The Texas sun beat down on the Circuit of the Americas, glinting off the triumphant navy blue of Max Verstappen’s Red Bull. The crowd, a massive, roaring sea of fans, chanted his name. He had done it again. After dominating the Sprint, Verstappen delivered a tactical masterclass to win the 2025 United States Grand Prix, closing the championship gap to McLaren’s Oscar Piastri to just 40 points.

His hunt for a fifth consecutive world title was ferociously alive. In the garage, engineers embraced. On the pit wall, the new guard of Red Bull management pumped their fists. The machine was perfect.

But there was a ghost at this feast.

Missing from the celebration, absent from the paddock he ruled for two decades, was the team’s architect. Christian Horner, the man who poured his “heart and soul” into transforming a fledgling team into a dynasty, was not there.

Dismissed suddenly and brutally as team principal and chief executive in July 2024, the 51-year-old was forced to watch this American triumph—a testament to the very empire he built—from the isolation of his home.

As the team he assembled celebrates its continued dominance, the exiled leader has been left to reflect on his legacy. And in a recent, poignant interview, when asked to name the one moment he would change from his storied, 20-year tenure, his answer was staggering.

It wasn’t the texting scandal that precipitated his humiliating downfall. It wasn’t the bitter internal power struggles, the rivalries of Vettel and Webber, or even the high-profile departure of design genius Adrian Newey earlier this year.

No. Christian Horner’s biggest regret, the blunder that sticks with him, is a ghost of its own: the 2005 United States Grand Prix.

For new fans of Formula 1, who see the sport’s booming success across America with three packed races in Miami, Las Vegas, and Austin, the 2005 event is a dark footnote. For those who were there, it was the day F1 almost destroyed itself in its most coveted market. It was, as Horner recalls, a farce.

To understand the weight of this admission, one must journey back to Indianapolis, to Horner’s very first season as the sport’s youngest-ever team principal.

The 2005 US Grand Prix was meant to be a showcase. Instead, it became a catastrophe. The issue was tyres. The grid was split between two suppliers: Bridgestone and Michelin. The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with its high-speed, banked final turn, placed unique and massive stress on the cars’ left-rear tyres.

During practice, Michelin’s tyres began to fail spectacularly. They were, their engineers admitted, unsafe to race for more than a handful of laps. The 14 cars running on Michelin rubber—including Red Bull’s David Coulthard and Christian Klien—were in an impossible position.

Negotiations were frantic. Proposals for a temporary chicane to slow the cars were rejected. The sport’s governing body, in its intractable wisdom, refused any solution other than racing on the approved track configuration.

The teams were told: race at your own peril, or do not race at all.

Horner, then just 31 and trying to establish his new team, was faced with a moral and competitive crisis. He, along with the other Michelin team bosses, made the agonizing choice. After the formation lap, as the lights prepared to go out, 14 cars peeled off the grid and drove directly into the pits, retiring en masse.

The American crowd, who had paid hundreds of dollars, erupted in fury. They threw bottles and cans onto the track. Only six cars—the Bridgestone-shod Ferraris, Jordans, and Minardis—were left to compete in one of the most pathetic and surreal “races” in sporting history. It was a PR cataclysm, a moment of corporate arrogance and systemic failure that left a deep scar on F1’s relationship with America for a decade.

“I look back now, and I look at Indianapolis 2005 and I think we could have done a better job there,” Horner reflected recently. “There was a lot going on… I think, as a sport, we could have done better then. You’re always learning in this business. If I had to pick one moment of the 21 years, that would be it.”

The irony of this statement, delivered in the shadow of his 2024 dismissal, is almost poetic.

In 2005, Horner was a rookie principal facing an external crisis. He made a decision based on safety, putting his drivers’ lives ahead of the show, even as it contributed to a sporting disaster. It was a failure of the sport.

In 2024, Horner was a titan of the paddock, brought down not by a sporting crisis, but by a personal one. The failure was not systemic; it was, by all accounts, his own.

His choice of the 2005 debacle as his “biggest regret” is a masterful deflection, yet it is also deeply revealing. It frames his legacy in terms of his care for the “sport,” a domain where he can still claim a moral high ground. It conveniently sidesteps the scandal that cost him his job, the accusations that tarnished his name, and the internal strife that finally saw him ejected from the team he called family.

But perhaps there is a deeper truth to it.

Horner watched in 2005 as F1 spectacularly failed to conquer America. He then spent the next 19 years as a key figure in helping the sport not only return but achieve the very dominance it now enjoys. The packed stands at COTA this weekend, celebrating his car and his driver, are the direct result of the lessons F1 learned from that 2005 humiliation.

Horner helped win the war for F1’s soul in America. Yet, in a tragic twist, he is banned from the victory parade.

He is forced to watch from afar as Max Verstappen, the generational talent he nurtured, storms toward a fifth title. He sees the car, born of the infrastructure he built, performing flawlessly. He sees the strategy, executed by the team he hand-picked, running like clockwork.

The machine, his life’s work, no longer needs its creator.

In this context, his regret about 2005 feels less like a political deflection and more like a lament for a simpler time—a time when the problems were on the track, not in his text messages. It was a time when “failure” meant pulling a car from a grid for safety, not being exiled from your own kingdom.

While Verstappen celebrated in Austin’s parc fermé, closing in on another championship, Christian Horner sat at home, a king reflecting on a 20-year-old blunder. It is the safest, most public regret he can afford to have. But as he watched his team win without him, one must wonder what unspoken regrets truly occupied his mind.