When he was 14, racing in karts, Christian Horner was leading the pack one weekend when humiliation struck.

With a crash and a clatter, his engine fell out, leaving him trundling down the track with no power.

Something similar appears to have happened to his autobiography, Drive, published tomorrow. The book looks the part, like an F1 racing car, plastered with dramatic track-side details and emblazoned with juicy anecdotes about his many enemies and rivals.

But one major component is missing. The engine of the story, the part that its publishers must hope will make it roar off the shelves, is just not there. If books had a bonnet, there’d be nothing under this one.

Horner, the former boss or ‘principal’ of the Red Bull team, uses his memoir to settle a multitude of scores, including digs at former world champion Lewis Hamilton and long-time F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone.

But he reveals next to nothing about his relationship with wife Geri, the pop star formerly known as ‘Ginger Spice’, despite the rumours that dogged their marriage after he was accused of bombarding a female employee with coercive and suggestive texts – allegations he has always denied.

And he dismisses the ‘sexts’ scandal in a few lines, even though many believe it is this that ultimately led to his dismissal from Red Bull in 2025 after two decades.

Readers who don’t know the background will be left with no clue as to the nature of the allegations, let alone the seismic effect they had on the supercharged world of F1.

Horner, so intensely sensitive to perceived slights and injustices that he is apparently known on the circuit as ‘Whinger Spice’, emerges from the memoir as entirely self-centred yet lacking any sense of self-awareness.

When he’s first told of serious accusations against him by the unnamed woman, he relays the charges to Geri.

‘She fell silent as she listened,’ writes Horner, in a chapter titled Out Come The Wolves. ‘We both understood the implications immediately. She looked at me. “Just tell me your truth,” she said.’

The idea that truth is subjective, and that some crucial aspects can safely be left unsaid, might satisfy Mrs H, but it will come as a crashing anticlimax to anyone who ploughs through Drive and realises this is all the revelation they’re going to get.

Here, then, is what the book doesn’t tell you. In early 2024, after investigating the woman’s allegations, Red Bull issued a statement exonerating Horner. He assumed the crisis was over. It wasn’t.

Within 24 hours, and with the season about to begin, an anonymous Gmail account released hundreds of messages that Horner had allegedly exchanged with the employee.

These appeared to show he’d badgered her with inappropriate texts, including requests for photos and comments on her clothes.

The archive was forwarded to hundreds of journalists and F1 insiders, including drivers and senior executives. Whoever leaked those messages had access to an exceptionally good contacts book, and was using it to cause maximum humiliation.

Geri apparently learned of the mass email while on a flight to Bahrain for the first F1 race of the year. When she arrived, Horner writes, ‘we walked hand in hand into the paddock as a media scrum jostled around us’.

In fact, she briefly reverted to her unmarried name, calling herself Geri Halliwell on social media, before deciding to pretend nothing had happened, at least in public.

A source told the Daily Mail’s Alison Boshoff last September that Geri was ‘very angry’ and ‘in private, she flicked the whip’ – but added, ‘she will never let go of her husband. She has taken a leaf out of the [fellow Spice Girl] Victoria Beckham playbook, in which you ignore the scandal and think beautiful thoughts. That’s one of her mantras – she will actually say: “I am thinking beautiful thoughts.” ’

That has the ring of truth to it, unlike Horner’s bland portrayal of Geri as a sort of Stepford Wife who has no concerns for anything but his own comfort and career. She’s always ready with a platitude, reassuring him, for example, when a hostile crowd greeted him at an F1 launch in London’s O2 arena.

‘It doesn’t matter if they boo,’ she told her husband. ‘Booing means they care. It’s only a problem when they ignore you.’

He meets Geri on page 186, after reams of endless trivia about racing regulations and disputes over contracts. At the time, he was in a relationship with Beverley Allen, the mother of his daughter Olivia, but claims it was ‘obvious [we] were drifting apart. Our relationship was now more of a loving friendship than anything else.’

He did not, he says, begin a relationship with Geri until the year after he and Beverley ‘gradually moved forward in our own way’.

When he and Geri were first introduced, at the 2010 Monaco Grand Prix, the singer was ‘in her element’, he says. ‘Her father had been a car dealer and had taken her banger racing as a child.’

Sarcastic as this sounds, it is apparently meant as praise.

Horner was aware of Geri’s fame in a band, chiefly through a bakery he sponsored near his home, called Elisabeth The Chef. It produced a range of Spice Girls cakes which were so successful, he says, that the sponsorship deal made a profit.

He also recalls hearing a radio interview with Geri – though what he chiefly remembers is the car he was driving at the time, a Renault Clio... ‘a loaner from my Formula Renault days’.

At Monaco, Geri ‘and her then boyfriend’ (aristo Henry Beckwith, though Horner doesn’t name him) were guests of Bernie Ecclestone, who ‘often paraded VIPs around the grid, usually when the race teams were at their busiest’.

She kissed other F1 bigwigs, including Eddie Jordan, on the cheek, but merely shook Horner’s hand, a gesture he calls ‘unexpectedly frosty’. Years later, at ‘a charity fund-raiser at Highclere Castle’, she buttonholed him for a scolding.

At the time, Red Bull’s Australian driver Mark Webber was aggrieved that Horner seemed to be giving precedence to his teammate, Sebastian Vettel. ‘The way you favour the German driver,’ she exclaimed, ‘is that even fair? You have to give Mark the same equipment that you’re giving to the other guy.’

Horner says: ‘Eventually, I smiled. “Have you ever thought that the other guy is just a bit faster?”

‘Geri didn’t like that at all. She frowned at me and marched away. I was bemused.’

He warmed to her later over lunch (with ‘Roger Taylor, the drummer from Queen, and Richard Jones from Stereophonics’ – Horner is a brazen name-dropper).

‘She had a natural warmth and confidence, and she treated everyone the same, whether they were royalty or a road-sweeper. It was entirely in keeping with the person who, in 1997, had hugged Nelson Mandela’ (Olympic-standard name-dropping).

Early in their relationship, ‘one Sunday in the spring, we went for a walk. Someone was hiding in the back of a car with tinted windows, waiting with a long-lens camera. I was transported from the back of the tabloids to the front.’

The front pages, though, are his natural habitat. He is drawn to fame and has been since, aged 17, he slipped through a gap in the fence at Silverstone, wriggled through a tunnel under the track and strolled into the pit lane where he met Nigel Mansell and Ayrton Senna.

‘Nigel exuded an easy confidence,’ he recalls. ‘Ayrton glowed. There was a superstar aura.’

Years later, when he was trying to put together enough sponsorship money to land a place on a Formula Three team as a driver, Mansell gave him £10,000.

Horner claims to owe his business acumen to his parents, who taught him always to look people in the eye when negotiating. However he does it, the man is a money magnet.

In his 20s, he started his own Formula 3000 team, called Arden. It cost him ‘a few hundred thousand pounds’, partly financed by his father, who remortgaged the family home.

Horner was plunged ‘into an unnerving cycle of debt where I maxed out one overdraft or credit card before moving on to another. My salary was non-existent... somehow, the cheques always cleared in time.’

When Red Bull bought out the Jaguar F1 team for £1, taking on all its debts, Horner was appointed its chief, aged 31 – the youngest team principal in the sport’s history. Under his leadership, they went on to win 124 Grand Prixes, eight World Drivers’ Championships and six World Constructors’ titles.

To anyone who is not an F1 obsessive, the sheer weight of statistics and mechanical minutiae in Drive can quickly become mind-numbing.

It does, however, have the unintended effect of making the occasional snide aside stand out in Technicolor. What Horner inadvertently reveals about his own mentality in these moments is more telling than all the catalogues of achievements.

When he lures engineer Adrian Newey to Red Bull, for instance, Horner seems more impressed by his own persuasive skills than he is by other man’s track record.

Ten years later, Newey makes the unforgivable mistake of considering a lucrative move to Ferrari. Although he eventually stays put, this is treated as a betrayal – and when the engineer is seriously injured in a subsequent cycling accident, Horner dismisses it in a sentence.

On page two of the memoir, he cites a jibe by Sir Lewis Hamilton, a throwaway joke that has clearly rankled ever since. Hamilton, the seven-times world champion, called Red Bull ‘just a drinks company’. Horner is so insulted that he brings it up again 200-odd pages later.

Though he might not like mockery, he enjoys dishing it out. He describes a night at Renault chief Flavio Briatore’s Billionaire Club in Sardinia, where the most expensive bottle of champagne was £25,000.

Every time one was sold, Briatore strode to a throne on a stage and high-fived the guests, while fireworks erupted from the bar.

Later, ‘Flavio invited me to join him on his private plane for a flight to Japan, where he greeted me in silk pyjamas and a pair of velvet slippers before showing me to his inflight library. The shelves contained various magazines. All of them featured Flavio’s face on the cover.’

Some of the best stories are about Ecclestone, whose office featured a collage of Playboy covers and a sculpture of one million dollars on a coffee table.

The diminutive Ecclestone, now 95, ‘was a used-car salesman at heart’, Horner writes. ‘On some weekends, when there wasn’t a Grand Prix, he visited the Lots Road furniture auctions in Chelsea. When I joined him one morning, it resembled a scene from Only Fools And Horses.

‘Bernie’s friends had colourful names. There was Dave the Deuce and John the Bookie. Everybody referred to him as Bernard. Then, as the sales catalogue was distributed, he scanned the inventory intensely, marking the items he wanted to buy – a multi-billionaire shopping for bargains.’ At a warehouse in Biggin Hill, Kent, Ecclestone stored his purchases in racks of boxes. They included 14 boxes of cutlery. Why did he need them? ‘Just in case,’ said Bernie. ‘Plus, it was a good deal.’

Ecclestone’s ruthlessness in business was notorious.

‘If you’re prepared to point the gun,’ he told Horner more than once, ‘be prepared to pull the trigger.’ Whether this was meant literally, we’re left to guess.

If only Horner had pulled the trigger on his own scandals, this memoir could have been a tyre-scorcher. Instead, he stays behind the safety car all the way round.