Croft: 'I think Horner's hostility towards Wolff comes from there'

Wolff makes no secret of the fact that Mercedes is doing everything possible to entice Max Verstappen to switch to the German team. That does not please Horner, who thinks Wolff should be concerned with the issues at play in his own team.

"I think Christian and Toto will carry on the war of words for their entirety of their time in Formula 1. That will just continue. It will just carry on. They’ve got a history, they’ve got a present and I think they’ve got a future when it comes to not agreeing with certain things," Croft stated in Sky Sports' podcast after the Chinese GP.

He continued: "Toto is doing everything that you would expect one of your rivals to do and if your driver is making it public that he might leave, he’s going to put his arm around him, he’s going to tell him that he’s the most important person on the planet and ‘come over to us, the grass is much greener at Brackley than it is at Milton Keynes'." According to Croft, Wolff is out to poke Horner and cause unrest at Red Bull, but he says that is part of the game.

Owner of Red Bull

The analyst and F1 commentator tastes a bit of jealousy from Horner. "And I don’t think that goes down very well with Christian. I think if you said to him, ‘Would you like to be a co-owner of that Red Bull team?’ Of course he would. He wants control. He wants power and Toto’s got that because he is a one-third owner of Mercedes."

"And Christian Horner, he might be a CEO and he might be a team principal, but he’s a paid employee of the Red Bull Formula 1 team, so he hasn’t got that autonomy to make decisions in the way that Toto has and I think a lot of the animosity on Christian’s side maybe stems from that. But I think Toto also knows how to wind Christian up as well."