Christian Horner hit back at Toto Wolff (Mercedes's team principal) after he and Zak Brown suggested they received CB from people at Red Bull "through all the levels."
It has been speculated for a while that the situation inside the Red Bull Racing team isn't 100%, and the recently announced departure of their chief engineer, Adrian Newey, seems to have confirmed some of the rumors.
Newey has played a significant role in the overall development direction of the team from Milton Keynes, and his departure will be a big loss for Red Bull.
However, the CEO of McLaren (the team that won the Miami Grand Prix), Zak Brown, suggested he thinks Newey will not be the last person to leave the team as he has seen an "increase in CVs" coming his way from Red Bull.
The team principal of Mercedes, Toto Wolff, confirmed Brown's words as he said: "Zak is absolutely correct; we are seeing Red Bull CVs through all the levels." As you can imagine, it didn't take too long for Christian Horner to respond to these comments:
"I think it's inevitable. You know the two candidates involved, they talk a lot. I'm not going to get sucked into a tit-for-tat but I'd be more focused on Toto's own issues that he has. I don't have any concern with the strength in depth."
Horner pointed out that employees moving between teams is a normal part of F1. However, the 50-year-old then went a bit further and tallied how many people his team stole from Mercedes to hit back at his nemesis.
"Of course, there is always going to be movement between teams. I don't know how many people we've employed from McLaren this year, or how many people VCARB have employed."
"Mercedes, we’ve taken 220 people, 220, out of HPP [Mercedes High Performance Powertrains] into Red Bull Powertrains so when we talk about losing people I would be more worried about the 220 than one or two CVs."