Horner: The first time I ran a team at a GP (Australia 2005)

“I remember it vividly. We got on the plane to Australia and I genuinely didn’t know what to expect. I’d only met Flavio (Briatore) on a couple of occasions and suddenly I was getting on a plane with him and the likes of Ron Dennis, you realise: ‘Crikey, this is it; we’re playing with the big boys now.’ I’d been to a lot of grands prix, but not in the capacity of running a team. We ran three cars in Melbourne. Vitantonio Liuzzi was test driver – he’d driven for me the previous year in Formula 3000, while David Coulthard, who I knew pretty well from previous years, and Christian Klien were in the race cars

The previous year, I’d been used to Liuzzi always being at the top of the timesheets and I think he topped the times in that first F1 session. The abbreviation of his name, LIU, was at the top of the list and I thought: ‘This is good, it’s quite like F3000!’ It rained on Saturday, but David put in a good qualifying lap before that and the big boys – the Ferraris and McLarens – got caught out. We qualified on the third row, well out of position. I think it was P5 for David and P6 for Christian – it was great, but we didn’t expect to hold those positions. However, David drove an excellent race, running third for a long time, before being pipped by Rubens Barrichello.

That fourth was like a grand prix victory for us and, with Christian finishing sixth too, it was a fantastic debut. Dietrich Mateschitz had set us a target at the beginning of the year of eight points, what the Jaguar team had got the year before, and there we were with seven after the first race! It was an amazing feeling. I thought: ‘Formula One can’t be that difficult!’ But that fourth place remains our best result at the Australian Grand Prix and we’re determined to do a bit better there this year.”