Skip to main content

Red Bull Racing - it's now business first, not sport.

Regarding :-

Red Bull power play: How Austria is tightening its grip on the F1 team

As soon as Mateshietz died, the passion project died with him and the suits in Red Bull started circling for the power, the glamour and of course the increased profits to turn into bonuses that they can get from Red Bull Racing.  They'd believe they can transition their undoubted expertise at running a marketing company that makes a drink under license and rebrands it into an elite sporting field at the pinnacle of engineering that actually manufactures real products with unique IP to remorseless, relentless deadlines.  This is going to be tested in real time in the glare of global publicity.  Barely anyone notices if the new flavour of sloshy caffeine is a week late.  They do if the new front wing is.

The first example of this was the fact that Alpha Tauri was told to wash it's own face economically, hence the rebrand and the consolidation into the UK.

RBR will now "enjoy" all the business efficiencies that will be loaded onto PowerPoint. Why should a team that has the capability for $600m F1 spend continue with that ability?  The cost cap is a third of that, so you don't need all those people do you - be more efficient - why run with the flexibility of 50% capacity when you can push yourselves with stretch targets of 95% efficiency (i.e. less staff).

All of which transitions RBR from being a sports team that happens to be extremely good at making money - through it's success - into a business that happens to do sport.

If RBR fans want to know what this turns into - look at Alpine.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Drugovich to Cadillac?

 Regarding Valtteri Bottas closes in on F1 return with Cadillac for 2026 Whilst I can understand Alonso not wanting Drugovich to demonstrate any, considerably cheaper, pace in the Aston Martin, I am not sure that Drugovich is a threat to Stroll. There can't be many people, within or without Aston Martin, that believe a team with all of the money could not hire a better driver.  Newey has said that "Lance is much better than people give him credit for" which is fair enough I guess, but it's not the ringing endorsement that Alonso gave Stroll  - of being "super young, super talented and has the possibility to be world champion". The question is, has Drugovich been out of the seat for too long to be useful to Cadillac? Certainly it needs at least one of Bottas or Perez.  Perhaps Cadillac will take a punt on Drugovich as a rookie with three years of being in the garage, seeing how the likes of Alonso and of course Stroll operate.  That's apparently potential...
Post a Comment
Read more

Lessons from swapping Tsunoda' and Lawson's seats

Regarding the article :-   The hard lessons Yuki Tsunoda and Liam Lawson learned after swapping F1 seats There are clues to the problem in this article I think. Tsunoda's comments about how he felt driving the Racing Bulls. Tsunoda was comfortable in the Racing Bull because he'd been driving, testing and help shape that design philosophy for four seasons. This is a design philosophy that has to be a little forgiving in terms of set-up since it is expected to have driver changes at least from season to season, it being the F1 finishing school for RBR. Lawson hasn't had a season at either team. But even where he has had more races, Racing Bulls, he's 18 starts across three cars with no pre-season testing of each new challenger. Both of them have had a go at driving a car honed openly around Verstappen for the last seven seasons - every other driver since Ricciardo left has been hired in a support role. That honing has increasingly focussed on peak performance that Verstap...
Post a Comment
Read more

Alpine : Plus Ca Change ?

Regarding:- How can Alpine turn around its plummeting F1 performance? When though has the Enstone team been different? When it was Benetton? When it was Renault first time around I guess. Since then it's been making up the numbers really. Where has the statement been that it really, really, wants a tilt at the title? The closest statement was the big money signing of Ricciardo and the whole project around him as their race winning, franchise driver around whom they were going to build a future. But he bailed and that programme whithered away back into making up the numbers culminating with a return to being a customer team. Renault need to sell up as their heart has not really been in F1 since Crashgate. They could still buy title sponsorship if they want to maintain Alpine branding in F1 and the team can still have its collection of showy investors as it tootles around a closed shop league.
Post a Comment
Read more