Current Red Bull Racing

Red Bull Racing

FIA Entry: Red Bull Racing Renault
Car 1: Sebastien Vettel
Car 2: Mark Webber
Engine: Renault V8
Team Owner: Dietrich Mateschitz
Team Principal: Christian Horner
Chief Technical: Office Adrian Newey
Chief Designer: Rob Marshall
Race Engineer Car 1: Guillaume “Rocky” Rocquelin
Race Engineer Car 2: Ciaron Pilbeam

Stats as of end 2010

First Entered 2005
Races Entered 107
Race Wins 15
Pole Positions 20
Fastest Laps 12
Driver World Championships 1
Constructor World Championships 1

Team History

Before Red Bull

In 1997 Paul Stewart, aided by his father Jackie and the Ford Motor Company, made the leap from F3000 to F1 as an entrant. Jonny Herbert won 1 race for the Stewart team before it was sold off to Ford who re-branded the cars as Jaguar.

Ford stuck with it through thick and thin (mainly thin) through to the end of 2004 before selling the team to Dietrich Mateschitz, who owns the Red Bull drinks brand, for $1 on the understanding he invested $400 million over 3 years

Red Bull Racing

With Christian Horner installed as team principal, McLaren refugee David Coulthard and Christian Klien as the drivers Red Bull went racing. Their first season was certainly more successful than Jaguar had managed, even with the same Cosworth power plant, with Coulthard managing a 4th place at the European Grand Prix and the team finishing 7th in the Constructors Championship.

Adrian Newey joined from McLaren as chief designer for 2006 and Red Bull swapped to Ferrari engines. Coulthard managed a podium at his "home" race in Monaco prompting Christian Horner to jump naked, other than wearing a red cape, into a swimming pool.

Christian Klien, who shared the car with Vitantonio Liuzzi in 2005 and Robert Doornbos in 2006, departed the team for 2007 and was replaced by Mark Webber. The RB3 was the first full "Newey" car and was coupled with a Renault motor. The car was very unreliable, suffering from a variety of different problems but Webber managed a podium at the European Grand Prix and the team finished 5th in the WCC.

Retaining the same engine and drivers for 2008 Red Bull slipped back to 7th in the WCC and again only managed a single podium, for Coulthard in Canada, but the reliability issues which plagued the car the previous season were mainly resolved.

2009 was Red Bull's break through year. With Coulthard having retired Webber was joined by Red Bull junior driver Sebastien Vettel. The new rules allowed Newey to design a car which challenged for both the Drivers and Constructors Championship. Webber won 2 races, Vettel 4 and the team climbed to 2nd in WCC taking 3 pole positions en-route.

In 2010 Red Bull justified Mateschitz's investment winning the Constructors title and Vettel the Drivers Championship. They won 9 races through the season, 5 for Vettel and 4 for Webber and took 10 poles. Webber led the title race for much of the season but it was the 23 year old Vettel who stole the title in the last race of the season and became the youngest Champion as a result.

2011 sees the team retain the same driver line up as 2010 and continue with Renault engine power in the new RB7 car.
 
The folks at F1technical are in overdrive trying to figure out what it is. There's no consensus there but most people tend to think is an ingenious KERS or an engine mapping (again).

Could it be that Vettel had such an advantage he had tine to start messing with the settings and throttle to really confuse the boffins? ;-)

More realusticly of course the agents of B.E.R.N.I.E could have conjured up a media storm to get people talking about F1 after a duff race. Plus with the promise that they think they've been caught and will take it off so Vettel will fall down the field they even have the carrott to tempt people to get excited about Korea with.

Not that I'm cynical or anything.
 
Could it be that Vettel had such an advantage he had tine to start messing with the settings and throttle to really confuse the boffins? ;)...
For several seasons now I think one of RBR's advantages is that they keep finding ways to coax the competition into chasing shadows. It's at least a distraction and at most provokes them to waste resources.

Auto Motor und Sport (who I seem to be quoting a lot lately) speculate RBR are seizing on the permissibility (by the TR) of delaying throttle response by up to 50 ms working together with Renault's existing cylinder deactivation and retarded ignition timing to cause the "idle" cylinders to produce more (or more energetic) exhaust gas in some partial throttle conditions.
 
Olivier - At least Lauda doesn't have any reason to want Red Bull disqualified, maybe so a team he is heavily involved in can be 7 points off the WCC rather than 110.

Pinch of salt there!
 
I find these comments from that item particularly interesting:

"Red Bull did some software testing before Singapore,” he told Osterreich newspaper. “[I know] because the FIA said [that Red Bull] needed to change something about it."

“They did that and then everything was apparently fine,” added Lauda.


What are they allowed to "change" in the software? I thought that was sacrosanct hence having a prescribed ECU.
 
Renault have equalled Ferrari with their 208th pole position this weekend to take the two to joint top of that particular list! They're still quite some way behind the Scuderia (and Ford Cosworth) in the wins list though!
 
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The Beeb's Gary Anderson opines that it's the RB9's aggressive rake that makes Vettel indomitable.

Other F1 reporters have remarked that Red Bull do not have the only smart chaps in the sport, which begs the question, why aren't the other teams simply increasing their rake? I don't think the solution can be that one-dimensional.

Engineering, at least engineering with any degree of sophistication, is the art of compromise. If rake is the key, then it must follow that the other teams either are unwilling to or incapable of making the same compromises as RBR have made in other regions of the car to support its exaggerated rake.
 
Didn't Anderson say that that the 2012 McLaren was crap at it's launch and that he didn't think much of the Mercedes this year because the front wing was underdeveloped...

His technical insight into races is often quite accurate, but other than general aerodynamic principles he seems to get it wrong half the time.
 
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