Red Bull Says F1 Partnership With Ford Has To Be Successful

“The scale of the investment is the biggest single investment that Red Bull have ever made in motorsport,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner explained in a recent interview with Motorsport.com. “Together with Ford, we have to succeed. We can’t afford for this project not to succeed. I think, for us, strategically, where we are on our journey as a group and as a team with this alliance, this powertrain change in regulations is the perfect juncture to take everything under control with all the benefits that come from that having everything on the same campus.”

With Ford and Red Bull currently collaborating on the power unit that will determine the success or failure of this new partnership – after Porsche ultimately decided not to pursue it – each side is contributing its own expertise to the project. Regardless, there are other factors at play aside from power units – such as the impending departure of engineer and chief technical officer Adrian Hewey.

“It’s very dynamic, with certain requests at certain times,” Horner said of Red Bull’s relationship with Ford. “As we’re very much in the building phase, where we didn’t have resource and capacity, it was: ‘OK, we need simulation engineers, we need electrical engineers.’
That’s where these guys [Ford], through their motorsport activities and through the investment that they’ve made in EV, it was just logical for us to start there and say: ‘okay, share with us your experiences.’ Are we looking at the right technologies, benchmarking and showcasing the suppliers that we were looking at working with? So, there was a big collaboration on that.”

We’ll have more on Ford’s return to F1 soon, so sure and subscribe to Ford Authority for more Ford motorsports news and ongoing Ford news coverage.