Formula One may well be in boom times now but its not always been the case. Back in 2009 Honda, Toyota and BMW all walked from the sport leaving a huge hole in the grid and dangerously few power unit manufacturers.
Further, three new teams were introduced in 2010 to bolster the grid, but by the time Haas F1 joined the sport, they had all become defunct, leaving the lineup again with just twenty drivers.
At the beginning of this tumultuous era, the owner of the Minardi team decided enough was enough. The then F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone pleaded with energy drinks magnate Didi Mateschitz to save the team, which he did and so was born Toro Rosso – the second Red Bull owned team.
Zak Brown calls for 2 team ownership ban
Of course owning two teams in F1 has its advantages with one being you have double the number of votes in the F1 commission the do other teams. Yet this is not quite the advantage it first seems at face value, given throughout the ages teams have banded together and voted in blocks – often in line with whoever supplies the engines.
In recent times there are those who have questioned the fact that Red Bull owns two F1 teams, with McLaren’s Zak Brown leading the charge for reform. “We have some work to do around the rules,” the McLaren CEO told Sky Sports News at the launch of his team’s 2024 livery.
“I think the A-B team is a real problem moving forward. I think co-ownership, you don’t really have that in any other sport, and I think that provides a lot of conflict of interest.” And Brown is right, none of the top sporting leagues across the world allow an owner to take charge of more than one team which is in direct competition with another in their portfolio.
“So now that we have a budget cap we need to be really a sport of total fairness and I think any time you have an entity that owns two teams, or an A and B relationship, I think it really starts to compromise the integrity of sporting fairness. That’s something that really needs to be tackled,” concluded the McLaren CEO.
Horner’s sacking leaves Red Bull defenceless
At the time, Alpha Tauri were moving a umber of their operations to England to a site that is part of the Red Bull campus in Northamptonshire. Yet the F1 establishment was not prepared to take on the issue, while it was dealing with the troublesome FIA who were promoting an eleventh team on the grid.
Further, with Christian Horner in charge of the Red Bull Racing empire together with being the longest serving F1 team principal, his influence and the recounting of the history of Red Bull coming to F1’s rescue was enough for those who cared to kick the issue into the long grass.
Now that Horner is gone and Mateschitz has died, it will become easier for the topic to once again be raised and potentially resolved. Bizarrely the very sacking of Christian Horner and the methodology of his replacement has raised eyebrows in the corridors of power at the FIA.
Laurent Mekies was able to drop his duties at the Racing Bulls and pick up where Horner left off the very next day. Because the team principals of Red Bull Racing and the Racing Bulls are contracted by the parent company in Austria, no gardening leave was required for Mekies – something which appears to have caught the eye of the FIA.
FIA to clamp down on A-B teams
There are rules which currently exist in F1 designs to ensure that no teams collaborate in specific areas and these are regularly monitored. Each team must produce its own intellectual property each year, but matters get complicated due to third party involvement in this process.
Haas F1 do not produce their own chassis, it is subcontracted to Italian firm Dallara. However, Dallara would not be allowed to offer this service to other teams on the F1 grid, due to the possibility of intellectual property crossover.
Haas F1 also buy components from Ferrari which are on the FIA’s list of allowed components and the same is true of the Racing Bulls and Red Bull Racing. Whilst a full blown review into the A-B team relationship of the Red Bull owned teams is not proposed presently, the lack of gardening leave for Mekies to serve may well be the thin edge of the wedge.
Now the FIA’s head of day to day operations, Nikolas Tombazis tells the Race: “We are working on clarifying more how teams, let’s call them A- and B-teams, operate in terms of putting in provisions that stops those that have some sort of close relationship from helping each other or collaborating.
Mekies lack of gardening leave a trigger?
“We are putting some provisions on the IT side, to make sure that IT systems are segregated, so they cannot share designs, or anything like that. And there will also be physical segregation and what details of what provisions need to be respected.”
“There’s already a lot of provisions, but it is a very complicated set of conditions that teams need to satisfy,” he said. One area for review will be be the limits laid down on personnel moving without gardening leave being served and Tombazis believes more work is required here to ensure a level playing field.
“We’re trying to formalise some of these things into some regulatory structure, so teams can’t play different games. We also want to satisfy the teams that don’t have any affiliation, that the key teams that do have a relationship of some sort do not gain an unfair advantage,” saids the FIA officer.
Tombazis adds that even “if a team is more standalone, and the team has some commercial relationships, we don’t want that to dictate what happens on the track.” Clearly there whole topic of how teams are allowed to interact is back on the agenda and it won’t be long before Zak Brown is banging his drum again about owning two F1 teams.
Red Bull’s Mekies ushers in a corporate coup
Red Bull ‘rebellious’ culture to change – Red Bull Racing was formed from the ashes of the latest efforts of auto giant Ford to compete at the highest level of motorsport. The Stewart F1 team was acquired by the US car manufacturer in 1999 for a reported $100m and Ford planned to build a state of the art facility in Silverstone to house both its chassis and proposed power unit operations.
As with many things Jaguar F1, this never happened and the team remained at its base in Milton Keynes. In a reflective editorial piece written in 2023, Motor Sport claimed that Jaguar was “one of the most high-profile failures in F1,” with “a revolving door of management that made Jaguar Racing look like an employment bureau rather than a slick F1 team.”
Things would change quickly once the energy drink entrepreneur appointed the youngest F1 team principal in Christie Horner (31) who immediately brought back the team’s previous boss Guenther Steiner to assist in rebuilding the team. Yet once the appointment of Adrian Newey was secured later in 2005, Didi Mateschitz approached the Italian to lead their NASCAR effort in the USA….. READ MORE
