Threesome Red Bull, Honda and Porsche

To those who watch racing the idea of Red Bull switching to Honda in 2019 makes nose sense at all. Surely, they say, it would better with Porsche. Perhaps it would, but that really depends on the ambitions of 73 year old Dietrich Mateschitz and his advisor 74-year-old Helmut Marko. The ambitions of older folk tend to be a little different to those of younger generations with things like becoming a grandparent, living by the sea and retiring being fairly popular. The most popular ambition in surveys is to travel the world, while those who have travelled the world often just want to stay at home. Very few people list administering a vast business empire as one of their ambitions when they are old. The F1 world has looked at what is going with Red Bull and have concluded that Mateschitz's addiction to Formula 1 is over and that now he would sell his teams and to look to other ideas. Mateschitz's team dominated F1 from 2010 to 2013, winning four Constructors' and four Drivers' Championships. The team has won 53 victories, although only six of them have occurred in the last four years. His company has revenues of $6.7 billion a year, which increases moderately each year.

Mateschitz has expressed his discontent with F1 on several occasions but he did a deal to stay in the sport until the end of 2020, and if he leaves before then, he has to pay $100 million a year for the remaining years. That is $300 million if he wants to walk away. Engines are expensive and he couldn't get a factory one. Thus the Honda deal makes enormous sense because if he has three seasons with Toro Rosso getting free Honda engines and two seasons with Red Bull Racing getting free engines, he is saving himself more than $100 million. There is still a possibility that his teams will win races, but as we have seen in the last four years it isn't easy, even with Adrian Newey and two drivers with the talents of Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo.

It is known that Mateschitz would love to sell Scuderia Toro Rosso, because it costs him more than Red Bull Racing, but finding a buyer is tough. With Honda joining the team, there is the possibility that one day the team could be sold to the Japanese. And Red Bull Racing? Well, if you believe paddock jibber-jabber Porsche is interested.. Christian Horner says that is not true. When asked about a Porsche deal he said: "there will be another announcement coming soon that isn't Porsche or Honda."

It might be Honda for a year or two in the interim because the answer to Mateschitz's problems could well be Horner. He's 43, has run the team that won eight titles for 12 years, he has an OBE and is married to an ex-Spice Girl. He has big ambitions. The word is that he was recently in Zurich meeting potential investors and one can imagine that he is probably proposing a management buyout to Mateschitz. He can keep the price down by offering free Red Bull signage on the cars for another three seasons, giving Mateschitz the coverage he wants at no cost. Such a deal would enable Horner to do a lot of things: retain Adrian Newey by offering him cars to design and shares in a team, and the chance to run an Aston Martin team. Horner likes Aston Martins (as does Newey) and there have even been rumours that in addition to running a team for Aston Martin, he might even try to buy the whole car company and become a modern day version of Sir David Brown. That is not as daft as it sounds. Building up Aston is a challenge which few investors relish. And having a successful F1 team could work wonders for the Aston brand. The problem is getting there.


The answer lies, probably, in an engine deal that is under discussion between Horner, Cosworth, Aston Martin and McLaren. They all want to have F1 engines and they all see the new rules as an opportunity. If they worked together, invested together and produced a competitive engine, within sensible rules, they could all walk away with a competitive unit. McLaren could use it as a McLaren engine, Cosworth as a Cosworth and Red Bull as an Aston Martin. 

Cosworth is doing quite these days with annual sales in 2016 of more than $50 million. Leaving F1 cost it a lot of money and it wants to go back and it has a board of clever people who know how F1 works, including former FIA advisor Alan Donnelly, McLaren's Zak Brown and former Williams CEO Adam Parr, not to mention Carl Peter Forster, a former head of Opel and Tata Motors. The company has order books exceeding $350 million and works with Aston Martin as the manufacturing partner with the V12 engine used in the Valkyrie.


"Our five year plan is to double the business again," the company says. "One of the benefits of operating in the automotive tier one supply business is that you have to work hard to earn the contracts, but the ones we have in the order book run until 2025 and 2026." The company also has Bruce Wood in charge of powertrain, who has been with Cosworth since 1987 and is a racing man, notably in Indycars.

Source: JSNL