JANUARY 5, 2007

Red Bull plans revealed

It seems that Red Bull will be building the same chassis for Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso in 2007. This is being achieved by using a third party company which is not a signatory to the Concorde Agreement. This has been achieved by turning the old holding company, Red Bull Racing Holdings Ltd, into a company called Red Bull Technology Ltd. This was done on December 20 2006, at least according to Companies House in England, where these matters are officially registered. It is listed as being headquartered at Building 1, Bradbourne Drive in Tilbrook, Milton Keynes. Red Bull Racing Ltd, the signatory of the Concorde Agreement, which was formerly known as Stewart Grand Prix and then Jaguar Racing, is headquartered at Building 2 in Bradbourne Drive.

It is an interesting argument about who designed the car because it is clearly not possible for Red Bull Technology Ltd to have done the job since Christmas but that depends on who was employing the various engineers in the course of the last 12 months. If they were employed by Red Bull Racing Ltd it would be a problem but if they were employed by Red Bull Racing Holdings Ltd there would be a decent argument. When the team announced the hiring of Adrian Newey in November 2005 it was as "Chief Technical Officer" of Red Bull Racing. The team website continues to list Newey, Mark Smith, Ben Agathangelou and Andrew Green as being employed there rather than at a third party company. This obviously needs updating as does Scuderia Toro Rosso's entries on the shared website as this is still listing Gabriele Tredozi as STR's technical director.

There are going to be some people who will argue that this is all just window dressing for the two teams sharing chassis and that the paperwork was done too late to make it credible.

Super Aguri F1 seems to have gone to rather more trouble with its attention to detail and its design work for the 2007 car is being done by a consultancy firm run by Paul White.