The Red Bull Showrun program’s MO isn’t just about stunts and gimmicks, but about taking F1 to places that might not have a grand prix of its own, whether that’s cities in F1 host nations — like Chicago or Nashville — or countries like Greece, Ireland, Romania, or Thailand which have never had an F1 grand prix at all. It’s effectively providing a service for F1 as a whole. While its audience continues to grow thanks to the likes of Netflix’s “Drive To Survive” and a constantly expanding social media presence, Red Bull gives fans real-world exposure in a way other teams can’t.
“Part of the brief is to go to places which don’t have an F1 touchpoint, somewhere which doesn’t have a race or a market where it’s much harder to actually go a race or get tickets,” explains Cooper. “We have around 20 events a year where we’re taking an F1 car to places where people might have never seen on in real life or even heard one, and it’s great for the sport because it’s engaging people with what F1 is and what it’s about, and also for us as well. We want to be connecting with that audience, we want to be showcasing what the sport can do, what the cars can do, and I think that’s really awesome, to be able to facilitate that.
“When you see their faces when they hear the car fire up, it’s super-unique, and in the world now where F1 is such a large part of that, you forget that there’s still a lot of people that don’t have access to the sport. So at least this is one of the ways that we can help reduce that, or give a new opportunity for people to see the car.
“We have flexibility: where do we want to go? And I think that ties in with what we want to do as a team, as well. We’re trying to reach new people and new places via the race team itself, our Showrun program, via our digital channels, but ultimately we want to just showcase to people what we can do as a team and what the F1 world is about. It’s a privilege to do it.”
F1’s 2024 race schedule was announced back in July, but for Red Bull’s Showrun team, the plan for next year is still being worked on. Each project, be it a short film or demonstration in front of fans, takes six to nine months to plan.
“In terms of the whole cycle of the year, usually we know around this time now when the business planning is happening, we have a good indication of what to expect next year, and then we begin planning from the beginning of the year for all of them,” Cooper explains. “It’s a long lead-up.
“Ultimately the first thing is planning how and when the car is going to get there. Sometimes we try and link up the car movements across a few different countries to try and save the costs of freight and things like that, so it’s a bit of a jigsaw puzzle to map that all together.
“It’s unconventional to be driving an old F1 car around and capturing videos and showruns. It’s a challenge for us in terms of delivering those projects, but also it’s great to work with the local markets to do that.”
It might be unconventional — you won’t see the likes of McLaren or Ferrari taking any of their historic assets off road or up mountains for the sake of entertainment — but it’s the Red Bull way. The company’s crazy escapades aren’t destroying museum-worthy pieces of history, but rather adding another chapter to their stories, suggests Borrill.
“Now and again I do wince a little bit when I see these cars doing donuts here there and everywhere and you’re so close to walls and all that sort of business,” he says. “But the reality is, over a race season your chassis is your mainstay component of the car; everything around the car changes anyway, whether it be servicing, upgrades, or even accident damage.
“When you talk about the history of the car, more than anything, I look at it as the actual main survival cell of the car, and in that sense, the chassis that we’ve got here are the chassis that we’ve finished racing with and then we’ve done all of the show events with. We haven’t necessarily destroyed anything; I think what it’s done is it’s just given those cars another life.
“So they’ve got their racing history, then they’ve got a great history of being a show car as well, so if anything I think you’ve probably only enhanced it because you’ve just given it another story.”
There is a sliver of sentimentality within Red Bull, however, with the team now looking to preserve some of its history as well as playing with it.
“We’ve got the two 7s and the 8s that we run on a regular basis, but also what we’re doing is restoring all of our fleet in the museum at the moment,” Borrill says. “We’ve got a car from every year in the museum, but they’re not all absolute runners. Our task now is to make all of them as close to a runner as we possibly can, including fitting PUs wherever we can from original suppliers – which is proving difficult, admittedly.
“When we go back to RB1, RB2, RB3, we weren’t maybe quite so good at archiving all of the parts back then, and trying to re-engineer is quite a time-consuming job. But we fired up the RB1 though. We completed that a few months ago, fired up the old Cosworth V10 in that, which was pretty cool. A bit of a blast from the past.
“We’re into RB2 now. Again, it’s quite tricky, but we’ve got a PU for that one, and then going forwards we’re into RB3, 4, 5, they’re going to be a little bit tricky. After that, we got a little bit better at things so hopefully we’ll be in a position sometime in the near future, we should have a lot more cars that are full runners.”