Notre Dame legend [autotag]Arike Ogunbowale[/autotag] already had a partnership with Red Bull. That mainly was because she had become a professional athlete. That opportunity was not available to her when she was with the Irish.
Times have changed though, and the NIL era has made it possible for college athletes to be paid. To that end, current Irish standout [autotag]Hannah Hidalgo[/autotag] has partnered with Red Bull herself now. That means the Irish’s past and present have come together in the corporate world.
The only thing Ogunbowale could do was surprise Hidalgo as she was being interviewed by Red Bull. Before Ogunbowale could enter the room though, Hidalgo admitted that she was cheering against the Irish before Ogunbowale hit her legendary championship-winning shot, which changed her perception.
When asked by Ogunbowale who would win a game between the current Irish and the program’s last national championship team, Hidalgo unsurprisingly picked her team. Still, the fact that they’re in the same room together, even if only for marketing purposes, is enough to make Irish fans happy:
Here’s hoping this is the start of a long and fruitful relationship between Hidalgo and Red Bull.
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Sergio Perez addresses the rumors of him leaving Red Bull after the 2024 F1 season. Check out what Perez had to say about the rumors!
[autotag]Sergio Perez[/autotag]’s status at [autotag]Red Bull[/autotag] has been one of the main topics of the 2024 F1 season. Perez sits eighth in the point standings behind the six drivers from McLaren, Ferrari, and Mercedes, and teammate Max Verstappen. Recently, ESPN’s Nate Saunders reported that Perez is set to leave Red Bull after the season; however, what does the 34-year-old driver think of those rumors?
On Thursday, Perez addressed the rumors that he won’t return to Red Bull for the 2025 season. As of now, Perez believes, at least publicly, that he will return in 2025.
“Nothing has changed since before in terms of what I’ve said for the entire year,” Perez said. “I’ve got a contract for next year and I will be driving for Red Bull next year.”
It remains to be seen if Perez actually returns to Red Bull in 2025, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see him leave. The Red Bull driver has really, really struggled this season, and his distance in the point standings from Verstappen is alarming. Yet, Perez earning one more shot at Red Bull wouldn’t be shocking either, as he is under contract.
Red Bull is allowing Sergio Perez to “come to his own conclusions” about the likelihood of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix being his last race for the team. Perez has endured a tough 2024, scoring just four podiums – in the first five rounds of the season …
Red Bull is allowing Sergio Perez to “come to his own conclusions” about the likelihood of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix being his last race for the team.
Perez has endured a tough 2024, scoring just four podiums – in the first five rounds of the season – and currently sits a distant eighth in the drivers’ championship. The gap to teammate Max Verstappen currently stands at 277 points, and Red Bull can no longer defend its constructors’ championship title, leading to a shareholder meeting after the season finale to discuss his future.
“Checo has had a very tough year,” team principal Christian Horner said. “Obviously the points tables are what they are. We’re very much focused on really supporting him to the checkered flag in Abu Dhabi, and then obviously it’s not an enjoyable situation for Checo, being in this position with speculation every week.
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“He’s old enough and wise enough to know what the situation is, and let’s see where we are after Abu Dhabi.
“I’m going to let Checo come to his own conclusions, nobody’s forcing him one way or another, I’m going to let him… it’s not a nice situation for him to obviously be in.
“We’ve got one more race this year, we’ll throw everything at it, and hopefully he can have a strong race to end the season in Abu Dhabi.”
Despite Helmut Marko already acknowledging the shareholder meeting, Horner insists discussions over Perez’s future will be discussed privately. However, he would not speculate over the Mexican’s position within the team beyond the final race, even though Perez has a further two years on his contract.
“Checo can’t be enjoying the situation that he’s got at the moment. He’s determined to finish the season on a high,” he said. “Anything regarding the drivers will always be dealt with behind closed doors, and most of all I think our priority is to get to the checkered flag in Abu Dhabi. Let’s see if we can finish the season on a more positive note with Checo.”
Should a change be made, RACER understands Red Bull would likely promote one of Liam Lawson or Yuki Tsunoda, and turn to F2 title contender Isack Hadjar for an RB seat over bringing in Franco Colapinto.
“[Colapinto] for sure, is a talent that’s looking to earn his permanent place in Formula 1,” said Horner. “We have a great pool of talent within the Red Bull junior team, and I’m sure Franco will find his way onto the grid in the future.
“You’re always keeping your eye on what the market is in all teams but we have the strength and depth in the junior program. It was good to see Isack Hadjar doing a good job [in Qatar] in Formula 2 as well.
“I think there’s what, half a point between the drivers going into the final race in Abu Dhabi. Liam and Yuki were very closely matched in that race, in terms of pace, so we’ve got a full stable of drivers.”
No, it doesn’t taste like fresh fruit. Which is exactly what I want from my energy drinks.
Welcome back to FTW’s Beverage of the Week series. Here, we mostly chronicle and review beers, but happily expand that scope to any beverage (or food) that pairs well with sports. Yes, even cookie dough whiskey.
I was a little afraid of Red Bull at first. Granted, this was 2002 and I’d just been diagnosed with a heart murmur that kept me from running cross country in college (not anywhere good, mind you). There was a concern, in the back of my brain, that the caffeine could short circuit me, lead to palpitations, whatever.
This was, of course, silly. Red Bull may have pioneered the energy drink marketplace, but it’s not excessively energetic. Its 80 milligrams of caffeine per can feels quaint next to the 300 milligram payloads of competitors like Rockstar or C4, though those come in a larger serving size.
This shifted my concern about Red Bull elsewhere; to its calorie content. In my early 20s I traded regular Coke for Diet Coke, understanding I no longer had the metabolism to fire down a pound of sugar each day without spilling over the top of my cargo pants or stretching the limits of whatever already-thin 1980s-era t-shirt I’d happened to find at the thrift store that week. Red Bull only had one sugar-free option for a long time, and it was in the classic, ground-up SweetTarts flavor.
Finally, there is rain in that desert. Red Bull debuted new sugar-free options this summer, a standby energy drink flavor (watermelon) and a new twist I haven’t seen before (strawberry apricot). Together, they promise a coffee-adjacent jolt without the shame of dropping four Splendas into a cup.
So do these new, fancier Red Bulls reinvent the genre? Or are they the artificial tasting, slightly acidic and totally poundable monsters we’ve come to love and appreciate? Or are they, in fact, bad?
Well, only one way to find out.
Watermelon: A
It smells and looks exactly like you’d expect a watermelon energy drink; like candy and neon red. There’s obviously value in having flavors that are true to the source, but when it comes to jump-starting my day with caffeine and taurine I’m not looking for organic garden flavors. I want a drink that tastes like someone blended up a bunch of sour gummies.
Red Bull thoroughly crushes it on that metric. The sweetness here is full bodied despite the reliance on sugar substitutes. There’s a gentle acidic tartness that snaps that off before it gets overpowering, leaving you a nice balance that keeps you coming back for more.
That’s sorta all there is to it. The carbonation helps enhance that balance between sweet and sour. It’s exactly what I’d hoped.
Strawberry Apricot: A-
A new challenger emerges! Apricot is a terribly underserved fruit in the beverage business — especially one that constantly tries to make passion fruit a thing even though it tastes like old rubber.
This also smells and pours familiar — though instead of candy, this is strawberry Fanta all the way. The bright pink liquid is both troubling and reassuring, and I gotta hand it to whichever food scientists handled the dyes for this round of sugar free drinks. They look awesome.
The taste, like the smell, is much more strawberry forward than apricot. But you do get that peach-adjacent flavor toward the end, adding a nice twist at the end of a simple sip. There’s no mitigating citric acid here to balance things out, so you get sweet-on-sweet before there’s a little bit of earthy apricot to round things out.
I drank the watermelon and strawberry apricot back-to-back on a coffee-less morning and honestly feel kinda great. 160 milligrams of caffeine is my sweet spot — enough to brighten my eyes, not enough to discount another energy drink or Coke or whatever later on.
I’m not sure it qualifies as “wings,” but I’m less tired and not jittery. I just feel like I got the extra hour of sleep I missed out on when I woke up at 4 am to think about whether or not my high school crush ever liked me back and I was just too oblivious to notice it.
I think the answer is that she did. I’ll never know. Drink Red Bull.
Would I drink it instead of a Hamm’s?
This is a pass/fail mechanism where I compare whatever I’m drinking to my baseline cheap beer. That’s the standby from the land of sky-blue waters, Hamm’s. So the question to answer is: on a typical day, would I drink Red Bull’s new sugar free flavors over a cold can of Hamm’s?
I’d drink it on the way to the tailgate to ensure I’m alert for the eight Hamm’s I’m about to drink before UW-Platteville and Wartburg kick off, I can tell you that much.
Oscar Piastri says a move to Red Bull is not on his horizon following comments from Helmut Marko linking him with a switch from McLaren. According to German website F1-Insider, Marko claimed that former Red Bull driver Mark Webber – who is Piastri’s …
Oscar Piastri says a move to Red Bull is not on his horizon following comments from Helmut Marko linking him with a switch from McLaren.
According to German website F1-Insider, Marko claimed that former Red Bull driver Mark Webber – who is Piastri’s manager – has been pushing for talks about what the team might do with its driver line-up in future. However, when asked if that was a possibility for him in the coming years, Piastri refuted Marko’s claim.
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“Definitely not, I’m very happy where I am,” Piastri said. “I’m under contract for the next two years after this, and I’m certainly not looking to go elsewhere.
“It wouldn’t be a week in F1 without some comments from Helmut. Not massively [surprised], I mean, it’s a nice compliment, I would say, but again, I’m very happy with where I am, and I think they have quite a big pool of drivers that they can choose from if they want to.”
The comments come amid a constructors’ championship fight between McLaren, Red Bull and Ferrari, and Piastri is hopeful that the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez will be better-suited to his car at the Mexico City Grand Prix than the last race in the United States.
“It’s quite different in a lot of ways to Austin, obviously the altitude and stuff like that makes it quite a different challenge, but hopefully it helps and suits us a little bit more,” he said. “I don’t think we necessarily expected Austin to be… ‘painful’ is a bit of an exaggeration, but not as competitive as we hoped, but it wasn’t a complete surprise.
“I think we’ve got some good ideas about why qualifying was so tricky, looking back at the weekend. I think the race itself was actually quite positive, especially from 12 months ago, it was more or less the same, especially with the first stint I was going with Lando.
“The second stint, a few mistakes in the middle of that hard stint, but for 95% of the race we were a very even match. And I think even just as a team, our pace was actually quite strong, it was just that we were very slow at the start of the race, and then everyone built the gaps and that was kind of it for us.
“So I think it looked a little bit worse than it was, it’s just that with the competition being so tight, if you put a step wrong, then you go from being first and second to where we were in fourth and fifth. It’s just a very tight field at the moment.”
Get ready everyone, the United States is about to take center stage in the Formula 1 championship battles. A four-week gap since the last race in Singapore has really whet the appetite for racing to return this weekend in Austin, but it’s not just …
Get ready everyone, the United States is about to take center stage in the Formula 1 championship battles.
A four-week gap since the last race in Singapore has really whet the appetite for racing to return this weekend in Austin, but it’s not just the long wait that means you’re going to want to pay attention to the way the United States Grand Prix plays out.
During the summer break there wasn’t a huge amount of expectation that we were going to get a drivers’ championship fight this season, but McLaren’s increasingly strong performance has been paired with strong driver showings and Lando Norris has outscored Max Verstappen at each of the four races since the August shutdown.
His biggest points swing in each of those events is eight – achieved with a win and the fastest lap in Zandvoort, and third place with the fastest lap to Verstappen’s sixth in Monza. Another dominant victory last time out in Singapore meant Norris only took seven points out of Verstappen, after Daniel Ricciardo’s final act was to score a fastest lap and take the extra point off the McLaren driver.
Verstappen has done a really good job of limiting the damage by finishing second to Norris on the two occasions the Briton has disappeared into the distance, and can perhaps count himself a little fortunate that a bigger chunk of points weren’t taken out of his advantage in Baku. But the trend has been clear, as McLaren has moved into the lead of the constructors’ standings.
Given the way the season started, it’s remarkable that Verstappen hasn’t won in eight races, a run stretching back to the Spanish Grand Prix in June. And while he might have prevented Norris from significantly reducing his lead in one go over the past four rounds, the average gain per weekend – 6.5 points – would be enough over the next five rounds to force a title decider in Abu Dhabi.
In many ways, the break in races came at the perfect time for Red Bull. McLaren was building real momentum, and although there were signs of progress at the last two races, the race pace difference was still far too big for Verstappen to trouble Norris.
But this wasn’t a shutdown period, so teams could work flat out to try and understand their performance issues and seek improvements. Without any fear of car damage being accrued – because there were no races – the manufacturing capacity could be allocated without the potential demand for last-minute spares.
So teams were able to plan out their development schedules to target an upgrade for Austin this year, as the visit to Circuit of the Americas will kick off a run of six races in eight weeks to complete the 2024 season.
As late in the year as it is, that still makes up a quarter of the entire season, so there’s significant value in any new parts that can be delivered to the cars this weekend.
McLaren goes into the final rounds of the season with the momentum. Andy Hone/Motorsport Images
Red Bull is looking to resolve the balance issues that have become increasingly prominent as the season has gone on, and team principal Christian Horner said after the Singapore Grand Prix that the team had identified a development direction that it could work towards ahead of the next race.
But McLaren is not standing still either, with Andrea Stella admitting he won’t let the fear of updating such a strong car hold back its own plans. If McLaren has shown a particular strength over the rest of the field this year, it has been its ability to add new parts and have them work as intended, while Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes all going through phases of problem solving.
How it plays out between the two teams is going to be crucial. COTA is a track that should suit Red Bull a little more than some of the recent layouts, and an upgrade could put it back in the mix for victory. But if McLaren is able to retain the performance advantage it has held since the summer break, then the title fight is well and truly on.
Mexico City and Interlagos should be venues where McLaren is strong, while Mercedes and Ferrari continue to show peaks and troughs that make at least one of them a threat at the front on most weekends. They will both also have upgrades of their own at COTA that could further impact the competitive picture.
The margins have been so small that there are so many potential outcomes in terms of relative performance this weekend. They range from Red Bull having a race-winning car again and McLaren facing threats from Ferrari and Mercedes, to McLaren retaining an advantage and Red Bull slipping to the fourth fastest car. Or many variances in between.
As the likely last major update for all of the teams, though, COTA will largely set the competitive order for the rest of the season, with the usual fluctuations based on circuit characteristics still to factor in.
With the Sprint format also offering a further eight points up to the race winner, if Norris has a quicker package than Verstappen at his disposal then he has every chance of taking the championship battle right to the wire, and a big swing in points would go at least some of the way towards even making him the favorite.
But if Red Bull is able to erase the performance deficit that it has been dealing with over the past few months, then it will have a chance of halting the momentum that McLaren and Norris have been enjoying. In that scenario, not only would Verstappen have the ability to snuff out any threat to his drivers’ championship lead, but McLaren’s 41-point advantage in the constructors’ championship could look more fragile, too.
And yet, on top of all that, there is still the added caveat of just one practice session potentially leading to teams getting their set-ups wrong, and not being able to extract the full performance capabilities out of their cars.
The time for waiting, though, is nearly over, and the direction of the championship battles this season will quickly be set when COTA kicks off the triple-header.
It’s official, Daniel Ricciardo is out of a drive in Formula 1, effective immediately. A year ago, he was trying to get back as quickly as possible from a broken hand, aiming to earn himself a spot at Red Bull at some stage in future. The form …
It’s official, Daniel Ricciardo is out of a drive in Formula 1, effective immediately.
A year ago, he was trying to get back as quickly as possible from a broken hand, aiming to earn himself a spot at Red Bull at some stage in future. The form Sergio Perez has shown for the majority of this season certainly opened the door for Ricciardo to walk though, but he couldn’t take that opportunity.
Four point-scoring finishes, only three of them in grands prix, and being comfortably outscored — and regularly outqualified — by teammate Yuki Tsunoda meant he did not make a compelling enough case to be promoted in Perez’s place during the summer break.
And as soon as he failed to do that, the writing was on the wall.
Liam Lawson had made himself impossible to ignore with his performances at late notice as Ricciardo’s substitute last year, and Tsunoda was doing the job in the early part of this. The consistency and spark just never quite returned for Ricciardo, and it is totally understandable that Red Bull decided it was time to see if Lawson could be a future driver for the main team. But less understandable is the way it went about it.
As a veteran of 257 race starts, eight victories (seven of them with Red Bull) and 32 podiums, Ricciardo has got the pedigree that shows why he was being given a chance to earn another shot in race-winning machinery. The fact he also took on a reserve role at Red Bull, and was willing to try and prove himself in the RB, displays what that environment meant to him.
Ricciardo’s care-free style, in evidence here after his win in the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix. was perfect for Red Bull and helped make him a star. Mark Sutton/Motorsport Images
But over the course of four days in Singapore, his demeanor went from saying he was expecting a decision on 2025 and to see out the rest of this season, to fearing he’d raced an F1 car for the last time.
“The decision I expect is for next year,” Ricciardo said a week ago. “Obviously crazy things have happened in this sport. I’m also not going to stand here too boastful and confident and ‘oh yeah yeah.’ Like, I believe I will be [racing at the U.S. Grand Prix], but let’s obviously see.”
By Sunday night, an emotional Ricciardo all but confirmed he was out.
“I tried to obviously enjoy it,” he said after getting out of the car. “A little bit like the end of ’22 at McLaren — obviously I was aware maybe that was my last race, so I tried to enjoy that.
“I think I acknowledged also why I came back into the sport — sometimes you see the big picture and I always said I don’t want to be a guy who’s just here on the grid and fighting for a point every now and then, which has kinda been how this year’s gone.
“Obviously this year the purpose was to try and do good enough to get back into Red Bull and fight for wins again, see if I’ve still got it. I felt like I came up short with that, so I think it’s then, ‘OK, what else am I fighting for here? What else is going to give me fulfillment?’
“I’ve been a young driver as well and at some point I don’t just want to take up space, also. Obviously you have to be selfish, but for me if I’m not able to fight at the front with Red Bull I have to ask myself, what am I staying on the grid for? That’s something I’ve also come to peace with.”
But what was so strange was that Red Bull and RB had not confirmed Ricciardo’s departure at that stage, and he had clearly only become aware of how likely it was as the weekend evolved. There was no ability to plan anything, to say goodbye properly, and have a race when he and everyone else knew for certain that he was getting behind the wheel for the last time.
Ricciardo deserved better than that.
The Red Bull exit in 2018 might always haunt him, but Ricciardo’s subsequent spell at Renault was still strong. It’s his results since leaving Renault, however, that make it very tough to argue that he deserves his place on the grid over someone like Lawson any longer.
And replacing him mid-season is also understandable. If you’ve got the replacement ready and waiting, under contract and available, and you’re going to put them in next season anyway, why not get started?
But Ricciardo deserved a proper send-off. A chance to enjoy the moment fully at the end of an impressive career. He’s a driver who has done so much for the popularity of the sport and Red Bull within it, and at his best he was electrifying. So, the least he should have received was the ability to make an announcement before his final race and step out of the cockpit for the last time with clarity.
Even amid his 2024 struggles, Ricciardo remained a fan favorite, making the manner of his exit frustrating both for those fans, Ricciardo himself and, ultimately, his successor. Andy Hone/Motorsport Images
There’s a knock-on impact on Lawson, too, who hasn’t been able to enjoy the promotion in the same way. Rumors flying around that led to criticism of Red Bull — and fans upset at the prospect of losing one of the most popular drivers on the grid — eventually added up to a lack of space to actually celebrate the promotion of another exciting young talent, presumably because it might seem tasteless against that backdrop.
If this is indeed the end of the F1 road for Ricciardo, he should have been able to retire at the very least slightly on his own terms. Instead, it came down to a short Instagram message:
“I’ve loved this sport my whole life. It’s wild and wonderful and been a journey.
“To the teams and individuals that have played their part, thank you. To the fans who love the sport sometimes more than me, haha, thank you. It’ll always have its highs and lows but it’s been fun and truth be told I wouldn’t change it.
“Until the next adventure.”
What that next adventure is remains to be seen, but it’s a real shame the last race went down without so many of his fans really knowing it.
Christian Horner says Red Bull has a lot of work to do to try and catch McLaren ahead of the next race in Austin, following Lando Norris’ dominant victory in the Singapore Grand Prix. Norris pulled out a lead of over 20 seconds in the opening part …
Christian Horner says Red Bull has a lot of work to do to try and catch McLaren ahead of the next race in Austin, following Lando Norris’ dominant victory in the Singapore Grand Prix.
Norris pulled out a lead of over 20 seconds in the opening part of Sunday’s race, although he lost some time before his pit stop when he locked up and very nearly hit the barrier. McLaren had asked its driver to open up an advantage of at least five seconds by around lap 15 but Norris went far clear at that point, with Horner admitting it was impressive pace that Red Bull had no answer to.
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“Yeah, that was taking the p***, although I shouldn’t say that in a public capacity!” Horner said. “The pace he had in hand on that tire at that point in time was… at that point we’ve conceded the race on pace. He touched the wall for the first time, then he touched it for the second time but they’ve got away with it.
“I actually think Max [Verstappen] drove a very strong race, and that was what we had, which, when you consider where we were a couple of weeks ago, I think we have made some real progress and obviously, we’ve got a lot of work to do before Austin.”
Horner told Verstappen over the radio about the two occasions Norris touched the barrier during the race, suggesting it showed how close the leader came to costing himself the win.
“It’s to show him he was a lucky bastard. You know, hitting the wall once is usually a wake up call. And to hit it twice, you’ve got somebody smiling on you… Hope I don’t get done for ‘lucky bastard’!”
While joking about the recent requests for drivers not to swear on team radio or in official press conferences, Horner says he was satisfied with the return in Singapore despite Verstappen losing seven points to Norris in the drivers’ championship.
“You have to congratulate Lando and McLaren. They had a very strong car this weekend, and particularly on the first stint they were very quick. I think on the hard tire, we looked in better shape. But of course, the gap is way too big by then at a track that, anyway, is very hard to overtake.
“So I think if you roll back the clock to Friday night, if you’d have said we’d qualify on the front row and take second place a significant amount ahead of the rest of the field, I think we would have certainly taken that.
“But obviously the gap to Lando was significant in the first part of the race, and we’ve now got the best part of a month to work hard and try and bring some performance to the car in Austin.”
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says Sergio Perez had the pace to win the Azerbaijan Grand Prix before being taken out of the race in a crash with Carlos Sainz on the penultimate lap. Perez had been battling Charles Leclerc for second place …
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner says Sergio Perez had the pace to win the Azerbaijan Grand Prix before being taken out of the race in a crash with Carlos Sainz on the penultimate lap.
Perez had been battling Charles Leclerc for second place (pictured) when he became tangled in a duel with Sainz, who was closing in on a podium finish with fresher tires in the final stages of the race.
Sainz slipped past Perez at the first turn but missed the apex at Turn 2, opening the door to the Mexican, who got a better exit to drag the Spaniard side by side down to Turn 3. But the two made heavy contact halfway down the straight that ended with both cars clattering into the barriers, forcing a virtual safety car that effectively ended the grand prix.
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The crash was deemed a racing incident in a post-session investigation, with the stewards declaring that while Sainz was drifting towards the middle of the track, Perez could have done more to avoid the collision.
“It’s hugely frustrating,” Horner said before the stewards issued their ruling. “I’ve just watched the incident several times and you can quite clearly see Carlos — if you take the wall as a reference and the white line on the right-hand side of the track — look in his mirror and just drift to the left, knowing that he was there, and Checo doesn’t move left or right. Hugely frustrating to lose that.”
Horner was particularly disappointed that Perez’s first strong race in months went unrewarded.
“I thought he was super,” he said. “It’s frustrating because Checo certainly should’ve been on the podium at the very least in third place, probably second.
“Actually, he could’ve won that race had he not lost a lot of time behind Alex Albon initially and then Lando [Norris] while he was on new tires and Oscar was still out on the old tires.”
McLaren’s team tactics paid lucrative dividends. While Perez was the first of the leading trio to pit for what should have been a powerful undercut, he happened to rejoin the track behind Norris, who started in 15th and was engaging in a long recovery drive.
Norris was asked to slow Perez to give Piastri an extra lap’s tire offset, and the Briton duly obliged with some clever defensive driving through the castle section that allowed his teammate to rejoin from his pit stop fractionally ahead of Perez.
“Lando backed him up, which allowed Oscar to keep track position, and I think without that we would’ve been ahead of Oscar and he would’ve passed Leclerc and he would’ve been fine,” Horner said.
“I thought Checo had a very strong weekend and he had great pace throughout that race. To sit on the tail of that for the entire grand prix distance — he was on the pace throughout the weekend.
“He was demonstrating race-winning performance today. Of course it’s a track that he’s always excelled at, but I think we’ve understood a few things with the car, and it was good to see certainly Checo’s car in contention for the win throughout the race. It’s just a great shame for him not to have capitalized with a podium, which has been costly in constructors points and in crash damage.”
While the points loss from the crash wasn’t the difference between Red Bull retaining and losing the constructors championship lead, it did allow McLaren to open a healthy 20-point advantage in one fell swoop rather than the more modest margin it was set to claim with Piastri in third.
“We’re pushing hard,” Horner said. “We’re now not defending, we’re chasing, so it changes the dynamic again. We’re just going to throw everything at it.”
Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner says Aston Martin was premature to celebrate the arrival of Adrian Newey while the designer is still serving out the final months of his contract at Horner’s team. Newey (pictured at left, above, with …
Red Bull Racing principal Christian Horner says Aston Martin was premature to celebrate the arrival of Adrian Newey while the designer is still serving out the final months of his contract at Horner’s team.
Newey (pictured at left, above, with Horner) was confirmed as managing technical partner and a new shareholder in a large-scale announcement event during the week at the team’s state-of-the-art new headquarters. The 65-year-old appeared in front of Aston Martin branding, talked at length about the company and appeared on stage with team owner Lawrence Stroll alongside drivers Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll.
The legendary designer announced in May that he would quit Red Bull Racing, negotiating an early exit from his contract that would allow him start work for a rival next March. But he remains tied to Red Bull via the RB17 hypercar program until then, and he’s also appeared at several races in Red Bull Racing team kit.
Asked about the incongruousness of appearing at another team’s factory while still on the Red Bull Racing payroll, Horner suggested Aston Martin had pulled the trigger too early on welcoming Newey to Silverstone.
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“It was obviously a large announcement by Aston,” he said. “Adrian has always tended to do his own thing.
“They chose to celebrate it perhaps potentially slightly prematurely before he’s finished his contract with Red Bull Racing, but obviously it was a big moment for that team.”
Newey reportedly returned to work at Red Bull’s headquarters at Milton Keynes, around 20 miles east of Silverstone-based Aston Martin, at the end of his presentation event.
Despite the eyebrow-raising scheduling, Horner said he would be sad to see Newey eventually swipe out of the building for the final time, even if it had long become clear that the title-winning engineer had his heart set on working elsewhere.
“It wasn’t a great surprise,” he said. “I think it was becoming clearer and clearer that was the route that he was going to go rather than into retirement or any other team.
“Obviously it’ll be a new challenge for him, and we’ll be sad to see it when he leaves next year but wish him all the best for the future. I look back with great fondness at the 20 years almost that we spent together and obviously the highs and lows during that period.
“Adrian is obviously a very creative guy. He’s not your average designer. I think he’s the only person still in Formula 1 working on a drawing board.
“He’s unique in many respects, and I think that Aston will obviously look to draw upon his huge experience. But we look forward to the future, and I think we’re well positioned for that.”
