Were there any last, lingering doubts about what really drives modern sport, Formula One managed to dispel them with crushing and depressing finality on Wednesday. Welcome, then, to a world where F1 now boasts a team named Visa Cash App RB, a title that deadens the soul with every utterance and stands, surely, as the very worst in the sport’s history.
The team were once the doughty Minardi. Formed in Faenza, Italy by Giancarlo Minardi, they were bought by Red Bull in 2005, raced as Toro Rosso until 2020 when they were once more rebranded as AlphaTauri to promote the brand’s clothing line. Both positively homely denominations in comparison to this latest abomination. They were at least titles that suggested a racing team, rather than simply the corporate sponsor with whom Red Bull have done a deal, across both its teams, worth millions.
What are they to be referred to as then? The RB of the title, the only suggestion that it represents something more than a way of shifting greenbacks, stands for Racing Bulls. Sadly it remains initialised; one assumes lest it somehow distract from the sheer magnetism and joie de vivre of Visa Cash App.
Internally, it is understood the team already refer to themselves as Vcarb, which is barely an improvement and will doubtless make the bean counters at Visa furious. Outside the team, the response has been derisive. One alternative already doing the rounds is Cash Cows.
F1 surely deserves better. Sponsors’ names have long been attached to teams, and more so than ever today. Mercedes, as they are universally known, are of course officially Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1; Aston Martin as Aston Martin Aramco F1. Yet this is a step beyond. It is simply a corporate title, where any sense of connection or identity with it being a racing team has been excised. Commentators will curse but also think of the drivers. They have, in Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda, two of the more entertaining characters on the grid. Referring to their team by its new name will surely sap the verve out of any comment by either.
Whither the fans too. Youngsters who admire the drivers will have to consider themselves fans of Visa Cash App RB. Not Lotus, Ferrari, Tyrell, Brabham, McLaren, Mercedes or even Red Bull but Visa Cash App RB. Don’t think of what the merch may be like.
All of which leads to the question of how F1 management allowed this to happen without heading it off with a functional compromise. The sport is desperate to sell to its new younger audience. It wants to be accessible, yet glamorous and aspirational. Surely nothing could be more offputting to new fans than a corporate title that stirs neither heart nor mind and has all the inherent glamour of doing a spot of online banking. This from Red Bull, the brand that has always sold itself as the edgy, imaginative brand in F1, the one that didn’t play by the rules but which now finds itself in a straitjacket of its own creation.
Behind the distaste and mockery, more serious questions are being asked, some relating to the Visa Cash App RB team forming a far closer relationship with Red Bull’s senior squad. Design staff are moving from Faenza to Red Bull HQ in Milton Keynes and the team, who have previously been independent, have stated that under the new team principal, Laurent Mekies, they will exploit the regulations to buy off-the-shelf parts from Red Bull.
Helmut Marko, the Red Bull motorsport adviser, said they would “follow Red Bull Racing as closely as the regulations allow”. The perception of a Red Bull B-team being created that will be able to follow the Red Bull design has not gone down well among rivals. At the recent livery launch for the new McLaren, the team’s chief executive, Zak Brown, twice steered questions round to expressing his obvious disquiet and frustration with the prospect. “I believe it’s a serious issue for the fairness of the sport, for the fans. That’s why it’s pretty much not allowed in any other form of major sport,” he said. “I’d like to see us, as an industry, focus on that before it gets to a level of being where Formula One once was, which is very out of balance because people are playing by the rules, but a different set of rules.”
This issue will, doubtless, rumble on as the season progresses and will be of great concern to team principals in the paddock. Outside it, perhaps, everyone will quietly revert to calling the team Minardi. There’s no money in it but it does come entirely free of any involuntary gnashing of the teeth.
