An innocuous industrial estate in Milton Keynes is the unlikely backdrop for one of Britain’s sporting success stories.
On this particular Monday, a DJ is outside in the sunshine playing music at full blast and, elsewhere, there are echoes of the workforce clinking bottles of Heineken.
Some wear branded T-shirts with the No6 on them, others with a three, both nods to a level of dominance unrivalled by perhaps any current sports team.
There are the bleary-eyed among those gathered, who have come straight here from an overnight flight from the Qatar Grand Prix before even being reunited with their families.
It is a place seemingly devoid of any dread for the start of another working week, although, at Red Bull Racing, there is no such thing as a normal working week. As team principal Christian Horner puts it: "This isn’t nine to five."
Red Bull are an insatiable winning machine, the main reception testament to that fact with a glass cabinet already 12 levels high full of trophies. If last season was dominant, this season they have disappeared into the distance.
They have won 16 of 17 races, Max Verstappen has led 769 laps in 2023 and the team have a sixth constructors’ title already sewn up. Two weekends ago, Verstappen made it a hat-trick of drivers’ titles, with five races left.
The inference is they will stay as frontrunners until 2026 at the earliest, when the next set of regulations come into place.
Red Bull have opened their doors inside this winning machine, letting a journalist into their post-race team debrief for the first time in their history.
Horner is in his element as he takes to the stage surrounded by most of the team’s most successful cars and much of a workforce approaching 1,600 in number.
The mood, already celebratory, is lifted further as Verstappen appears as a surprise guest on a large screen from his Monaco home, looking, it has to be said, like he has been party to celebrations of his own since title No3 became official in the wake of the sprint race in Losail.
The admission comes that he sank five gin and tonics in celebration on the Saturday but joked he sweated them out during the searing heat of the following day’s main race, in which he was victorious.
The Dutchman knows he is taking all the plaudits, but is quick to thank every person within the team, many of whom line up for a selfie with a cardboard cut-out of the man and one of his trophies.
“It feels like a second family to me,” he says. “Loyalty is very important to me. My dream is to stay with the team until the end. It’s way better than I ever could imagine.”
Verstappen is clearly a major part of the team’s success, but Horner likes to credit Red Bull for being the sum of their parts in creating the RB19, a vehicle their lead driver calls “a rocket ship of a car”.
Speaking from his office earlier in the day, Horner said: “It has to be inclusive that everybody matters and everybody counts. The spirit created here, you feel it, it’s self-perpetuating and emanates around the business.
It’s a work hard, play hard mentality.
“It’s a sort of work hard, play hard mentality in terms of enjoying success. It’s all about team. To achieve the results we have, you need every one of those members of the team and each of their departments to be doing their bit.”
Horner describes himself as the boss of a sports team for 22 weekends of the year and the CEO of a technology company for 365 days of the year. Immensely competitive, he says that permeates through the whole organisation.
As a boss, he is quick to point out he is “not in the Alex Ferguson mould” of screaming and shouting. Instead, he prefers to give those around him the autonomy to shine.
“I’ve always believed in employing the right people for the right roles,” he said. “There’s no point employing Adrian Newey and telling him how to design a car. He’s a creative guy and you’ve got to give him creative freedom.”
Newey’s office lies a mere five steps from that of Horner — separated by two glass fronts — and it is the technical whizz credited with much of the team’s current dominance and how he and his team got a jump on the rest in terms of adapting to the new regulations for last season.
“This has been one of the easier, one of the less stressful seasons for us,” said Newey, mastermind of some of the greatest F1 cars in history, the RB19 included. “I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in cars that have been dominant in the past, but we’ve never had this level of consistency. To achieve this is a real tribute to everybody. We have to keep pushing the boundaries.”
Horner muses how different life might have been for Red Bull without Newey, who toyed with leaving the team in their barren spell between Sebastian Vettel’s winning run and Verstappen’s current success, when the car’s Honda engine was lacking the power to get close to the then dominant Mercedes of Lewis Hamilton.
On this day of celebration, Horner and Newey have reverted to their old habit in the early days of the team of always stopping for lunch together.
But not absolutely everything is rosy within the team. Sergio ‘Checo’ Perez, not quite on the naughty step despite his apparent struggles in the superior car on the grid, has flown straight here from Qatar for a day working in the factory’s simulator as everyone else celebrates Verstappen’s success.
The Mexican is in a tight fight for second in the championship, just 30 points ahead of Hamilton, with Red Bull never having previously achieved a championship one-two.
The site is one of constant expansion. The powertrains building, where they are building their own engine for 2026 — “not bad for an energy drinks company,” says Horner — was the most recent addition. And work is in full swing for two further major constructions, with a view to bring their sister F1 team, AlphaTauri, on site.
Ominously for Red Bull’s rivals, the team have dominated the championship despite having their wind tunnel time reduced as punishment for previously violating the cost cap, a reduction which ends in the wake of this weekend’s United States Grand Prix.
543,000,000
Estimated size of Red Bull fanbase
Estimated size of Red Bull fanbase
Red Bull consider themselves to be winning off the track as well as on it. They have 52 partners and sponsors — 85 per cent of new ones coming from the US — and have a fanbase of 543 million people, a rise of 11 per cent from last year.
Chief marketing officer Oliver Hughes said: “That puts us with the likes of Paris Saint-Germain and Golden State Warriors, it’s more than double the size of the Dallas Cowboys. We’re up there as a sports entity.”
Red Bull pit themselves as putting fans first. In Austin, their car livery will be designed by a fan for a second time this season, as it was in Miami, and will again be in Las Vegas with their Make Your Mark campaign. For Austin, entries were just shy of 100,000.
“I’d say my focus is never about what’s happening on track,” said Hughes, who started six years ago with a marketing team of 20 which has risen five-fold. “I’ve got no control over that. Let’s build something that fans want to follow. We have to keep outdoing ourselves.”
Within the marketing department, there is the thud of techno music playing, a musical mirror to the mechanics’ soundtrack of choice in the garage on any given GP weekend.
Horner, a far more affable personality than he might at times appear when on camera at races and in the Netflix series Drive to Survive, himself likes to push that message of “work hard, play hard”, and both seem to be at play on this particular day.
It is an easy approach, though, to have when your team are dominating.
Horner makes the point that it is “incredibly hard” to make the dominance look easy and also points out there is no one secret ingredient to the current success. As he puts it: “Everyone else is searching for a magic bullet. The reality is there isn’t a magic bullet, but a combination of things coming together.”
And his warning for rivals is that they still have not mastered their current car, with more pace yet to be extricated from it.
“We’re still learning,” he said. “We’ve won all races bar one, which is stunning. To have won 16 of 17 grands prix, we could never have dreamed of that coming into this season. It’s the most amazing season for us. We won 17 races last year and didn’t think we would top that.”
The message is clear: watch out in 2024. The winning machine shows few signs of being derailed.
