Red Bull’s eccentric owner and passionate race fan, Dietrich Mateschitz, has spent more than $700 million building the best Formula One team on the planet. Red Bull Racing has won two straight championships and is the front-runner for a third, with drivers Sebastian Vettel (right) and Mark Webber combining for 11 top-five finishes through the first eight races of 2012. This June in Montreal during the Canadian Grand Prix, the team opened its garage exclusively to Sportsnet magazine.
Christian Horner has been talking about tyres all goddamn day. No, not tires. Tires are what rotate under your minivan as you take your kids to soccer practice, driving on the right side of the road, abiding by posted speed limits. Tyres are the badass hulks of rubber that push the limits of physics under an F1 race car driven by a millionaire athlete at more than 320 km/h. We’re talking 25-inch Pirellis, reinforced with underlying nylon and polyester to withstand more than a ton of downforce, with a 13-inch hard steel rim in the centre, carefully designed to hug the road like Velcro. Pirelli revamped their tyre compounds specifically for this F1 season, and everyone wants to know what Horner thinks of them.
The diminutive Brit obliges, answering every question the crowd has while sitting in the blazing Montreal sun wearing a pink button-up shirt—with flashy purple
cufflinks—tucked into jeans. It’s his job, after all. Horner is the team principal for Red Bull Racing and its primary spokesperson on all operational matters. He came up as a driver, bouncing around several teams and circuits throughout the ’90s until, at the age of 25, he founded his own team, Arden, and quickly led it to three F3000 championships. In 2005, Mateschitz called and asked the then-31-year-old to become the youngest team principal on the circuit and guide the energy drink company’s entry into F1. Much of Red Bull’s success has come from having key team members such as Horner in place. Individuals with equal parts racing experience and youthful savvy who know how to win—and take risks while doing it. “I try to ensure the team’s operating at its full potential. I’m not a specialist; I’m not an engineer,” Horner says. “I just make sure everyone’s rowing in the same direction.”
The team is run a lot like a military operation. They arrive in your country by air and sea, bringing a sizable army of men and women along with a tremendous amount of freight. Everyone has clearly defined roles and responsibilities. There is a stringent chain of command starting with Horner at the top and filtering down to the tyre-washing mechanic at the bottom. Everything that happens on a race weekend is rigidly scheduled and scrupulously double-checked. And Horner is the field general. “It’s like chess or a football game,” Horner says. “The structure of your team is tremendously important.”
It’s a calm Thursday at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, the island racetrack where Horner and Red Bull have arrived for the seventh stop of the 2012 F1 season. The infantry of Horner’s team buzz around him, mechanics carting stacks of tyres back and forth, engineers running tests, marketing employees keeping visitors entertained. Horner has final say on every decision made that weekend, though he swears he rarely has to get involved. The team is so well-oiled it practically runs itself. For the most part, Horner will spend Thursday glad-handing with sponsors and talking to the press. That night he’ll be one of more than 1,000 guests at the $10,000-a-table Grand Prix kickoff event in Montreal’s trendy Griffintown. Naturally, an awful lot of those people want to ask him about tyres.
Ole Schack is scrambling, nearly tripping over his own feet as he forces his way through a torrential storm invading his garage. The rain started practically the minute Friday’s practice session ended, sheets of it pelting down on Île Notre-Dame and pouring directly into Red Bull’s garage, which quickly began to flood. The wind streamed in too, knocking down a long plastic beam that runs along the top of the room. Schack lowers one of the two big metal doors that open to the track in a hurry, wiping the rain off his face and doing little to hide his chagrin. Usually it’s fires he has to worry about, not floods.
Schack is the chief mechanic on Vettel’s car, the latest stop in a career that started washing tyres on the Formula Four circuit. He was educated as a road car mechanic in Denmark and knows his way around a car like Cousteau knew the sea. But a mechanic’s life is a humbling one. “Everything’s up to the engineers,” Schack says. “I’m the hands, they’re the heads.”
As Schack twists through the maze of blue-and-red plastic walls back to Red Bull’s garage, you can hear the tremendous racket the boys are making inside. Both cars are hoisted up on jacks as teams of mechanics screw and wrench away at them, seeming to hardly notice the dance music piped into the room. There are about 50 hours until race time, which may seem like a lot to work with. It’s not. Sixteen-hour days are the norm for F1 mechanics, whose workhorse tendencies spurred the F1 to institute a curfew on race weekends. Teams can only work on their cars until 1 a.m., at which point they have to drop everything. If you’re caught working on your car past curfew four times, your team has to start the race from the pit lane, a nearly insurmountable disadvantage. Red Bull doesn’t make a habit of pushing curfew, although they were penalized for it twice in 2011. They have yet to be penalized in 2012. “The long hours are the hardest part of the job,” Schack says. “But the reward Sunday hopefully outweighs the lack of sleep.”
To Schack’s right a mechanic waves an ultrasound machine over the front wings of each car, scanning for any loose carbon fibre or stress fractures from the practice session this morning. Like most things that cost an exorbitant amount of money, Red Bull’s RB8 race cars are extremely fragile. They weigh only a little more than 400 kg—less than quarter of the weight of an average road car—and it takes just the slightest bit of debris to compromise their performance. Adding to the challenge is the fact that F1 tyres degrade rapidly, leaving little bits of rubber all over the track—drivers call them “marbles”—that get shot off tyres like bullets and can damage a car’s front wing. Even something as small as an air pocket between the layers of carbon fibre in the wing can affect aerodynamics and cost a driver time. Tiny errors or missteps like that are the sorts of things that keep mechanics awake at night. They work right up until 1 a.m. on Friday night, nearly 40 of them tweaking engines, adjusting wings, analyzing engine oil. They go through an awful lot of Red Bull in the process. It can seem excessive, but every weekend brings a new set of complications to overcome. And it’s not always as easy as just pulling down the garage doors.
Jonathan Wheatley, Red Bull’s team manager, is the best lieutenant a general like Horner could ask for. Tall and fit with impossibly good posture, Wheatley brisks around the hectic Red Bull garage checking in with everybody from mechanics to tour guides. Almost everything that happens at the track on a race weekend will cross his clipboard at one point or another, and it’s his job to make sure as little as possible goes wrong. “I worked it out once—I could be blamed for nearly everything,” Wheatley says. “It’s a challenge, but it’s a great challenge, you know? And there’s a great satisfaction to be had from getting it right.” Wheatley’s been working in F1 for more than 20 years, starting as a mechanic with Benetton in 1991, when he worked on the front end of Michael Schumacher’s car. Now he watches Schumacher whiz past from Red Bull’s pit wall during races, where he keeps an eye on the team’s pit stops and handles any regulation issues that arise.
When they aren’t racing, Wheatley is simply responsible for 100-odd people and more than 45,000 kilograms of freight. It’s only Saturday, but so far Wheatley has had to deal with a missed flight, equipment that arrived late and a heated verbal altercation in the garage on Friday morning. It’s some kind of stress. And then, every once in a while, the F1 fuzz start poking around.
One of Wheatley’s most crucial responsibilities is ensuring Red Bull isn’t breaking any rules, which, the way this team pushes the envelope, should be someone’s full-time job. The F1’s governing body, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, has been kept busy inspecting and determining the legality of the seemingly endless advancements Red Bull makes to its cars. Coming into the Canadian Grand Prix, controversy swirled around the team after the FIA ruled that a tiny airflow-directing hole in the floor at the back of the car Webber used to win the Monaco Grand Prix in late May was illegal. Then, in Montreal, the FIA ruled Red Bull’s hubcaps, which had slots in them to channel hot air from the brake ducts to the outside of the wheel where it energized and flowed over the front wing—improving aerodynamics with a brilliant stroke of engineering—were also illegal. Webber was especially perturbed by the rulings, because it tainted his first win of the season. “It pisses me off, to be honest,” Webber says, his normally laid-back Australian delivery suddenly stern. “The car passed every single technical regulation after the race.”
But despite these infringements on their fun, Red Bull continues to push the limits of not only speed, but also conceptualization and ingenuity. No other team has been as aggressive in trying to gain an edge for their car. These guys will try anything. Of course, it’s easy to get creative when money is almost no object. And the results don’t argue. “If anyone thinks a hole in the floor is the major contribution toward the performance of our car, I think they’d find themselves wrong,” Wheatley says, almost too politely. “To be honest, it isn’t a very big deal for us.”
On the surface, Red Bull’s operations appear rather relaxed and nonchalant. They joke more than other teams, hopping around to loud dance music and throwing back energy drinks like water. Red Bull’s “Energy Station” hospitality areas are must-visits at every Grand Prix, especially the European events where the team builds a pop-up nightclub complete with multiple bars, dozens of flat-screen TVs and a swimming pool. All the crew members are young and wear the same tight-fitting uniform: blue shirt, blue shorts and a blue belt with white lettering around the back spelling out “GIVES YOU WINGS.” On Thursday night in a swanky Montreal neighbourhood, the team hosts a weekend kickoff party at an Infiniti dealership where pretty young girls in little black dresses and white wigs hand out fresh sashimi and sake to the crowded room, kept sustained by an endless stream of vodka and Red Bulls. At times it can seem like the team doesn’t harbour a worry in the world.
But image is everything with Red Bull. They want to look cool. They want it to look effortless. They want you to underestimate them. This is as structured an operation as you will find, and both Horner and Wheatley are renowned for coming down hard on crew members who aren’t performing up to grade. It may be an informal and even fun operation, but it’s still the military. “I come across as a really nice guy away from the track,” Wheatley says. “But trust me, the boys know when they’re in trouble.”
The boys work another 16-hour day Saturday—with a short break in the late afternoon to catch some of the Euro 2012 match between Germany and Portugal, of course—pushing the weekend total to almost 50 hours over three days. Leaving the garage in the middle of the night, the team will start to feel the burnout coming. These weekends are marathon sprints. But everyone sleeps fast; Sunday is race day.
It’s Sunday, 3:33 in the afternoon. Horner and Wheatley sit at Red Bull’s pit wall watching the array of monitors in front of them while hundreds of people stream behind their backs, sprinting down pit lane. The crowd is rushing to greet McLaren’s Lewis Hamilton at the finish line as he pulls in from his slow-down lap to collect his third Canadian Grand Prix Championship. The pair pay no mind, hidden from the unrelenting sun by the roof of their pit wall as they try to figure out how Vettel, who had the pole, finished one spot shy of the podium and Webber came in seventh after qualifying fourth. Everything was going so well this weekend. But in F1, nothing is ever certain.
About an hour later, Horner sits down at a table in a mercifully air-conditioned room in Red Bull’s paddock and is handed the entire race charted on a single piece of paper. Lines of every colour run from left to right across the page, a different one for each of the 20 cars in the race. Lap by lap the lines move up and down, according to position. It looks as if someone drag-selected the entire two hours and dropped it into Microsoft Excel. “Let’s try and work out what happened there,” Horner says with a sigh, examining the data. He settles on a point somewhere shortly after the 50th lap where Vettel’s line begins to tail downwards as his tyres became so degraded they simply wouldn’t do what he was telling them to. It was a decisive moment. On the pit wall, Horner, Wheatley and the rest of the Red Bull brain trust made a snap decision to abandon their pre-race plan and bring Vettel in for an extremely late pit stop seven laps shy of the checkered flag, eating up 22.4 precious seconds. “Sometimes plans have to change, and sometimes you’re going to make the wrong choice,” Horner says. “But the worst thing in this business is to not make a decision.” On the piece of paper in Horner’s hands, Vettel’s red line starts spiking upwards, the new tyres and a hell-bent driving strategy pushing him up the leaderboard. But it hits a dead stop on the right-hand side of the page, Vettel’s fastest and final lap. They only give you so many. The kicker in all this is that Lotus-Renault’s Romain Grosjean ran an incredibly similar race strategy to Vettel’s and finished second. Grosjean’s tyres simply didn’t wear down as quickly as Vettel’s did.
That’s the cruel reality of operating an F1 team. You can try to cover every last possibility, but you never will. In a sport so technical and so intricate by design, with a million moving parts and so many out of your control, there is no such thing as true preparedness. The millions of dollars poured into research and development; the tens of thousands of man-hours in the garage, endlessly tweaking and preparing the car; the days, weeks and months of planning, strategizing, specifying and engineering. All that expense and the race is lost on the goddamn tyres.
Not that it seems to bother Vettel as he emerges from a building in Red Bull’s paddock two hours after the race and makes haste for his ride. There aren’t many people around, but Vettel is still in a hurry, his grey shoes pounding the pavement and a big black backpack bouncing on his slim shoulders. A small group of fans pressed up against a chain-link gate shout “Sebastian! Champion!” as he darts by. He gets about two steps further and stops, breaking into a wry grin and returning to greet them. He grabs the first kid he sees, puts his arm around him and smiles as cameras all around snap, before he’s on his way again. A crowd awaits him at his car, too, extending pictures and programs for him to autograph as he pushes through and climbs into the back of a black Infiniti JX35 SUV. The driver’s driver hops in and quickly pulls out, parting the mob of fans and speeding off down the dirt road, literally leaving everyone in their dust.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine.