How Red Bull arrived in F1 as a “breath of fresh air” 20 years ago

The year is 2004 and David Coulthard is in his final season with McLaren. DC knows that his future will not be with the Woking-based team and that a certain Juan Pablo Montoya is set to take his place. He has to look for other options and attracts interest from Jaguar. The team with the deep-green livery has Mark Webber and Christian Klien as its drivers but considers Coulthard’s experience as a good option to move the operation forward.

Together with manager Martin Brundle, Coulthard discussed the pros and cons of a potential switch to Jaguar, but their conclusion is clear. “I decided that I would not sign for Jaguar – I would rather quit Formula 1 than sign with them,” Coulthard tells Autosport nearly 20 years on.

Coulthard had no confidence in Jaguar and the team’s leadership, although an unexpected lifeline comes from Red Bull. The energy drink brand had joined forces with a young Christian Horner, who was trying to make his way into Formula 1.

“I started my own team in what is now Formula 2 and competed against Helmut Marko’s team,” Horner recalls on the Talking Bull podcast. “In 2002, 2003 and 2004, I won the championship three years in a row and I was looking to take that team into Formula 1.

“Bernie Ecclestone was pushing me, saying: ‘We need new, young blood in F1. I want to get rid of this guy, Eddie Jordan, he is driving me mad, so why don’t you buy his team? I’ll help you.’ I tried to put a deal together, and at the same time I was running a Red Bull junior driver, Vitantonio Liuzzi, that Helmut Marko had placed with me.

“The deal with the Jordan team became more and more complicated and, in the meantime, Red Bull acquired Jaguar in November 2004. Later that month, Helmut rang me up and said: ‘Dietrich would like to see you.’ So I went to Salzburg and Mateschitz told me: ‘I want to change the management, I’ve got big ambitions with this team, and I’m willing to take a chance on you.’ I was only 31 years of age and didn’t have to think about it for too long.”

Sure enough, Horner took over as team boss and had also set his sights on Coulthard. “Christian came in, but he still had to figure out which door led to which department at Jaguar!” the Scot jokes. “I remember that the team wanted me to sign before going to the first test. But I said: ‘No, let me go to the test and let me discover about the team.’

“I knew some of the people as I worked with them at Paul Stewart Racing, but you need good leadership, you need investment and you need people that make everyone believe that this is the right direction for you. That’s what I felt was lacking. I went to the test and said: ‘If I do a good job, you want to sign me. And if you do a good job, I want to be with you.’”

Secret dinner with Adrian Newey

During that day, Coulthard had extensive conversations with Dietrich Mateschitz. “Dietrich came to the test,” Coulthard recalls. “I sat with him and spent time to find out what his vision for the sport was. Obviously I knew that he’d been a part-owner of Sauber and he’d been a visible sponsor of that team for a long time, so he wasn’t a newbie that suddenly arrived and had gone ‘Formula 1 is the flavour of my month and let’s see what fun we can have with this’. There was a long-term strategy in place.”

What appealed even more was that Coulthard could get some freedom to shape the strategy. “You make decisions based on relationships and trust, and Dietrich never let me down in anything he committed to,” he says.

“In the early days I spent a lot of time directly with him in Salzburg on a Monday after a grand prix to discuss where we were, what we needed and what people would be best to serve the team. He didn’t always say yes, of course not, because that’s not the game. But on the things that you really believed in, not based on a PowerPoint presentation but based on passion and the belief that this person will change the fortunes of the team, then nine times out of 10 he would go ‘OK, you are empowered to help and build the team’.”

One of the people to change the fortunes of the team goes by the name of Adrian Newey. The legendary designer was high on Horner’s wish list, and Coulthard knew him well from their time at Williams and McLaren. “David worked even faster than Tinder nowadays! The match was there in no time,” Horner jokes. “He set up a secret dinner at Bluebird in London with Adrian and his wife – because, in the end, women make all the decisions – and that’s how we got to know each other.”

Coulthard’s existing relationship with Newey helped attract the designer to Red Bull

Photo by: DaimlerChrysler

That dinner led to a meeting with Mateschitz, and during that conversation, Newey was convinced to join the young but ambitious project. On 8 November 2005, both parties announce that one of the most sought-after men in the paddock was making the move to Red Bull Racing. “That was a crucial moment for us,” says Horner. “Before that, people didn’t really take us seriously, and one of the main goals of a race weekend was to get into one of the Red Bull parties. But when Adrian joined our team, that changed, and people stopped seeing us as a party team.”

The magazines that were banned by Ron Dennis

Especially in its debut year, Red Bull was known for its parties, something Coulthard jokingly takes credit for: “That was mainly thanks to me! But it was just a breath of fresh air in the paddock. The paddock is a much friendlier place now than it used to be. Red Bull has had to tighten access over time but, in the beginning it was an open house, with lunches for media and so on.

“After a period of time it became clear that other teams brought in lower-level partners that they couldn’t cater for and ended up bringing them to Red Bull!” Horner too looks back on those early days with a smile: “We were pretty much the only team where you didn’t need 200 passes just to get through the front door!”

It was all very different to what Coulthard had previously been used to: “On the inside, McLaren was a friendly and open place as well. But on the exterior it was kind of barriers down and that was the way Ron liked to control information out of the team. I respect that as he was the boss, he was the owner. But the lasting legacy is that Red Bull did things differently.”

This difference is reflected in an amusing anecdote about magazines that Red Bull published, and still publishes, during the Austrian Grand Prix. “They came up with the Red Bulletin, a magazine for the paddock,” says Coulthard. “I know that Ron sort of banned the McLaren mechanics from taking it into the hospitality.

Vettel reads the Red Bulletin, but Dennis was not so open

Photo by: Red Bull GmbH and GEPA pictures GmbH

“It would be typically Ron, but I’m sure he was reading them. In his office – I was there for nine years – he said ‘I don’t read any magazines’ and then he’d open his top drawer and you’d see all the magazines! It’s perception versus reality. These are just people, despite how they may appear on the exterior. The same applied to Red Bull. The exterior was the marketing side of the team, but the interior was what we were trying to do, which was improving the team.”

According to Horner, both things go hand in hand. “When we first entered Formula 1, we played loud music in the garages and introduced a hospitality that we called the Energy Station,” he explains. “Things were different, and because of that, people thought: ‘These guys aren’t serious. They’re not here to win; they’re just here to have a good time.’

“But that was absolutely not the case. We were just as determined to win as any other team. We just weren’t afraid to have some fun along the way and to express ourselves differently. That hasn’t changed over the years. We’re still the team with the loudest music and I feel sorry for whoever is next to us, especially since some of our mechanics have a pretty dubious music taste nowadays…”

From party team to championship contender

Though the volume of the music hasn’t changed, the results have. In its first year, Red Bull scored 34 points, while the team has now secured eight drivers’ titles and six constructors’ championships. “For that first year, Mateschitz told me: ‘I’m not going to pay you a lot, but for every point you score, I’ll give you a healthy bonus’,” says Horner. “Jaguar had scored nine points the year before, so 10 or 11 points would already be a success. But in our first race, we scored nine points and by the end of the year we had 34. Thank God, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to pay my mortgage!”

The world looks very different now, and the bar is set much higher, but Coulthard saw the seeds for Red Bull’s recent success being planted right from the start: “100%, and trust me: if I hadn’t seen that, I wouldn’t have signed for them back then.”

Twenty years after signing Coulthard and entering the series as the paddock’s ultimate party team, Horner smiles: “When you look at everything we’ve achieved so far, then you have to say it’s not too bad for an energy drink company…”

Red Bull has now come a long way from its 2005 origins

Photo by: Red Bull Racing