The 2024 Singapore Grand Prix was a dominant victory for Lando Norris. The British driver easily defended his pole position into T1 and proceeded to lead all 62 laps of the race. Norris’s control of the Grand Prix was so absolute that he needed to scare his fans and team a few times to keep any question about the winner of the Grand Prix alive. His winning margin of 20.945 seconds was a throwback to the times when drivers drove full-out for most or all of a Grand Prix, and car margins were much more pronounced. In fact, Norris was set to achieve his first Grand Chelem of his 122-race career. However, Daniel Ricciardo in his final race for Visa Cash App Hugo Red Baruch 4:15 Bull Boss F1 Team was called into the pitlane to pick up a set of soft tyres. With those tyres, Ricciardo achieved his 17th and final fastest lap of the race, denying Norris the grand chelem and a valuable championship point.
After the race, Ricciardo himself spilled the beans and revealed that his attempt to secure the fastest lap was done in the service of Max Verstappen’s championship challenge. Therefore, the author will leave any idealistic notion of this being a farewell gift for Ricciardo to more philanthropic pundits. After the race, Zak Brown was sure to let people know that he would raise the issue of “B-teams” with Liberty Media and the FIA. The fact that Red Bull are functionally running four cars is so blatantly obvious that this Gravel Trap will not waste any time explaining it. The separate facilities of the former Minardi team in Faenza are mere window dressing and lip service to the current Formula 1 rules. While there were vocalisations about AlphaTauri becoming more of a “sister team”, yet that evidently did either not work out or was deemed undesirable by the Red Bull GmbH.
Now to the important question: is Red Bull’s unique situation a problem for the sport? On the one hand, one can point to the rarity in which VCARB actually provides assistance in championship fights. In the era of DRS, holding up leaders while getting lapped does not often provide an advantage and it is exceedingly rare for the junior team to do so anyway. Some would point towards the junior RBs being told to jump out of the way of the A team when fighting for position, but as previously addressed on the Gravel Trap, weaker teams in today’s era generally tend to not fight the big dogs in the sport anyway. However, we saw in Singapore that, in the right situation, Red Bull can make another team take a hit to hurt the others – the fundamental fairness of that is to be questioned.
Of course, this is not an original talking point: the relationship of Sauber-Petronas to Ferrari was getting questioned pretty much from the start. Martin Brundle in his paranoia always assumed the worst whenever a Sauber interacted with a front-running car, be it a Ferrari or another. When Norberto Fontana claimed in 2006 that he was ordered by Jean Todt to block Jacques Villeneuve at the 1997 European Grand Prix, this was quickly accepted as proof of collusion despite Sauber’s denials. There was also Super Aguri in 2006, famously established with the main goal of keeping Takuma Sato in Formula 1 while opening a seat for 1993 F1 Indoor Trophy World Champion Rubens Barrichello at the Honda works outfit.
There are other aspects that would be worth talking about, like why Formula 1 has not copied the sensible rule of Formula E that the point for the fastest lap is given to whomever has the fastest lap of all the drivers in the points-paying positions. However, the author considers those irrelevant to the point at hand: if Ricciardo had pitted from eighth and stayed there, he still would have taken the point away from McLaren-Mercedes.
In the end, the author is not fundamentally opposed to secondary teams. While they are able to be misused as tools to manipulate races and even championships, they also provide a unique chance for young talent that might not get a seat with more independent teams. Furthermore, as a passionate enjoyer of Schadenfreude, the author will always have a heart for situations where the B team outperforms the A team: 2007, where Honda were one masterful drive by Jenson Button away from being beaten by the aforementioned Super Aguri; 2008, where the Red Bull family got their first Formula 1 victory at the hands of Toro Rosso; or 2020, where the renamed AlphaTauri won almost as many races as the A team.
However, there is one factor in the current state of Formula 1 that has affected the opinion of the author on this subject: Franchise Value™. Before the current Concorde Agreement, teams that were unhappy with Red Bull’s advantage could have easily countered it. Ferrari partly did so by giving technical support to the Haas team, but failed to make the connection as fixed as Faenza’s is to Red Bull. Of course, thanks to Ferrari’s continued inability to be a serious championship challenger, we have not yet had the chance to see whether Haas would interfere on their behalf if ordered to by Ferrari, but that is neither here nor there. If McLaren or Mercedes had been displeased with Toro Rosso in the early 2010s, there were so many teams that could have been bought at a cheap price: HRT, Caterham, Marussia – even Sauber would have been purchasable at a reasonable price at some points, given their dire financial straits and the resulting miserable years.
However, the ability to counter the advantage VCARB gives is nowadays nonexistent for rival teams. The Red Bull GmbH purchased Minardi in late 2005 at the reported price of seventy million Euro. The current anti-dilution fee is 2.8 times that amount and if the teams had their way, it would soon rise to eight-and-a-half times that. That is before any operative costs of the team itself are covered, which are still immense despite the current budget cap. Alpine, who are presumed to be up for sale despite Flavio Briatore claiming otherwise, are currently estimated to be worth US$900 million. That sum is before noting that any sale would obviously only happen if Renault makes a profit, given as the budget cap would probably allow Renault to run the team at negligible cost (especially now as a customer team) as long as it remains respectable enough to attract sufficient sponsorship. Regardless of how one feels about junior teams, it is safe to say it is utterly unreasonable for any manufacturer to spend over a billion dollars just to acquire such a team.
Not operate. Acquire.
A strategy your opponents do not counter because they are unwilling or do not see the need to is a legitimate strategy, morally speaking. A strategy your opponent simply cannot feasibly counter is not one. This gives Red Bull a unique advantage that is quite unsporting, to say the very least.
While the author is in favour of Red Bull being encouraged (read: forced) to sell their B team from a sporting perspective, Liberty Media and to a lesser extent the FIA are in a troublesome situation with RB. Since the existence of those two teams gives Red Bull two voices whenever the teams are asked about regulation changes, any attempt by either of those two entities to cut down Red Bull’s power will be met with a swift response. Especially given Red Bull’s now almost 30-year long history of investing heavily into the sport, both as a sponsor and as a constructor, nobody will be particularly willing to step on their toes. However, the inability of the Red Bull junior team to justify itself in a franchised Formula 1 will create major issues for Liberty Media down the road. Rejecting Andretti on account of not bringing “sufficient value” to the sport has already been met with public mockery and an investigation by the United States Department of Justice. While the author does not hold its breath that this investigation will actually have any direct effect on Liberty Media, the Red Bull junior team (and to a lesser extent Haas) could become a serious anchor around its neck should the FIA try again to reassert power over the sport by permitting a European outfit to become the eleventh team in the future: European courts have in the past proven to not take a kind view of professional sports circumventing their laws in any way or form.
It stands to reason that if Liberty Media and Formula 1 would claim that the hypothetical European eleventh team does not possess commercial and sporting value, European courts would most likely ask that they prove said value to exist in the current teams. The author wishes them good luck in that regard, because at the current point proving the commercial and sportive value of the junior RB team and Haas is like proving a punch to the face is an appropriate response to being asked the time of day.
Sources: Autosport, BBC, f1i.com, Forbes, manager magazin, motorsport-total.com, racefans.net, racingnews365.com
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