“Mercedes was a very short conversation” – Red Bull team principal Christian Horner reveals they had approached Renault, Mercedes, and Ferrari before the creation of Red Bull Powertrains.
After Honda announced they would leave the sport at the end of this season, it left Red Bull and AlphaTauri without an engine supplier from next season onwards. Red Bull then went on to do the most natural thing – approach the existing options.
Team principal Christian Horner has now revealed on the Beyond The Grid podcast that Mercedes were not keen at all to help out their arch-rivals. Interestingly, Ferrari seemed keen but Red Bull did not go ahead with the deal, leading to the creation of what we now know as the Red Bull Powertrains.
“The most natural thing was to have a discussion with the existing suppliers. Mercedes was a very short conversation and Toto [Wolff] obviously wasn’t particularly keen on that one.
“Renault, their aspirations as a team didn’t include supplying a team like Red Bull, and probably the most willing was Ferrari. And we had some exploratory discussions.
“But to be a customer, so to have to accept all the integration, particularly with the new regulations coming, would be a massively hard pill to swallow, so that’s when we started to explore the possibility of ‘okay, how do we take on this challenge in a Red Bull manner and see if we can put a deal together with Honda in the foreseeable future?’
“It’s a big step, it’s a bold step, to take control of our own destiny as an engine supplier and bring the whole lot under one roof in Milton Keynes. It would make us the only team other than Ferrari to have the whole lot within one facility.”
