Red Bull launch Ford Formula 1 engine partnership in Detroit

Red Bull Powertrains (RBPT) technical director Ben Hodgkinson, who worked for Mercedes’ F1 engine company for 20 years before switching, said that starting from scratch came with pros and cons.

“I’m confident that the team I’ve built is incredible,” he said. “I’m confident the facilities we put together are going to be benchmark. But we’re a newcomer.

“We had to build factories while people started developing engines. So I think we started behind. But I think the people and the facilities we’ve got are better than everybody else. Will I have overtaken them by race one? I don’t know.”

Ford came on board as a partner a year or so after RBPT was established but Hodgkinson said the relationship was “very much a partnership”.

He said Ford had managed to “patch a few holes” Red Bull had not been able to fill in terms of recruitment, that their “state-of-the-art manufacturing capability” had allowed Red Bull to “make very complex 3D parts, but parts that are so complicated you can’t machine them because of their geometry, and we’re able to do those really, really fast because Ford’s expertise in the area is really quite world-class”.

And he said Ford’s buying power in terms of supply for the electrical part of the engine had been “very, very useful indeed”.

He added: “As an F1 engine manufacturer, even though it’s massive business really, it’s tiny compared to some of the big OEMs (car manufacturers), and if you’re to try and get an electric vehicle component supply company to be interested in supplying your 50 bits, they’re just not interested, there’s not enough margin for them. But then if Ford go knocking on the door, people answer.”