Sunday 21st November 2004

Red Bull F1

First pic of the new car

---

Courtesy of a friendly PHer...

[JulianHJ]

One thing puzzling me. Red Bull is obviously very popular soft drink that sells in large quanities - but it's not on the scale of say, Coca-Cola, is it? How do they afford to buy an F1 team? I thought it cost tens, maybe hundreds of millions of pounds to run.

I'm certainly missing an angle here, what is it?

[PetrolTed]

The price of a can?

They also run a jet used in air displays.

[Hughesie2]

They are the sort of company that has money to burn, Think Brewsters millions

Gives you wings, Bollox, makes you fart

[JulianHJ]

Granted, it's not cheap stuff. Certainly judging by the £20 round for three drinks I paid last night in London

I understand they are doing well in the US, but they're not exactly ubiquitous, are they? If one of the world's largest car manufacturers has bowed out, is a soft drinks firm really drowning in enough cash to step in?

What sort of cash does an F1 season set the smaller teams back?

[telecat]

Its a private company and based in Switzerland I imagine they are quite protected from larger predators. Coca-Cola ,Pepsi etc have shareholders whereas The guy who runs Red Bull doesn't.

[mutt k]

Interesting to see what other sponsorship gets added to pay the bills!

[mattmurdock]

The bloke who runs Red Bull is a billionaire who used to have a stake in Sauber. He has a net worth of $1.4 billion and owns a Fijian island, so he could probably afford to run the F1 team personally, let alone through his company.

[seamus]

Dietrich Mateschitz allegedly got it from Ford for only $1 - now the stinger - provided there was an investment of a reported $400 million over the next 3 years races..

[Andrew Noakes]

JulianHJ said:

What sort of cash does an F1 season set the smaller teams back?

About £25million. The top teams spend ten times that, but Jaguar reportedly had a budget of around £100-150million.

Red Bull apparently sells 1.6 billion cans a year, so Mateschitz only has to put the price up by 0.09p to cover costs!

[julianhj]

Cheers for the answers!

[5150]

Even better news......

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/4034663.stm

[hornet]

mutt k said:

Interesting to see what other sponsorship gets added to pay the bills!

A vodka brand maybe?

[Mr_Thyroid]

You know how rich oil companies are.......?

Now imagine you could get rid of the mining costs AND sell your product for four times the amount of petrol.....imagine how rich you'd be.

(you know it's just sugar and water, right?)

[eastlmark]

this has to be a record of thread revival.

[Mr_Thyroid]

Revived by a spam post, which was subsequently deleted - making me look a little late to the party.