Light Reading For The Evening -- March 1, 2024

Locator: 46640REDBULL. 

Link here. 

This explains so much. I've always wondered about the background to these two stories.

From the linked article:

Dietrich Mateschitz never intended to build a Formula One world champion. Then again, he never intended to build a global energy-drink empire either.

He pulled off both unlikely feats because of the same basic impulse: He was bored.

As a marketing executive in his native Austria, Mateschitz traveled the world in the early 1980s hawking toothpaste, detergent and women’s cosmetics for a German company. He was stuck in a rut, fast approaching 40 and tired of life on the corporate treadmill. “All I could see was the same gray airplanes, the same gray suits, the same gray faces,” Mateschitz said.

Mateschitz was desperate for a way out of his monochrome nightmare. His escape route would eventually lead him into the Technicolor fantasy land of the world’s most popular motor racing series. What began with Mateschitz popularizing an energy drink called Red Bull in the 1980s, turned into a marketing revolution in the 1990s, and finally a disruptive Formula One team in the 2000s that would make the Red Bull name synonymous with F1 greatness.

Since the 1950s, Formula One has stood as the pinnacle of motor sports, a global series in which 20 of the world’s most sophisticated race cars now go wheel-to-wheel along winding tracks in glamorous locales from Monaco to Singapore. Its history was written by the likes of Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren—companies that used the sport as a showcase for their engineering prowess.

But in barely two decades, a circuit dominated by those automotive giants and watched by more than 1.5 billion viewers per season was taken over by an outfit that had never before built a combustion engine.

ed Bull drivers have now won seven world championships, including the past three for Dutch wunderkind Max Verstappen. Their success has outlived Mateschitz, who died in 2022 at age 78. And as the 2024 season kicks off this weekend in Bahrain, the team shows no signs of slowing down. Amid an ongoing controversy, team principal Christian Horner was cleared on Wednesday by an internal investigation into inappropriate behavior toward a female employee.

Fresh off a steamrolling campaign last year, in which it won 21 of 22 races, Red Bull is now a prohibitive favorite to turn this season into another 200 mile-an-hour victory lap.

“How can a fizzy-drinks company take on the might of the constructors that existed in Formula One?” says Horner, who has overseen Red Bull’s F1 operations since the team’s first season in 2005. “It was about going in there and taking on the establishment, but doing it a different way.”

Much, much more at the link, but if you want to read the whole story, buy the book: 

Adapted from “The Formula: How Rogues, Geniuses, and Speed Freaks Reengineered F1 into the World’s Fastest-Growing Sport” by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg, to be published by Mariner Books, an imprint of Harper Collins on March 12, 2024. Copyright © 2024 by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg. Printed by arrangement with Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp).