Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner has hailed his company’s new RB17 hypercar as an embodiment of “all the good stuff they got rid of from Formula 1”, and says it would not be difficult to adapt for road use.
Horner says lead engineer Adrian Newey – who leaves Red Bull at the end of this F1 season – was “unleashed” in creating the RB17 as he did not need to adhere to the usual Formula 1 restrictions.
“There’s no FIA constraints and no cost cap, so you can see influences from all these cars over the years. It has an insane amount of performance that even Max Verstappen would struggle to extract,” he said.
But while similarly conceived hypercar projects from rival teams, including the AMG One and Aston Martin Valkyrie, are road-legal, the RB17 has been engineered for track use exclusively from the factory.
When asked if that was representative of those company’s larger budgets for non-F1 projects, Horner told Autocar: “that was purposefully done” and that “Red Bull isn’t an automotive manufacturer”, which limits its production abilities and resources for projects outside of motorsport.
“But should somebody wish to do a road conversion on this car,” he added, “I’m sure there are several conversion houses that are capable of doing that.”
On the prospect of boosting RB17 production beyond the 50 confirmed units, or building further hypercars afterwards, Horner said: “This is very much a halo car for us. We don’t want to distract from our core competence which is building Grand Prix cars.
“With Red Bull Powertrains now building our own engines on site, we felt that building 50 cars over a two-to-three-year period, it is quite easy for us to slot in the manufacturing capability we have on site without distracting the business.
“That was one thing I was quite keen on: this needs to complement F1, rather than distract in any way.”
Interestingly, Horner revealed to Autocar that Red Bull did approach new Formula 1 partner Ford about collaborating on the RB17, but the 5.4-litre V10-engined hypercar was deemed not to “fit with their EV criteria”.
“Jim [Farley] would love to drive one”, Horner laughed, acknowledging the motorsport leanings of Ford’s CEO, but “it didn’t really fit with their current lineage”.
Nonetheless, Horner is open to the prospect of taking the RB17 racing. Though Horner is not “sure which category” the car would contend in at Le Mans, the possibility hasn’t been taken off the table.
“The Valkyrie is going to run at Le Mans next year. If that can happen, it would be amazing to see the RB17 run.”
He stopped short, though, of confirming plans for an entry at La Sarthe – which would see the RB17 heavily reworked to meet the WEC’s balance of performance regulations.
