© Getty ImagesBulls’ Guide To: Live DemosThe RB16B isn’t the only F1 car Red Bull Racing Honda will have in Texas this weekend. We’re heading to Dallas with the RB7 for a Live Demo, but what exactly is that?
Therearen’tmanyweeksintheyearwhereaRedBullRacingHondacarisn’tfiringupsomewhereintheworld.Ourcalendarofracingandtestingisprettyhefty,butevenwhenwedon’thavetoturnawheelinanger,there’sagoodchanceoneofourshowcarswillbeoutandaboutsomewhere.
In MK-7 we have impeccable static models, but the pride and joy of the fleet are the live demo cars, kept in tip-top shape to fly the flag anywhere and everywhere in the world – often reaching the parts other Formula One teams cannot reach.
Our Car Collection At MK-7© Red Bull Racing
And this is important. F1 is a global sport with a global calendar, but it only visits 20 or so countries every year. There’s a world of people with little hope of ever seeing an F1 car live and however good watching on the TV can be, a live F1 car is something else altogether. And our live demos aim to plug that gap. We take the cars onto the streets everywhere from Cape Town to La Paz, and invite everybody in the vicinity to come witness the magic for free.
Now it’s not a coincidence that our showcars often pop-up in a location that is shortly to host a new (or as good as new) grand prix. These events in places like Zandvoort, Mexico City, New Jersey and Vietnam are partly to bang the drum for F1, and partly to recce the locale.
Not so much the track but the logistics of going racing somewhere new. Is it straightforward to get a car into the country? What paperwork is required for the crew? Is the media made welcome? We’re by no means the only team that does this stuff, but we perhaps do it more than most.
On top of that, our live demo team does some simply amazing things. Ostensibly because it makes for great promotion, but also, one suspects, just to find out if we can. Can we do a pit stop in zero gravity (tick), can an F1 car run on the world’s highest and lowest roads (tick), can you drive an F1 car down a ski run in Kitzbühel? (tick – surprisingly well, it turns out).
The live demo team are usually tight-lipped about where they’re going next, but they’re often seen preparing a car in the race bays with an exotic array of parts guaranteed to cause speculation. Why would you need that much extra cooling? Why is the ride-height being cranked up that high? What’s with all the filters, are you planning on driving it through a sandstorm? Etc.,
Charing Down A Ski Run In Kitzbühel© Getty Images
The showcar isn’t a car, but more of a fleet of cars. We have 17 years’ worth of stock stored on racks in plastic bags (if they’re not on display in MK-7), and under the right circumstances, any of them might appear as a showcar – but for the practical day-to-day stuff we use a fleet of RB7s and RB8s as our live demo cars.
Why those particular cars? They’re both double-championship winning models which definitely adds some prestige to their appearances, but also, they hit the intersection of being modern enough to be painted-up like the current cars without looking odd, married to the simplicity of having the old-school V8 engines that have considerably fewer complications than the hybrids that followed.
They’re also really loud, which tends to impress. There’s also a degree of convenience in that many of the live demo crew worked on these cars when they were racing, but more on that below. As a general – but by no means absolute – rule the RB7s are used for the full-blooded runs on race tracks and the RB8s get to do the more gentle exhibitions on city streets.
Max And Alex Drive Along The Canal And Windmills© Rutger Pauw/Red Bull Content Pool
Yes. Ish. Quite. But not entirely. These are the real cars that raced and most of them have grand prix-winning pedigree, and if you’re at an event, get one of our guys to explain the provenance of the particular chassis that’s being used, it’ll have a story.
The cars are prepped in the factory to the same standard as they were when being raced, with our composites department, test & inspection department, gearbox department etc., doing all of their bit, because the safety requirements don’t change whether it’s a grand prix or a demo lap.
Where they’re different is in issues of practicality. Here it’s worth noting that these cars aren’t straining for the last tenth of performance, and nor are they historic cars where authenticity is paramount. They are demonstrators designed to run reliably, put on a good show for tens – perhaps hundreds – of thousands of people, and not make children cry by breaking down before they leave the truck.
Thus, something like a KERS isn’t really relevant to the live demo experience, and but some extra cooling might be, and so the cars might carry extra weight in the form of electric fans in the front of the radiators that allow them to operate without the airflow they’d get travelling at 340km/h down a straight. Instead, they’re doing donuts, burn-outs and other fan-friendly demonstrations that would have a genuine race-spec car cheerfully melting its own con-rods within five minutes.
Taking Pit Stops To A Whole New Level© Getty Images
For the RB1, which we used as our zero-gravity pit-stop car, the challenge called for the car to be rotated in mid-air during the wheel change. Given no-one had ever done that before and we fully expected it to be clattering off the fuselage of the Ilyushin II-79MDK cosmonaut trainer, we thought it best to take a hardened car that didn’t mind a few bumps and scrapes (it’s also a bit narrower than our other cars, which helps when you’re falling out of the sky in a rattling tin can).
There’s often an assumption that Red Bull have an ulterior motive beyond marketing for having such a big, impressive showcar programme. There are some racing benefits of having a showcar programme – but they’re not what everyone thinks.
This isn’t a development tool. We can’t run modern tyres on these cars, there aren’t suspiciously modern development parts fitted to the cars. F1 has a lot of rules to prevent that sort of thing, but this doesn’t mean the showcars have no value to the race team.
While it isn’t their primary purpose, the programme allows the team to retain a reserve pool of talented mechanics to draw upon, should the need arise. In the distant past, a test team would have fulfilled this function, training junior mechanics, giving more responsibility to mechanics moving up through the ranks and generally forming a fallback group to cope with illness, injury and the general ebb and flow of garage personnel.
When testing was virtually eliminated, a little over a decade ago, the need to employ a test team went with it. Today, the race team could – and does – call on the car build team from the factory to plug gaps, but the live demo team are another string to the bow.
COTA is also a useful example of how the experience on the live demo team can allow the race team to catch their breath. In 2019, the US Grand Prix followed, rather than preceded the Mexican Grand Prix. The second leg of a flyway back-to-back is always tough, but 2019 was tougher than usual as the pit lane in Mexico was badly affected by a vomiting (and worse) bug, with every team running on a skeleton crew.
Max Enters The Foro Sol© Vladimir Rys
Things were pretty stretched, with pack down going on until Sunday midnight, the teams taking a dawn flight to Austin, and then receiving their cars at COTA to begin the process of a full strip-down and inspection. It takes the full week to prep the car for its next race when you’re on the road, and coming to the end of a long season, with many people in the paddock unwell, things were a little grim.
Our live demo team, many of whom are seasoned veterans with championship-winning experience, had been doing a promotional event in LA, which they followed by coming to COTA and taking over the night shift in the garage, preparing the cars for their second race of the back-to-back.
There’s no curfew Monday to Wednesday at a track, and while other teams had their already tired crews working 18-hour days, our race team were at least able to get three nights of decent sleep. We got both cars home on Sunday without incident and did the first and second quickest pit stops of the weekend. Many factors contribute to that, but the ability to ensure the garage crew have a reasonable amount of rest should not be overlooked.
Things like this, however, are a bonus. First and foremost, the showcar is all about allowing the maximum number of people to see a genuine F1 car up close and personal. It’s an experience you never forget.