Racing Bulls - Debut of the Red Bull Racing Energy Station

Debut of the Red Bull Racing Energy Station

By Ian Lockwood
April 21 2005
With the first three flyaway races out of the way, the teams can stop living out of aircraft containers and unwrap their luxury motorhomes and hospitality units.

Jaguar Racing with its relatively meagre budget wasn't the flashest team in the padock when it came to motorhomes and hospitality units. In 2004 Richard Parry Jones said the team "wasn't interested in all that bullshit" and would rather spend their limited funds on the car. The result was a relatively plain hospitality unit.

This year however the new Red Bull Racing team clearly have a different view on things. Imola sees the debut of the "Red Bull Racing Energy Station". This will become home from home for the team, offering entertainment facilities, full catering, team offices and meeting rooms. Not a bad pad, I think you'll agree......

Walking through the gate at Imola, you are hit by a wall of brightly polished metalwork of all colours, gleaming in the Spring sunshine. First of all come the tyre company trucks, then the Ferrari motorhomes – old style but classy and a bit further on is the mighty McLaren glass palace. A couple more motorhomes and then……What the **** is that?

Amazing, unbelievable, original and pretty damn big! Words are not enough (so look at these photos) to describe the new Red Bull Racing motorhome, which like most of the facilities in the paddock is not a motorhome at all, but a fantastic glass and steel building.

In much the same way as the team’s performance on the track has taken everyone by surprise in this season’s opening three races, so too the team’s base for European races has had people bumping into one another as they walk along the paddock, staring in awe at the newest kid on the block, “The Red Bull Energy Station.”

It is truly unique and takes a completely different “open house” approach, both in terms of its architecture and the welcome it provides to guests, media and anyone else who cares to stroll in.

“We have adopted a different philosophy with this unit, which takes some of its inspiration from the unit we used in MotoGP,” explained Claudio Hatz, the interior designer on the project. Working alongside Hatz was the Austrian design company, Kitz Exclusive. “The fact that the structure has to be assembled and dismantled before and after every European race and in some cases, repeated in time for the following weekend, was the biggest challenge. In terms of the concept, it meant we put functionality as the top priority, rather than design. For example, the glass floors are made with a special silicate to ensure the panels don’t break in transit.”

For its debut race here in Imola, 40 people spent 3 days erecting the facility, although these numbers should come down to 25 people and 2 days after this first outing. Transport is taken care of by 9 trucks and when it is up and running 2 electricians and 2 technicians are on duty, while catering involves 5 chefs and 5 people “front of house.” On Saturdays, a guest chef will be on hand and this week, it’s Roland Trettl, who can usually be found in the kitchens at Red Bull’s Hangar-7 in Salzburg.

“The main difficulty with this project is that we had no experience to base it on,” continued Hatz. “What was difficult? It’s easier to tell you what wasn’t difficult! Actually the hardest thing was perfecting the hydraulically operated roof, which shuts down the upper terrace in the event of rain.”

Source: www.redbullracing.com

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