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Red Bull will reveal the first Formula 1 car of its new era with Ford later - but it's far from its first manufacturer tie-up.
The fact Ford will be badging an engine that might once have been either a Honda or a Porsche, and which has been created by the F1 team it once owned, is actually very much in keeping with Red Bull’s history of unconventional manufacturer tie-ups.
In a piece that first ran in 2023 when the Red Bull-Ford deal was announced, Edd Straw looks back at Red Bull's history of strange manufacturer tie-ups.
Red Bull continued to have a big stake in Sauber until selling it back to founder Peter Sauber at the end of 2001 after a disagreement about whether to run Kimi Raikkonen or the driver Red Bull favoured, Enrique Bernoldi.
During that time, the Red Bull-liveried Saubers ran Ferrari customer engines badged by Malaysian petrochemical giant Petronas. There was a plan for Petronas to build its own F1 engines during this period, although it was dropped for financial reasons.
Despite having Ford Cosworth engines in 2005, Red Bull started looking for a new engine partner almost as soon as it had taken over the team. A deal was struck to run Ferrari engines for the first year of the 2.4-litre V8 engine formula in 2006.
However, the transition didn’t go smoothly as Red Bull got its cooling specifications wrong and had to compromise the car to adapt at the start of what was a difficult campaign.
Things got so bad that Renault was only willing to supply Red Bull if it badged the engines under a different name and agreed to a deal that prevented criticism of the engine under the terms of what was called a “mutual and amicable agreement”.
That led to Red Bull agreeing an engine badging deal with watchmaker Tag Heuer for 2016-2018, meaning at that time it and the works Renault team ran the same engines – but Red Bull’s were named after a watch.
Red Bull started working with Aston Martin in 2016 thanks to the formation of what was called an “innovation partnership”. That led to Aston Martin branding appearing on the F1 car and Red Bull (and Newey) collaborating with it on a road car project.
This deal was expanded to be a title sponsorship from 2018-2020, with the team entered as Aston Martin Red Bull Racing. This spanned the switch from the Tag Heuer-branded Renault engines to Honda power. As with Infiniti, the Aston Martin name was never used for engine badging.
Red Bull effectively became its own engine partner following Honda’s ‘withdrawal’. The 2022-25 RBPT engines were very much Hondas, after a deal was struck for it to supply Red Bull with engines. To all intents and purposes, it was a continuation of the Honda works deal, only with Red Bull paying the bills.
Honda produced a new-spec power unit package for 2022 and continued to work on it as before. Initially, the Red Bull carried only HRC logos, but late in the 2022 season full-blown Honda branding reappeared.
They've fully split for 2026 with Honda instead teaming up with Aston Martin, while Red Bull is building its own engine for the first time, having invested heavily in a brand-new engine division at its Milton Keynes campus.
For the third time in its period in F1, Red Bull is linking up with Ford in 2026.
Before Ford came along, Honda had been in contention for a renewed fully-fledged official Red Bull relationship to coincide with the new engine rules, and before that, Porsche had been in talks after a partnership – though these collapsed when Red Bull refused to hand over the degree of control Porsche would have wanted.