Growing Wings: The Inside Story of Red Bull Racing
by Ben Hunt
“There were more ups and downs over the course of the season. Ricciardo won the Azerbaijan GP, while Verstappen retired after losing oil pressure. In Austria, Ricciardo was third again, while Verstappen crashed out, and the two would suffer their first coming together in the Hungarian Grand Prix. Tempers boiled over as they made contact on the opening lap. Verstappen had gone wide at turn one and, as he attempted to stay ahead of Ricciardo at the next corner, he locked his brakes and crashed into his colleague, ripping open the bodywork of his Red Bull.”
Do you know what season we’re reading about here?
That’s the thing—the more you keep current with the myriad of happenings in a racing season/decade/era, the more everything becomes a blur over the years because there is just so much happening all the time. A well-written, context-rich book like this is a welcome aid in realigning the ole memory box.
If you’re only a casual follower, it does all the heavy lifting in sorting out what happened when and how we got to where we are, not just Red Bull Racing but the sport as a whole. Competitive sports is a partisan affair so if Red Bull Racing is a thorn in your flesh and the last thing you desire is a book about it, read it anyway (Hunt’s next one will be about McLaren; his previous one was a Lando Norris bio) because it is very well engineered in regard to both wordsmithing craft and journalistic integrity. The latter is particularly noteworthy because as a professional reporter (lead F1 correspondent for the Sun newspaper, cohost of the F1 podcast “Inside the Piranha Club”) author Ben Hunt is used to holding people’s feet to the fire which is an entirely different dynamic from writing a feature book that requires walking a mile in their shoes and letting them speak in their own voice. That this juggling act was successful is evident in the fact that Christian Horner, team principal and CEO of Red Bull Racing, supplied the fine Foreword.
Behind each of the photos on these two spreads is a story big enough to warrant its own book. It doesn’t matter how much or how little you know about F1, this book has things to say—not least that the sport is about way more than the manufactured bombast of the “Drive to Survive” TV show in which Red Bull Racing featured so prominently.
That the book came out when it did is no coincidence: 2023 was the team’s 20th anniversary year which just so happened to see them pocket their 100th win, and in a manner that left no room to argue—21 wins in 22 starts, 19 of which for Max Verstappen who would take the record for most World Championship points in a season, and teammate Perez coming second in the driver’s championship. The same Perez whose consistently poor performance in the 2024 season lost him his Red Bull seat for 2025, proving the point that whether it’s people, money, regulations, politics, weather or the phases of the moon, there is never dull a moment in F1. If Hunt had been taking his book beyond the end of the 2023 season it would have shown the pendulum swing wildly. Nothing that looked foreordained came to pass—although Verstappen did claim another World Championship.
Notwithstanding the glass-half-empty crowd that holds everything was all “better” in days gone by, the genesis of Red Bull Racing stands quite by itself in the history of motorsports, and, really, sports overall because what was once an upstart fizzy drinks company that only got into racing as a sponsor for the PR value and then gained a reputatation as the party team nowadays has some 850 competitors in multiple sports in their portfolio, and when founder Dietrich Mateschitz died in 2022 he was worth an estimated at $27.4 billion! To properly appreciate this ascendancy recall that RB rose from the ashes of what was Jaguar Racing whose deep-pocketed owner Ford couldn’t make it work (they also owned Cosworth and let it go at the same time) any better than the folks that preceded them, Stewart Grand Prix. Hunt starts the book there so you can gauge how wide a net he casts. Thankfully the book has a good Index.
Motorsports revolves around a vast multitude of unknowables, making the hand of fate a fickle one. Money buys many things but not guaranteed success, but without money, nothing is easy. From Horner’s Foreword all through the book the common theme is overcoming self-doubt and committing to the mission.
Copyright 2025, Sabu Advani (Speedreaders.info
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