Hear that? It’s the sound of silence being shattered as Red Bull Racing gets back to testing at the Barcelona circuit this week. The Red Bull colours are by now a familiar sight on the Spanish track and all the other circuits on the Formula 1 calendar and that’s is a very different situation to the one the team found itself in just over a year ago.

“It was a difficult period full of uncertainty,” recalls head of aerodynamics, Ben Agathangelou. “We didn’t know if we had jobs nor who was going to buy us. As a group in the aero department we felt we could either give up and go home, or we could play around with the car and see what we could learn, because if the team did get bought and we went racing, we would be pretty disappointed if the car was a turd.”

A year on and the picture is much rosier and that has a lot to do with staff loyalty, as only one member of Agathangelou’s fifty strong team chose to quit. Their reward is that they get a second wind-tunnel to play with, alongside the existing facility in Bicester.

“The new wind tunnel is commissioned but it is not ready for use yet,” warns Ben. “In fact, the most important thing for me is we are not using it! The answer is to use it when it’s ready and not before. We are taking our time to understand it and you also need to gear up the department to run a second wind tunnel, so we have expanded the department. The Bicester wind tunnel is still the focal point for designing the 2006 car, while the new one in Bedford will be used for RB2 development later in the year.”

The RB2 will be the first car to be built here under the leadership of Technical Director, Mark Smith.

“I arrived (after a very brief spell with Jordan) just after the first race so the RB1 existed and the first thing to do was to look at the basic car and areas where we could move it forward,” he explains. “Red Bull Racing started the season in a very strong fashion, but we were realistic enough to know that there were one or two teams that were not in their normal positions in terms of pecking order. Hats off to everyone here for being able to take advantage of that.  If you look at our pace compared to BAR at the last race we were quite strong. So we have developed, but more importantly we have developed a structure within the organisation that will allow us to go further next year and beyond.”

Mark is an experienced player on the F1 field, but just as it was for Ben, the Red Bull approach was something totally new.

“Red Bull’s approach doesn’t have an influence on my day to day job but it is nice to be part of the team that people focus on,” he says. “You always feel good if you are associated with a team that is the focus of a lot of people’s attention. I think it does rub off on people and we are proud to be part of it. It is a fresh approach that gets people thinking. Red Bull is an incredibly successful organisation with very clear objectives and we in the racing team should do the same.”

Red Bull