The story behind Red Bull’s 2016 engine

 

Grand Prix editor Mark Hughes explains how Red Bull and Mario Illien will work together Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Dear Moli, So if, as seems to be the case, Red Bull will be building its own engines in 2016 – with a Mario Illien-developed version of the Renault, probably using Red Bull’s own energy recovery systems – it re-unites the Adrian Newey/Mario Illien partnership of McLaren-Mercedes of the late ‘90s/early 2000s. In many ways, they are two of a kind. Extreme and uncompromising in their technical vision, their designs are invariably on the edge, occasionally over it. Once, they even compounded each other’s aggressive striving when Newey asked Illien if it was possible to lower the Merc’s crank height by a significant margin. Mario felt that it was – but that engine consistently blew itself to pieces and lost the team its chance of the 2003 world title. That was also the season in which Newey’s MP4-18 never raced, such was its complexity and frailty. But when they got it right it was spectacular. Their high-point has to be the 1998 McLaren MP4-13 that dominated the season to give Mika Häkkinen his first world title... Click here to read the full feature >

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