F1
RESET, REBUILD, RACE: Visa Cash App RB
In a sport dominated by a few teams, how do you take a bottom-of-the grid operation and put it on the path to podium? For the Visa Cash App RB F1 Team, it’s all about reimagining what’s possible.
It’s nearly impossible to cut through the noise during Super Bowl Week. Especially in Las Vegas. But there, the undeniable cachet of modern Formula 1 was on display on Thursday night, as a 2024 F1 car launch briefly nudged aside all the NFL and Taylor Swift hype. For a hot second, the Visa Cash App RB Formula One Team grabbed the limelight.
On an evening in which Kendrick Lamar banged out a set for a crowd fronted by Marvel star Simu Liu, soul singer Janelle Monáe and Baltimore Ravens wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr., the team formerly known as AlphaTauri shed its old skin to emerge as a glossy, heavily backed new player on the grid. It’s a big- budget metamorphosis, replete with new faces, new sponsors—and a bold mission to elevate the team from junior-driver finishing school to a genuine contender, one capable of battling for podiums.
That would be no small leap. In 2022, the AlphaTauri squad finished the season ninth out of 10 teams in the Constructor standings, with just 35 points. And last year wasn’t much better. In 2023, only 19 of 66 available podium places went to drivers from teams other than Red Bull Racing, Ferrari or Mercedes. And nearly all of those were taken by perennial upper-midfield contender McLaren and surprise standout Aston Martin. Thanks to a moderate late-season revival, AlphaTauri rose to eighth at the end of last year, but the team had languished dead last for most of the season as it struggled to be competitive—and also, it seemed, to find its identity and motivation.
This year, the team has reasons to believe that the identity crisis has been solved, thanks to the massive input of Visa, embarking on its first global sports sponsorship in 15 years. But it will take more than a ritzy new identity, top-shelf sponsors and a glitzy Las Vegas launch to propel the team up the grid. The big question for 2024 is whether Red Bull’s junior team is ready to grow up.
The man newly employed to answer that question is team principal Laurent Mekies. Charged with reinventing the racing side of the business, Mekies joins the program from Ferrari, where until last year he held the role of racing director (one step below the team principal position). But long before that, Mekies cut his F1 teeth with his new team in its earliest Red Bull–owned incarnation, as Scuderia Toro Rosso.
Not surprisingly, Mekies says the bones of the team are strong. “It’s more than 10 years since I left Toro Rosso, and in that time everything has massively moved on in Faenza,” he says, referring to the Italian city where the team is headquartered. “I think it has pretty much doubled in size. But it goes deeper than that. When I looked through the list of people, the various departments, I just thought, what an incredible number of talents. It’s not a top team, but the bases are there to build what we want, to take it to the next step.”
The team formerly known as AlphaTauri has re-emerged.
© Digital Lighthouse/Red Bull Content Pool,
For Mekies, who helped engineer seven race wins and consistent high performance at Ferrari, the first step on that road is to bring about a culture shift. “What I’ll try to bring [from Ferrari] is the spirit to fight for wins,” he says. “We all know how tough the battle is at the front of the grid, the kind of mindset it takes to structure a company to get into that fight, but we want to bring that winning spirit to the team in order to do a step change.”
It’s a big ask. That winning spirit has flowed just twice in the team’s history, both times at its home race, the Italian Grand Prix. The first triumph came when future legend Sebastian Vettel scored his first career win with Toro Rosso in 2008 and the second more recently, when Frenchman Pierre Gasly triumphed at Monza in 2020 for AlphaTauri.
In subsequent years, the team’s trajectory could charitably be characterized as flat. Early in the 2023 season, longtime team boss Franz Tost proclaimed at an official F1 press conference that he no longer trusted his technical staff. “The engineers tell me we make some good progress, but I don’t trust them anymore. I just want to see the lap time, because this is the only thing that counts,” said Tost, who until recently had held the helm since 2005. The deepening slump didn’t go unnoticed in Red Bull’s corridors of power either, and with the team visibly struggling, Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko said that the team’s performance was “not what we expect.”
“There has to be an improvement,” he told German media. “It is also true that the financial commitment at AlphaTauri is too high. This means that we also have to do something on the sponsor side, on the revenue side.”
Those concerns have been addressed. While Mekies has replaced the retiring Tost on the racing side, new CEO Peter Bayer has been hired to lead the business side of the team. And just a few days before the Vegas launch, the team announced a rearrangement of its technical team, with former FIA technical director Tim Goss joining as chief technical officer, and highly respected former Alpine team manager Alan Permane taking on the role of sporting director. Lastly, aerodynamics specialist Guillaume Catellani bolsters the design team as deputy technical director.
Mekies contends that the new signings are only the beginning. “We want to reinforce in all areas,” he says. “We are doing a 360-degree review of where the team is, and [determining] what fundamentals need to be put in place to go to the next step. And that means improving in every single area.”
Basking in optimism at the Visa Cash App RB livery launch in Las Vegas.
© Getty Images/Red Bull Content Pool
For a team whose drain on Red Bull resources was judged too high, an expensive influx of new talent would seem to be an unaffordable luxury. But as Marko hinted, the revenue side of the team has been addressed with the arrival of a slew of high-profile sponsorships, including Hugo Boss, Tudor watches, Cash App and biggest of all, Visa.
For Bayer, bringing Visa on board lifts the team to a different level. “It’s massive news for the sport and for us,” says Bayer, who has held senior roles at the FIA and the IOC in the past. “When I was working for the Olympics, I saw how Visa can activate on a global level, and that’s going to spread the message of everything that we do within the team and what Formula 1 does in a great way.”
With a new identity, extra resources and a refreshed talent pool, the building blocks of the team’s rebirth seem to be slotting into place. The final pillar is of course the talent at the wheel. And in that area, Mekies says, Visa Cash App RB has “one of the most exciting lineups in the pit lane.” He’s talking about eight-time grand prix winner Daniel Ricciardo and highly rated 23-year-old Yuki Tsunoda.
“A few years back, Daniel was on the wish list of every top team, and we have the opportunity to build his way back to that,” Mekies says of the Australian, who is in the midst of a promising resurgence, first from a slump in 2022 that cost him a seat with McLaren and then from an injury that paused a comeback with AlphaTauri in the middle of last season. “He’s incredibly focused and motivated. What he brings to the team in terms of energy, technical sensitivity and speed represents a huge opportunity for us.”
Mekies also sees a bright future for Tsunoda, now in his fourth season with the team. “Yuki has surprised us every year,” he says. “With Daniel as his teammate, he has an incredible opportunity to go to the next step. Putting them together is going to push the team very hard to give them the car they need to be more competitive. As a combination, it’s as good as it gets.”
For Bayer, it all adds up to a heady brew he believes is potent enough to allow the team to dream big in 2024. “On the sporting side, top of the midfield for this year—that’s what we are targeting,” he says. “And I really do believe this team has everything we need to go even further in the future.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by the team’s veteran driver, a guy who knows just what it takes to win in F1. “There are a lot of new personnel, some big partners coming on board,” says Ricciardo. “The team has always taken itself seriously, but I feel like this is another step up. It’s no longer just a platform for Red Bull Racing. It’s a time for us to fight at the front of the midfield.”
That’s the big bet that was on full display in Las Vegas. Now it’s time for fans to sit back and see how it pays off.
“It definitely feels like a fresh start,” says Ricciardo of the '24 season.
© Will Cornelius/Red Bull Content Pool
01
DANIEL RICCIARDO
EVERYTHING IS JUST WHERE IT BELONGS
Daniel Ricciardo has been through a saga of reboots and rehabilitation, but as he kicks off his first full F1 season since 2022 with a new- look team and restored self-belief, he’s sure that the Honey Badger is back.
Even in a sport with a flair for the dramatic like Formula 1, Daniel Ricciardo’s recent story arc reads like a plot device spun by the love child of Drive to Survive and a daytime telenovela. A likable fan favorite has a crisis of confidence on an inflexible team that ultimately casts him into the wilderness. Rescued by his first love, he returns to the fray, only to suffer a debilitating injury that sidelines him until a glorious late-season charge once again proves to the world what they were missing.
That basically summarizes where Ricciardo, 34, sits at the start of his first full season back in Formula 1. He’s moved on from the crumbling form he showed at McLaren in 2022—results that led to the mutual termination of his contract—and he’s also moved on from the badly broken hand that complicated and delayed his prodigal return to the Red Bull fold with AlphaTauri last year. He was able to rediscover some of his trademark competitive bravado after his comeback at the 2023 U.S. Grand Prix in Austin, punctuated the following week when he dragged his underperforming team to fourth on the grid and seventh in the race in Mexico City. But the racer known as the Honey Badger and his team sputtered at the end of the season, and it wasn’t clear where Ricciardo’s head was at. Until now.
On a video call from London, Ricciardo beams a smile as pristine as his ice-white, Visa-emblazoned race suit as he ponders the 2024 season. “It definitely feels like a fresh start,” he says. “For me, with the benefit of a full preseason with the team, I feel like it’s the real start of chapter two in my career. There is also a sense that everyone’s coming into this season with a point to prove, and I feel like the people here feel it’s time to step up and take it to that next level.”
And while it’s easy to be distracted by the luster of a rebrand and the bling of the team’s Vegas launch, Ricciardo insists the ascent to that next level is possible, pointing to last fall as evidence of the team’s higher midfield credentials.
“Mexico was a strong weekend and I draw a lot of encouragement from that,” he says. “Now we’ve certainly got more power behind us, and it’s like, ‘OK, what can we actually achieve here?’ Can we aim for consistent top fives, can we put ourselves in a position that maybe leads to a podium? These things now feel like real targets.”
But while he’s happy to bask in the warm glow of revitalization, Ricciardo, entering his 14th F1 campaign, knows that the kind of debilitating scrutiny he suffered in his final months with McLaren is always lurking. He knows that, like his teammate, Yuki Tsunoda, he has something to prove this year and that failing to do so could quickly complicate phase two.
“There’s always a bit of pressure, but I like that,” he says. “It drives me to work harder. I’ll always hold on to a bit of that pressure, but the important thing is that I no longer put the weight of the world on my shoulders. The simplest way I can describe it is that I have belief again. I don’t fear any kind of failure.”
In the cutthroat world of F1, the quickest route to proving your worth is to trounce your teammate, since his performance in identical machinery is the purest metric by which a driver can be judged. Ricciardo, though, has a more collegial goal in mind. “Of course we’re competitive, and it’s good, because that’s going to drive us to get that extra 10th of a second,” he says, referencing Tsunoda. “But we need to have collaboration. We need to work together to try to fast-track everything.”
And Ricciardo is certain that will happen.
“Can I locate the Honey Badger? Sitting here today, 100 percent, I feel it,” he says. “The final part is proving it on track, but all those intrinsic emotions are where I remember them being from the days of me performing at my best. It’s like when you have a gut feeling about something, you just know it’s right. The feeling inside is telling me that everything’s back where it belongs.”
Tsunoda says he can learn a lot from his more experienced teammate.
© Will Cornelius/Red Bull Content Pool
02
YUKI TSUNODA
Fast, fiery and frequently foul-mouthed, Yuki Tsunoda has been a force of nature in F1. But now, for his new-look team and new bosses, the Japanese driver says he’s determined to present a calmer, more consistent side.
There are more than a few Yuki Tsunoda highlight reels that have more f-bombs than Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Off the track he might be unfailingly funny, charming and polite, but once the racing begins, it’s different. There, the phenomenally quick Japanese driver has blown his stack many times, with slights real and imagined setting off a fusillade of expletives.
Mention his colorful radio traffic and Tsunoda’s face crinkles into a brief smile before more careful reflections emerge. “I don’t know why, but this stupid right thumb is just always pressing the radio button,” he laughs. “You know, in the second half of the season I tried to be calmer, because I understand better how important it is to be calm and how unnecessary it is for the engineers if I shout on the radio. They just want to hear feedback about the car or the tires. Obviously, when I have frustrating moments I still shout but I’m trying to reduce it.”
In that same vein of blunt honesty and self- improvement, Tsunoda says he’s working hard to deliver more consistently during races. “It’s not easy to put 100 percent into every lap, and if I look back to 2022, some of the races, especially when the car wasn’t performing well and I started like in P16, it put my mindset back slightly,” he admits. “I didn’t like that feeling. So last year I tried to give 100 percent effort every time. It wasn’t easy because it is mentally tough, and at the end of the season I felt mentally and physically exhausted. But I felt much happier because I’d given it all. It was more consistent. And that’s the target for this year—more consistency.”
Many observers would say that Tsunoda is under pressure to deliver in 2024. This season will be his fourth on the squad now rebranded as Visa Cash App RB F1 Team, and though often hamstrung by uncompetitive machinery, he has yet to fully deliver on what legendarily hard-to- please Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko once called “unbelievable basic speed.” In his 63 races with the team to the end of 2023, the 23-year-old driver has a highest finish of fourth—at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix— and has scored just 61 points.
The pressure is heightened by the presence in the wings of Red Bull Racing reserve driver Liam Lawson. The 21-year-old New Zealander put in an impressive point- scoring five-race stint with AlphaTauri, filling in for an injured Daniel Ricciardo last fall. But despite the polemics about competition between the three drivers in the paddock, Tsunoda quickly dismisses the notion that suddenly it’s crunch time.
“For me every year is crucial,” he says. “Everyone knows that my contract is year to year, so I’ve gotten used to it being crucial. Yes, this season will be important, but I’m more focused on what I want to improve and how I can enjoy this more.”
Tsunoda also is insistent that there’s no cage match brewing with Ricciardo. In fact, the young racer believes he has a lot to learn from his more experienced teammate. “He’s fast and it’s not easy [to beat him],” Tsunoda says. “His approach to race weeks is different, but there are lots of things I can learn from him. For example, a thing I learned from Daniel when he joined our team last year is that he’s really, really relaxed. He’s always calm and always gives the engineers really accurate, consistent feedback. He’s a good reference.”
Tsunoda is being authentically modest. So he does not mention that his “unbelievable speed” saw him outqualify Ricciardo—notoriously good over a single lap himself—in four of their seven races together last season. “That’s just what I have to do all the time,” he laughs. “I just have to be competitive—competitive throughout the week and the season. I just want to score points as much as possible.”
And so Tsunoda will carry on, and (try to) keep calm. “Yes! Honestly, at some point it will come naturally,” he says. “But there are some things I can’t change, you know. Once I put on the helmet and I’m in the car, I change, right?”
That’s Yuki Tsunoda—still fast, still fiery, always himself.
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