The Oracle Red Bull Racing Formula One (F1) team revealed its eagerly awaited RB17 hypercar at Goodwood Festival of Speed, with Christian Horner, Team Principal and CEO; Adrian Newey, Group Chief Technical Officer; and Rob Gray, Red Bull Advanced Technologies (RBAT) Technical Director, doing the honors. Designed for track-only use, the two-seater takes its inspiration and name from Red Bull Racing F1 cars and features what is said to be the most advanced ground effect package available in a series production car.

“We are excited to reveal the RB17 at Goodwood Festival of Speed, a project that is one of the most authentic and exciting that Red Bull Advanced Technologies has embarked upon to date,” said Horner. “With 20 years of legacy in the world of F1 to draw from, and as a performance-centered organization, it only made sense for us to design our own hypercar from the ground up. Combining technical innovation, achievement, and emotional appeal, the RB17 is a landmark car. We expect the RB17 to be a future classic.”

Designed by Newey and being developed with his colleagues at Red Bull Advanced Technologies, the high-performance engineering arm of Red Bull Racing Group, the RB17 builds on the team’s 20 years in F1 resulting in winning six Constructors’ titles.

“I had been mulling around the idea to take on the challenge to design our very own hypercar, from concept to delivery, for many years and it has been a magnificent project and journey,” said Newey. “The RB17 hypercar embraces everything we stand for: undeniable power, speed, and beauty. It is very adaptable in its abilities, and we made sure to design it as a two-seater so that the thrill of driving at F1 speeds can be enjoyed with a friend or partner.”

From developing the initial concept to the delivery to customers of the finished hypercar to customers, of which only 50 are to be sold, Red Bull Advanced Technologies is responsible for taking the initial design through engineering and building the car.

“The RB17 is an amazing project that we are privileged to work on and has allowed Red Bull Advanced Technologies to showcase our engineering, design, and technical capabilities and solutions,” said Gray. “We cannot wait to see the finished cars being enjoyed to the full on a racetrack by racing and automotive enthusiasts alike.”

Full technical details for the RB17 will be released closer to production.

 

The road to RB17

Since energy-drink maker Red Bull bought the remnants of Jaguar Racing from Ford and formed an F1 team in 2005, Red Bull Racing has expanded its operations and capabilities, now located on a 290-acre (117-ha) campus in Milton Keynes. The RB17 will be developed and made at the Red Bull Technology Campus there.

“The RB17 marks an important milestone in the evolution of Red Bull Advanced Technologies, now fully capable of creating and manufacturing a series production car at our Red Bull Technology Campus,” said Horner. “Further, the RB17 marks the first time that a car wearing the Red Bull brand has been available to collectors.”

The RB17 is a passion project for Newey, as he described in a January YouTube video. The idea for it started to take form when Sony reps approached him in 2010 to design a “no-regulation” ultimate performance car that at the end of that year that became the PlayStation X1 racer. Newey and the team next developed a hypercar with Red Bull F1 partner at the time Aston Martin to do the Valkyrie hybrid-electric hypercar, the project helping to create Red Bull Advanced Technologies in 2014.

“We were working with a partner, which can bring its frustrations,” said Newey. “We all collectively thought it would be great to do our own car and be a pure Red Bull.” And so, the project for the first all-Red Bull hypercar was born.

Newey’s work on the RB17 began over the Christmas break at the end of 2020 when he got “a little bit bored and started drawing it out.” The start of RB17 research came during Covid and a tight Formula One championship battle with Mercedes-Benz that season, making 2021 a very busy year for Newey and Red Bull.

“The approach in terms of how we do our research, our design, manufacture, development, the process is the same,” said Newey, of the RB17 and F1 design similarities. “It’s just applied differently. We don’t have Formula One regulations to restrict us, but we do have of course all the normal physical constraints.”

The holistic design approach started with the goal of making the car “look stunning.”

“These sorts of cars should be viewed as pieces of art,” he said. It then “has to be emotive, which also includes sound, so we decided on a normally aspirated engine for that reason. Some of us remember the sort of high-revving [F1] V10s of the mid-to-late ‘90s, and they sounded amazing, so we wanted to rekindle and recapture that.”

Development is focusing on track performance, but the car is a two-seater so that the owner can enjoy it with a friend or partner. Despite its performance, the team wants a car that’s not intimidating to drive.

 

Lightweight despite electrification

The RB17 features a carbon-fiber monocoque chassis and carbon-composite tub. At less than 900 kg (1984 lb) and producing more than 1200 hp (894 kW), the hypercar is said to deliver F1-equivalent lap times and top speeds in excess of 350 km/h (217 mph), while remaining easy to own and operate.

“The RB17 pushes design and technical boundaries far beyond what has been previously available to enthusiasts and collectors,” said Newey.

Its semi-stressed mid-mounted naturally aspirated V10 engine red-lined at 15,000 rpm and producing 1000 hp (746 kW) is the major part of a hybrid-electric powertrain, with power transferred to the rear wheels via a carbon-fiber gearbox.

For the two-seat RB17, Red Bull wanted to package two people “in reasonable comfort.” It has a bit more space inside than the Valkyrie, and for tall people, it’s got a lot more legroom, said Newey.

“We spent a lot of time thinking about the systems and how we can make it user-friendly to a wide variety of driver abilities and experience,” said Newey. “The challenge we’ve set for ourselves is that adaptability of the car, but then ultimately the car if driven by a professional driver is capable of Formula One lap times.”

He attributes much of that performance to a focus on lightweighting, resulting in a car much lighter than most for road and track. Added to that equation is the V10 and a 200-hp (149-kW) electric motor. In addition to the performance boost, the electric motor “fulfills a variety of functions” like “smoothing out” engine torque and gear changes, providing reverse gear, and eliminating the starter motor.

The car has active suspension, which it needs because the downforce produced to achieve fast lap times is immense. Downforce is capped at 1.7 ton (1.8 t), almost twice the car’s weight, to not overload the tires. It gets to that figure at about 150 mph (241 km/h), after that starting “to bleed off.” It produces its own weight in downforce at 120 mph (193 km/h).

Newey says that efficiency is high as well, in terms of downforce-to-drag ratio and near the lift-to-drag ratio of an aircraft or a bird of prey. To achieve that, the car has a “blown diffuser” and active suspension, the latter to give a stable aerodynamic platform with “reasonably sensible” spring rates, not nearly as stiff as a current Formula 1 or LMP car, for ride compliance.

The arrangement also offers the ability to tune the car both aerodynamically, by adjusting the ride heights, and for mechanical balance, to balance grip between the front and rear axles. It makes the car suitable for a range of driver techniques, styles, and abilities.

 

Aerodynamics, mechanical design, and vehicle dynamics

Newey says the collaboration with Red Bull Advanced Technologies was very much an interactive process.

“It’s quite a big project,” said Newey. “In some ways, because we’ve got more variables, you could argue it’s more complicated than the Formula One car.”

He did the first layout drawing of a packaging and aerodynamic shape proposal with fundamentals like wheelbase and some suggested targets to achieve. Next, the project was broken down with RBATs, in the same way as any F1 team, into three principal departments for aerodynamics, mechanical design, and vehicle dynamics development.

For aerodynamics, from the first sketch to now, Newey estimates thousands of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) runs and iterations of all the individual parts, with a huge amount of detail spent on components like the front wing, how that interacts with the floor and the top body, the brake ducts, and cooling. A lot of that CFD work is to ensure that the aerodynamic characteristics are benign and forgiving when driven hard. And aero development is ongoing.

For the mechanical design, hitting that sub-900-kg weight target involved a huge amount of weight optimization, stress analysis, and detailed design.

For vehicle dynamics, there’s a lot of aero loads and engine power to handle, so Red Bull partnered with Michelin to develop special tires for the car, “which is absolutely vital,” said Newey. “It’s an expensive thing to do—developing tires for such a limited-series car, but we felt it was absolutely essential, and Michelin are great partners on this.”

Much of the dynamics work has focused on the active suspension, its settings, and developing and adapting the simulator models.

 

The customer journey

For the 50 lucky RB17 collectors, Red Bull is planning for an ownership experience far beyond just the car, bringing with it a closer association with the Red Bull Racing team through access to simulators, vehicle program development, and on-track training and experiences. The “clients” will be welcomed into the Red Bull family with a customer journey that includes a range of track events allowing them to experience some of the world’s greatest circuits.

Driver development and tailoring of the car to suit individual owner needs is part of the experience. Each car will be bespoke, with the customer able to specify everything from the exterior paint color to interior materials and a host of smaller details.

“We’re keen that customers are very involved in the process,” said Newey, taking them through the journey and involving them in the next 24 months.

The engine will be running on the dyno this summer, with prototype drives in the passenger seat to follow. Rig testing is happening through 2024, 2025 is the on-track development year, and then manufacturing will begin.

The RB17 will be supported directly by the factory, with servicing and maintenance tailored to each owner and their usage profile for the car.