Birth of Red Bull: grizzled start for F1 titan that rose from ashes of Jaguar

The day after tomorrow, in other words Thursday March 6, will be the 20th anniversary of the 2005 Australian Grand Prix. It will also therefore be the 20th anniversary of the first grand prix entered by a Formula 1 team called Red Bull Racing, which had been known as Jaguar Racing before that and Stewart Grand Prix originally.

Jaguar Racing, which was owned by Ford, had not been a success. It competed in F1 for five seasons, from 2000 to 2004, and it was led by a dizzying number of very different types of chap, none of whom stayed very long: Wolfgang Reitzle, a previously successful automotive business leader recruited from BMW; Neil Ressler, a dyed-in-the-metal car man from Detroit who had worked for Ford since 1967; Bobby Rahal, a legendary ex-driver who had won 24 races and three championships in CART; Niki Lauda, an even more legendary ex-driver who had won 25 grands prix, two non-championship races, and three world championships in F1; Guenther Steiner, an ex-World Rally Championship engineer-manager who could not yet know that his route to fame and fortune would later lie in learning to swear like a trooper on Drive to Survive; Tony Purnell, an engineering academic and multi-millionaire businessman who in 1999 had sold his electronics company, Pi Research, to Ford; and David Pitchforth, a senior engineer-manager hired from Reynard who, after his short stint in F1, went on to a successful career at Boeing, ending up president of Boeing Defence, Space, and Security. During that time Jag Rac (as we journalists liked to call it) notched up just two podium finishes from its 85 grand prix starts – third places at Monaco in 2001 and at Monza in 2002 – both of them courtesy of Eddie Irvine, who earned $27 million in the three seasons he spent at the team, which was about £18 million back then: a lot of money for a driver employed by what was in truth never more than a midfield outfit.

Jaguar Racing’s predecessor, Stewart Grand Prix, had been more successful. Started from scratch on a tight budget by Jackie Stewart and his son Paul, it raced for just three seasons, from 1997 to 1999, achieving a fairytale second place in its fifth grand prix, at Monaco, a result delivered by Rubens Barrichello that caused Jackie, despite his own prodigiously impressive in-cockpit F1 CV, to weep with joy. Two years later, in 1999, Barrichello produced three more podium finishes – at Imola, Magny-Cours, and Nürburgring – but, even better, 23 seconds ahead of Rubens in that topsy-turvy wet-then-dry European Grand Prix at the new ’Ring, Johnny Herbert crossed the line in the other Stewart in first place.

“I consider today’s grand prix win greater than any of my own grand prix wins as a driver,” said Jackie afterwards – and, although we all knew what the old boy meant, I doubt that you will cavil at my assertion that what he had achieved himself 31 years before, on the old and far more challenging version of the same circuit, caressing his Matra MS10 to victory with one strong hand and the other incapacitated by a recently broken wrist, in torrential rain, finishing more than four minutes ahead of his nearest rival, was just a little bit better.

But let’s fast-forward to March 4, 2005, in other words precisely 20 years ago to the day, for on that Friday, two days before the Australian Grand Prix, I interviewed Red Bull’s 33-year-old new recruit, David Coulthard, in the Melbourne paddock. I knew him very well by that time, having interviewed him often during the nine seasons he had spent at McLaren (1996-2004) and a couple of times during his short spell at Williams before that (1994-1995), and I remember ribbing him that balmy Aussie afternoon for his salt-and-pepper stubble, which he wore with defiant nonchalance as a Red Bull man but which Ron Dennis would never have allowed during his McLaren days, when his unusually square jaw used to be so marble-smooth that it made him look like a Palitoy Action Man, sans cheek scar of course.

Coulthard had won 12 grands prix for McLaren, which was fewer mano a mano than his two superfast Finnish team-mates, first Mika Häkkinen then Kimi Räikkönen, who had serially edged him for both pace and success, but a dozen grand prix wins is a decent tally nonetheless. He was never destined to win a race for Red Bull, and perhaps he knew that at the start, but he was visibly happy that sunny day in the Melbourne paddock, unencumbered as he now was by the need to conform to Dennis’s presentational strictures that all drivers who raced for McLaren in those days accepted as part of the deal.

“Tell me about the stubble,” I said at one point.

He grinned and replied, “Well, now I can shave when I feel like it.”

“Rather than every single morning, like it or lump it?” I asked.

“Exactly,” he said – then, well aware that we both knew that the elephant in the room (or on the neatly kempt Albert Park paddock lawn, to be more accurate) was Ron’s intransigent punctiliousness, he threw his head back and he roared with laughter. The next day he qualified fifth, and the day after that he raced to fourth: not a bad Red Bull debut, all things considered.