It might have started as a marketing arm for an energy drink, but it seems that F1 World championship-winning team Red Bull harbours some serious ambition: it wants to become a pukka engineering firm, and even wants to move into road car development.
According to the good folks over on Autocar, Red Bull Racing is planning to us its tie-up with Infiniti (which sponsors the Red bull cars) to help move towards creating road cars.
"Red Bull used to be known only as an energy drink company, but now it is recognised as an engineering team," Red Bull boss Christian Horner told Autocar. "It's a natural evolution for us to get involved in road car engineering."
We're not sure about 'natural evolution', but it's certainly an interesting idea. But what sort of form would this take? Well, Autocar reckons that a Clio Williams-style collaboration on a performance model would be the obvious first fruit of such a venture, but it's not yet clear which Infiniti model would get this.
The Infiniti-Red Bull venture is already bearing fruit, too. We're told that the public's awareness of the Infiniti brand in the UK is on the up thanks to its logo taking the chequered flag in F1 on a regular basis, so a more obvious connection to its road cars could surely only help in its ambition to sell 10,000 cars a year in the UK in the next five years...
