‘It has clearly exceeded expectations’: inside Red Bull’s F1 engine factory

The new factory Red Bull have built in Milton Keynes from scratch now houses their pristine engine building team. Photograph: Red Bull

Mekies acknowledges then that this season Mercedes – by far the class of the field – have as much as a two- to three-10ths advantage over his team from the engine. That Red Bull are so close at their very first attempt is remarkable. They have been off the pace of Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren in the opening three rounds this season but, as Mekies admits, the real deficit is in the chassis.

In terms of harnessing the horsepower, Red Bull have hit the ground at a gallop. It becomes clear quite how much in a rare opportunity to visit the engine manufacturing facility in the company of Red Bull Ford Powertrain’s technical director, Ben Hodgkinson, who was headhunted from Mercedes to lead the project and has 27 years of experience in building engines. He describes the project as bold and audacious and believes that it attracted characters with similar attributes to join it.

When it began he was taking on 25 personnel a month and the team he leads is now 700 strong. For all the noise around high-profile departures, Red Bull are maintaining no little momentum in recruitment, having taken on 120 new employees across engine and chassis in the first quarter of this year alone.

From that barren patch of ground at the Milton Keynes campus, Hodgkinson had one major advantage for his task in that he was building a unique facility from scratch – and it shows. Even given the haste with which it has been built – including the engine dynos being housed in large, imported pre-built steel units picked specifically because they could be on site and up in the shortest possible time – it is a technological marvel.

The romantic picture of engine assembly involving spanners and oily overalls has long gone from modern F1, but the assembly rooms at Red Bull are another experience altogether even compared with those of rival teams. There is an air of pristine, precise, perfectionism amid an almost disarming, preternatural quiet. Were an actual spanner to drop it would echo like thunder in this meticulous atmosphere.

The cleanliness and order is observed for good reason as potential contaminations of parts with even minute particles is taken incredibly seriously. Pieces arriving from outside are unboxed in a room entirely separate from the assembly area and then cleaned before entry. Computers abound as do immaculately dressed engineers. It has the air of an especially sparkling kitchen run by a decidedly fastidious chef. Certainly there would be no concerns eating from any of these surfaces.

Laurent Mekies, the team principal of Oracle Red Bull Racing, believes the ‘crazy decision’ four years ago to build their own engines will bring a huge dividend in the next few years. Photograph: Bryn Lennon/Formula 1/Getty Images

The same attention to detail applies in the area where engines at the end of their life are disassembled in detail to identify any areas of weakness that could help to prevent a failure in future models. There is an entire room for cleaning crank shafts before use and another for oil analysis – a process that identifies particulate elements that may be wearing the engine with undue haste.

The focus on creating a coherent organisation with an overarching sense of purpose and direction is evident everywhere and it is impossible not to be impressed by how singularly it has been achieved given the sheer scale of the task that began four years ago. Indeed for all Red Bull’s current travails, including Max Verstappen’s dissatisfaction with the new rule set and his recalcitrant car, their engine has proved an undoubted success story.

“It has clearly exceeded expectations,” says Mekies. “We were gearing up from a much further away starting point. It’s something that could have put the project at big risk for two or three years.

“But now the ghost of the power unit – is Oracle Red Bull Racing going to have a strong enough power unit for the years to come? – has disappeared. We have our own issues. We need to get these tenths back, we need to fix what we need to fix with the car. This, we know how to do. It’s going to happen, not in Miami, but it’s going to happen.”