Redbull and Infinti have ended partnership with immediate effect. This marks the end of three successful championships since the luxury Japanese automaker became the British F1 team’s promotional engine partner in 2012. The team will continue to use the Renault engines for the 2016 season but they will be branded as Tag Heuer units.
Redbull and Renault began a successful partnership in Formula 1 in 2007 and this peaked in the period 2010 to 2013 where they successfully held on to the drivers and constructors’ title, and in the case of the former, it allowed Sebastian Vettel to become a quadruple world champion.
While this move to rebrand engines with a non-motoring partner may seem strange to recent F1 fans, it is not the first time that such a thing has happened in the sport. During the late 1990s after Renault withdrew from the sport, Williams and Benetton both back-to-back world champions during the previous four years ran rebranded Renault engines as Mechchrome and Playlife respectively.
Coming back to the issue at hand, it is believed that this compromise was engineered by none other than Bernie Eccelstone himself in a bid to prevent Redbull and its sister concern Torro Rosso from exiting the sport.
The big question now is what will the team do for 2017 season when its contract with Renault runs out? There were rumours that Red Bull had been paving the way for VW to enter the sport with either the Lamborghini or Audi branding but with the German auto giant embroiled in the diesel gate scandal, it remains to be seen what the British-based Austrian team will do for the 2017 season.
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