The team in Faenza doesn’t look or feel like the outfit that once wore Toro Rosso blue or AlphaTauri’s muted tones. Racing Bulls has been rebuilt in plain sight: a sharper identity, a louder voice, and a clearer purpose inside the Red Bull ecosystem.
The reset began at the end of 2023 with Franz Tost’s departure and a new leadership pairing: Laurent Mekies as team principal and Peter Bayer as CEO. Mekies has since moved on to lead Red Bull Racing; the ever-experienced Alan Permane now runs the pit wall in Faenza. Through it all, Bayer’s been the constant, steering a project that’s swapped ambiguity for intent.
“The most important step was developing an identity,” Bayer tells us over coffee during Red Bull’s home race in Austria. “People understand who we are. We’re an incubator for talent. And you can feel there’s cohesion now—real team spirit.”
On track, Racing Bulls has leaned into technical synergy with Red Bull Racing wherever the rules allow, opening a new facility at the Technology Campus in Milton Keynes and moving out of the aging Bicester aero site. It came online in January; six months later, staff talk about wanting to go to work. “It’s a beautiful facility,” Bayer says. “Parking, canteen, gym—every trick. We’ve got a functional operation.”
Off track, the team’s personality is unmistakable. After the confusing Visa Cash App RB branding exercise in 2024, Racing Bulls now carries its own name—and a clear tone. Its feeds are fast, self-aware, and occasionally ridiculous, exactly the kind of content Liam Lawson and Isack Hadjar are happy to play with. According to the F1 Team Perception report, 47% of fans rated Racing Bulls’ social output “excellent” in Q1 2025, up from 14% a year earlier—the highest among the 10 teams.
It isn’t all polish. The Miami “Summer Edition” pink livery landed as a statement of what this team is prepared to be used for within the Red Bull world—bold and commercial without apology. A Slawn collaboration is queued up for Silverstone. The throwback energy is deliberate. “We’re trying to re-inject a bit of those original values,” Bayer says. “Don’t take yourself too seriously. Work hard, party hard.”
Bayer’s favorite analogy is three floors of Vans HQ: skatepark at the entrance, product in the middle, suits upstairs doing the numbers. Racing Bulls’ version swaps boards for memes, but the point stands. “On the third floor, it’s hardcore Formula 1—engineering, thousandths of a second,” he says. “On the first, that’s where Racing Bulls and the music and the fun live. It’s a conscious decision to make hardcore business an entertainment experience.”
The new UK base has also changed how the team hires, offering flexible movement between Milton Keynes and Faenza. “It’s easier to recruit when people don’t have to uproot their lives,” Bayer says, joking that former boss Tost would hate the phrase “work-life balance.”
The ambition remains blunt. “We started with a Fiat and tuned it into something quick and unique,” Bayer says. “But we’re up against Ferraris. The challenge is making the next step—and then the next.”
