Reigning F1 champions Red Bull have pushed Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes-AMG into the shadows on the track, and now they’re poised to do it in the supercar market too. The company has revealed it’s working on a US$ 6 million (£ 5 m) hypercar that goes on sale in 2025. Created by legendary F1 car designer Adrian Newey, the man largely responsible for the look of the Aston Martin Valkyrie, and slated to be built by the Red Bull F1 team’s Advanced Technologies sister division, the car is codenamed RB17, which now makes sense of the mysterious gap between the firm’s RB16 F1 car from 2021, and the RB18 name give to the current car that followed it.
Autocar reports that the carbon-bodied,
closed-roof machine will have two seats, and though designed with track use in
mind, could potentially be made road legal if customers are crazy enough to
want it. Only 50 cars are planned, each constructed in-house in the UK, and
even at more than double the price of an AMG One or Aston Valkyrie, all have been
sold.
Red bull is not giving too much away in
terms of technical details at this stage, but we do know that it’s powered by a
twin-turbo V8 built by an unnamed third party, and will get an F1-stye energy
recovery system to provide a torque fill. Autocar says it will have 1,233 hp, including 148 hp of electric assistance, which tallies
with other reports that state the engine’s output as 1,085 hp.
Speaking to Autocar, Newey claimed that he
is targeting a club weight of just 900 kg plus driver, which would
make the RB17 even lighter than a late-model Lotus Elise, while Red Bull
Racing’s CEO said the car “would not disgrace itself” on the F1 grid in terms
of pace. That has much to do with this project being less constrained by the
kinds of rules that make designing F1 car so tough, and aero devices like
skirts, which were banned in racing’s top tier more than 40 year ago, will
feature on RB17.