Finishing straight

BOOK REVIEW

GROWING WINGS: THE INSIDE STORY OF RED BULL RACING

Ben Hunt RRP: £22

When you trace the lineage of each of the 10 current Formula 1 teams, Red Bull remains the second youngest – it joined the grid as Stewart Grand Prix in 1997 before evolving into Jaguar in 2000 and then its current guise in 2005. The only team that’s younger is Haas, which made its debut in 2016.

It is through this prism that Red Bull’s success must be gauged. To date it has taken 118 race wins, 102 pole positions, six constructors’ titles and seven drivers’ crowns. For a team that had topped the podium just once in its first 134 attempts, achieving what it has in the subsequent 377 grands prix is a staggering level of performance.

What is equally staggering is how Ben Hunt has managed to condense such a convoluted story into 305 pages while keeping this a genuine page-turner – something that’s rather rare in the motorsport sphere. The input from the team in Growing Wings: The inside story of Red Bull Racing is immediately evident, with team principal Christian Horner providing the foreword as well as sharing memories that add an extra level of insight to the story.

There are, naturally, other voices that feature throughout but, for the most part, these quotes come from contemporary press conferences, TV snippets and publications. Press releases are also used to further paint the picture, with specific reference given to the timings of their release at certain points, particularly in reference to the announcements of Mark Webber’s and Sebastian Vettel’s departures from the team.

Of course, there are certain points in the team’s history that readers may want to skip straight to, notably Turkey 2010 when Vettel and Webber collided, Malaysia 2013 and Multi 21, and then arguably the most polarising moment in F1 history in the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix.

Refreshingly, while these elements are given fair space on the page, they are not fixated upon too much – this being especially true with the events of 2021. Thes