Red Bull Dual Ownership: Is the Clock Ticking on Racing Bulls?

Red Bull owning two Formula 1 teams is no longer just a paddock argument. The FIA president has said publicly he does not think it is right. Divestment was on the table in the current Concorde Agreement negotiations. The next agreement is due around 2031. The sport is moving toward a decision on this whether Red Bull wants it or not. The only real question left is whether the regulations catch up before or after the damage becomes impossible to ignore.

Key Points: Red Bull Dual Ownership and the Road to 2031

• FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has confirmed the governing body is evaluating restrictions on dual team ownership in F1
• Ben Sulayem stated personally he does not believe owning two teams is the right approach
• Zak Brown confirmed divestment of one Red Bull team was discussed during current Concorde Agreement negotiations but did not receive enough support
• The current Concorde Agreement runs to 2030, making 2031 the next realistic decision point
• Racing Bulls were rejected a reported £1.1bn bid, having been purchased for around £20m in 2005
• No gardening leave requirements between Red Bull and Racing Bulls remain a central competitive grievance for rival teams

Twenty Years of Tolerance

Red Bull bought Minardi at the end of 2005 for around £20m, stepping in when the Faenza-based team was close to folding. The grid needed the cars. The sport needed the stability. Nobody looked too hard at the implications of one energy drinks company owning two championship entries. That was a different Formula 1. Manufacturer withdrawals, financial crises, grids struggling to fill twenty cars. The calculus was simple: two Red Bull teams was better than nine.

Twenty years on, Formula 1 is a different sport entirely. Team valuations have reset. The grid is full. There is a waiting list. Entry is a franchise-level asset worth billions, not a lifeboat thrown to a collapsing team. The conditions that made the Red Bull arrangement tolerable in 2006 do not exist anymore. And the advantages built into that structure have only grown.

The Advantages Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud

The most visible grievance is personnel movement. Between Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls, there is no gardening leave. Employees move. Engineers transfer. Institutional knowledge travels with them, immediately, without the months-long cooling-off period that every other team in the paddock has to respect. I covered this in detail through the lens of the Gianpiero Lambiase situation, the kind of signing that cost McLaren years of waiting precisely because the normal rules applied. For Red Bull’s internal transfers, they do not.

You can read more on the GP gardening leave situation and what it means structurally for McLaren here.

Beyond personnel, there is the intellectual property question. Regulations govern documents and components, not conversations. Knowledge transfer between these two teams is effectively impossible to police. An engineer who spent three years at Red Bull Racing and moves to Racing Bulls carries everything they know with them. Built-in, unavoidable, invisible to any compliance process. Every team in the paddock understands this. Nobody says it plainly.

Singapore 2024 said it for them. Racing Bulls pitted Daniel Ricciardo late specifically to take the fastest lap point from Lando Norris. Racing Bulls gained nothing. Red Bull gained a point in the championship fight. The team principal offered an explanation. It was not convincing. That moment is exactly what dual ownership produces and exactly why the FIA is now being pushed to act. One team sacrificing its own race for another team’s benefit. With the same owner watching both.

Ben Sulayem Is On Record. That Matters.

FIA presidents do not casually opine on active commercial arrangements. When Mohammed Ben Sulayem told The Times that he personally does not believe owning two teams is the right approach, and confirmed the governing body is actively evaluating restrictions, that is not background noise. That is a position statement from the person who sits at the top of the regulatory structure.

His exact framing was careful. He acknowledged the complexity. He did not announce a ban. But the direction of his language was clear: this is under review, and his personal view is that the current situation is not correct. For a governing body that has spent two years rebuilding its credibility on governance and regulatory consistency, that kind of presidential signalling matters. It does not happen by accident.

For a full breakdown of what the Concorde Agreement is and how it structures the sport’s governance, read my explainer here. And for why changes to that framework cannot happen overnight regardless of public pressure, the context is here.

Zak Brown and the Credibility Problem

Brown has been the most vocal team principal on this issue for years. His argument is principled on its face: no single owner should have two entries in the same championship, because the conflicts of interest are unmanageable. The Singapore fastest lap incident is his exhibit A. The gardening leave gap is exhibit B. He is not wrong on the substance.

The credibility problem is what sits alongside it. Brown confirmed that divestment was discussed during the current Concorde Agreement negotiations. It did not get enough support at that stage. He also acknowledged, publicly, that he has a degree of appreciation for what Red Bull did for the sport historically, and that as long as the arrangement is managed and watched, the existing situation can be tolerated. What he drew the line at was expanding it.

That became considerably harder to hold when Mercedes began exploring a stake in Alpine. Brown pivoted to oppose that too. He is right on the principle. But he is not a clean voice in this fight, and the paddock knows it.

The Rebranding That Changed Nothing

Red Bull has worked hard to reframe Racing Bulls as a standalone entity. The name change from AlphaTauri was part of it. The language shift followed. Team personnel now refer to Racing Bulls without the junior team framing. Red Bull themselves have moved away from calling it a sister team in official communications. The effort is visible and deliberate.

The structural reality has not shifted. All drivers across both teams remain centrally contracted to Red Bull. Personnel movement flows freely. Racing Bulls run Red Bull-sourced components wherever the regulations allow. The FIA is not evaluating this operation based on what it is called. It is evaluating how it actually works. A new name on the car does not change any of that.

The Question Nobody Is Asking: Who Actually Buys It?

Here is where the conversation gets complicated. The case for forcing a sale is increasingly well-documented. The mechanics of actually executing one are not.

Racing Bulls rejected a reported £1.1bn bid. Red Bull paid approximately £20m for the Minardi operation in 2005. The asset has appreciated by a factor of fifty or more inside a sport that has been commercially transformed by Liberty Media, the Netflix effect, and a genuinely global fanbase. That valuation reflects reality. Formula 1 team valuations across the grid have reset dramatically. A Concorde-era entry point is worth far more than it was a decade ago.

So who writes a £1bn-plus cheque for a team under a cost cap, inside a commercial framework controlled by FOM, with prize money parity years away? BYD has been mentioned. Sovereign wealth names surface periodically. But a concrete, credible buyer at that valuation is not obviously there.

Red Bull’s Austria-based leadership has also consolidated its grip on both operations in the post-Horner restructure. The political architecture around both teams is tighter than it was. A forced sale does not just require a buyer. It requires Red Bull to agree to one at a price the governing body and commercial rights holder consider acceptable. That is a multi-year negotiation at minimum, even if the Concorde language eventually mandates it.

The cost cap has added another layer that nobody is talking about. The financial regulations have increased Racing Bulls’ physical presence on the Milton Keynes campus, which also houses Red Bull Powertrains. There are engine supply arrangements that would need to be examined and potentially unwound. Racing Bulls could theoretically become a customer team under a new owner, as Haas operates with Ferrari, but the shared facilities at Milton Keynes dilute the clean separation a sale would require. Those arrangements would need to be renegotiated or replaced entirely. That is not a footnote to a forced sale. That is a significant structural problem sitting inside it.

Coffee Corner Take

This is happening. Not in this Concorde cycle. The agreement runs to 2030 and the framework is locked. But the next one, the conversations starting around 2031, is where this lands. Ben Sulayem’s comments to The Times were not accidental. Brown putting divestment discussions on the record was not accidental. The FIA does not publicly evaluate arrangements it plans to leave alone.

The Racing Bulls rebrand tells you something about Red Bull’s read on where this is going. You do not spend years carefully repositioning a team’s identity and pulling back from junior team language unless you are expecting scrutiny of exactly that relationship. This is not preparation for a sale. It is probably preparation for a regulatory argument: that Racing Bulls is already independent enough to satisfy whatever 2031 requires.

Whether that argument holds depends on what the FIA and FOM actually write into the next agreement. That is where this gets decided. And Red Bull knows it. The public statements, the rebranding, the careful language shift away from junior team framing. That is not coincidence. That is a team positioning itself for a fight it can see coming.