RB currently has a facility at Bicester in the United Kingdom, a town that lies just to the north of Oxford in the proverbial ‘motorsport valley’. It houses a number of the team’s aerodynamic resources along with model makers – essentially it’s wind tunnel team.
However, Mekies has revealed the team intends to move the operation a little over 20 miles.
“It is super simple. We have a very good facility in Faenza, where Franz [Tost] has done a very good job to modernise the headquarters,” Mekies explained.
“I think it was built in 2015 or 2016. We think that that is a good base to build upon.
“But we are not happy with what we have in Bicester today in terms of infrastructure. We don’t think [it] puts our guys in the best possible position.
“It is simply because of the history of it. It was a very small facility that we’ve outgrown.
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“We are there because we are using our wind tunnel, but that is not the case anymore,” he added.
“We have decided that the site is going to close.
“It is effectively the aero department, the concept department and a few other bits and pieces there, and it is going to be discontinued.
“Instead, we are building a brand-new headquarters in Milton Keynes, outside of the Red Bull campus, that is going to be a state-of-the-art facility, in the same way that we have high-level facilities in Faenza.”
The move will likely ruffle feathers among rivals who already hold concerns about the RB and Red Bull Racing relationship.
The two squads share a wind tunnel, while senior personnel have transferred from the senior team to the junior operation with seemingly no gardening leave.
RB is being invested in more broadly, the UK-facility move in line with its stated aim of competing in its own right, shedding its ‘feeder team’ reputation.
According to Mekies, the move is also an attempt to create capacity to recruit new staff.
The Faenza facility in Italy, where the bulk of the team is based, is somewhat isolated, even from Maranello, the home of Ferrari. It makes recruiting and retaining high-calibre staff difficult.
While the Bicester facility is hardly remote, a move to Milton Keynes affords the squad an opportunity to expand its floor space and accommodate more UK-based staff.
“The plan is that people will move from Bicester to Milton Keynes, and in the new headquarters, we will have more capacity, meaning that we [can] take the opportunity to go in the market and get somebody who wants to stay in the UK, regardless of what the background is,” Mekies said.
“It could be race engineers, simulation engineers or an aero and design guy. We want to think that it is now possible to get a single department split across two locations.
“Historically, it’s been a huge downside in F1 to do that and there are not too many successful examples of it. We are conscious of that.
“We are not disregarding the history of it, we are just thinking that as the world has changed massively, it is not only technology, it is also people’s mindsets.
“We are trying to make that work and think we could turn it into an advantage.
“We’ve got people in because they wanted to be in Italy and we’ve got people in because they wanted to be in the UK – we want to play it as a strength instead of a weakness.”
Nick Roberts and Guillaume Cattelani have both recently joined RB.
Roberts was senior race strategy analyst at Red Bull Racing and has taken on the role of senior strategy engineer with RB.
Cattelani was formerly McLaren’s head of aerodynamics and was most recently chief engineer of technology and analysis tools at Red Bull Racing, leaving that position last month to become deputy technical director at RB.
RB is currently advertising for 16 new staff to join its operation, five of those to be based in the United Kingdom.
That includes roles in logistics, aerodynamics, simulation and modelling, composites, and the model shop.
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