Red Bull RB17 makes public track debut at Goodwood

Red Bull is building a production car. That’s not news of course – we’ve been aware of that for a couple of years. But at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, we got a chance to see the RB17 in action for the first time.

The 1,200 hp hybrid machine is something to behold. From the pen of former Red Bull design maestro Adrian Newey, the car is the culmination of the knowledge gained by the company in over 20 years of Formula 1.

When we first saw it at the 2024 Festival of Speed, it was nothing more than a life-size(ish) design model. The model was refined for its appearance at the same event last year, but this time along it moved and the Cosworth-developed 4.5 liter V10 sang.

“The model that was shown two years ago was almost a two-and-a-half year old design, really,” Red Bull Advanced Technologies technical director Rob Gray told RACER. “It was a very early concept study. It had some aero work done on it, but not everything. And really, since then, everything has been focused on turning it into a real car.

“It's integrating all of the systems within the car, so all of the mechanical systems, all of the electrical systems, active suspension, active aero. There's a whole load of different things that have to be designed under the skin. They were all at an early stage two years ago, and they've all had to be turned into real parts.

“A lot of them are actually designed and made in-house. So it really is a case of each bit has to be specified, designed, manufactured and then tested before it comes here.”

Adrian Newey may no longer be a Red Bull Racing employee, but the RB17's designer was among those getting a chance to drive it at the FoS. Simon Galloway/Getty Images

Aerodynamics are what Newey is known for, so naturally they’ve been a major focus. As such, the car is tightly packaged – a Newey trademark – so cooling has been something Red Bull has been refining since the car first broke cover.

“First of all, [we’ve been] making sure we've actually got it going through the air and generating downforce,” said Gray. “It's also got valances for cooling, it's got brake system cooling. Cooling's big, big thing.”

"Production car" is an important distinction. Red Bull plans to build 50 units but they won’t be road legal – unlike the Aston Martin Valkyrie, another Newey project that had Red Bull involvement in its early stages, it’s strictly a track car.

Gray says that Red Bull is “aware” of firms like Lanzante that have previously turned similar track specials like the McLaren P1 GTR, Pagani Zonda R, Lamborghini Seto Elemento and Bugatti Bolide into road-going form by the company (the latter of which was unveiled in its road-legal form at this year’s Festival), and have expressed an interest in offering similar for the RB17, but has no interest in doing such conversions itself.

A track special with no road or race regulations to follow implies the freedom to do whatever, but Red Bull has decided to follow the Le Mans Hypercar regulations anyway in order to maximize safety.

“We're obeying the Le Mans Hypercar car regulations – there’s a lot of features on the wings and the flaps on the back there – so that the car doesn't generally lift when it's going sideways, so that it's sort of intrinsically safe and doesn't give the driver a problem should it spin,” said Gray.

“The Le Mans rules thing is really not because we think we're going to go and race, but because we wanted a safety standard that we can stand behind,” he explained. “That's the most similar type of car to this, and at least then we know we're designing something responsibly.”

The track-only RB17 has been built to Le Mans Hypercar safety regs, although there are no plans to race it. Simon Galloway/Getty Images

Goodwood was very much a demonstration for the car, but that doesn’t mean its runs up the hill in the hands of Newey, his son Harrison, Red Bull F1 drivers Isack Hadjar and Yuki Tsunoda and Red Bull-backed F1 Academy driver Alisha Palmowski haven’t been useful.

“I guess every mile you go is valuable,” said Gray. “One thing that's probably most valuable here is that the duty cycle is quite unique in that there's lots of stopping and starting, going to the top, turning a hot car off and sitting there with it cooking, turning it back on, coming down at slow speeds. So it's the kind of variety that the actual owners will experience. It doesn't do any harm to come here.”

And while the car’s now been seen in running form by the public, the car isn’t finished.

“Well, we've only done about 500k on the car in total already; maybe it's 510 now,” said Gray. “So it's going back into the commissioning phase. There's a whole load of systems we haven't got running yet, which we need to.

“So we'll go back and get back testing, doing that probably next week, and then building up the pace to start durability running in the autumn.”