Red Bull’s marketing team is at it again. We’ve seen Crashed Ice, a skydiver changing planes mid-air, trampolines suspended from a hot air balloon, and the big one: Stratos in 2012 with Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking skydive from the edge of space.
When Red Bull stepped into Formula 1 racing, it was more than just a stunt though. They were there to win. They wanted to further excellence and innovation in motorsport and their latest innovation is proof.
On February 13, 2024, Shaggy, aka Ralph Hogenbirk’s, custom-built Red Bull Drone 1 managed to not only follow Oracle Red Bull Racing’s brand-new F1 car, the RB20, for an entire lap, it even seems to overshoot it at times. And that was part of the difficulty of the design. They needed a drone that could catch up with cars and then maintain the same speed and control. Red Bull Drone 1 accelerates 2x faster than an F1 car, hitting 299kph in just 4 seconds and a top speed of 350kph. This is a first in both drone technology and F1 history.
Watch it’s flight with the Red Bull Formula 1 car, driven by Max Verstappen, on that rainy morning at the UK’s Silverstone Circuit,
What is this drone going to mean next for Red Bull and Formula 1?
Shaggy says, “Even though this drone looks really cool, and it’s working like it’s intended to, there’s a lot more we can do, obviously. I think one of the things we should do is try to get a high-quality live video feed from it, so we can use it for live streaming. And then it’s further testing and proving that this drone is safe, reliable. It would be cool to have one drone covering the track in live races, but maybe in the future we will have multiple drones. Who knows?”
