RBR expects no quarter from STR

By Andrew Cutler
February 7 2007

Forget that Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso are owned (at least in part in STR's case) by the same man, who supplies sponsorship funding to both teams. Forget that rival teams are saying that they will be using the same chassis this year. When the red lights go out, none of that will matter.

From almost the very moment it was announced that Dietrich Mateschitz, who allready owned Red Bull Racing, was buying the former Minardi F1 team and renaming it Scuderia Toro Rosso, it has been a widely held belief that RBR was the "senior" team, meant to battle for wins and championships and the STR was merely the "junior" team, meant to be a training ground for young drivers who, if they prove themselves worthy, might one day get the call to come drive for RBR. If STR drivers occasionally out qualified their RBR counterparts and finished ahead of them on race day last year, it was written off as being due to problems with RBR's '06 car or the supposed advantage that STR's rev-limited V10 engine provided on certian tracks. With both units using V8s and supposedly similar chassis this year, the "A team / B team" relationship was expected to, finally, come into full effect.

Red Bull Racing's team principal, Christian Horner, does not see any of this as reason to expect that the squad from Faenza will cut the squad from Milton Keynes any slack on the track. He expects the two teams to fight against each other just as they would against any other rival unit. "Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso are two completely different teams that will compete against one another."