Porsche and Red Bull? Apparently, definitely a dead issue. Why did the Austrian team decide to break off negotiations with Porsche?

For months, it has been an open secret that Porsche and Red Bull Racing will become partners and work together on powertrain development from 2026. Plus, Porsche was to buy a stake in Red Bull. But apparently that’s not going to happen, and there’s no deal between the two companies…

According to Motorsport, Porsche and Red Bull were supposed to officially announce the formation of this partnership back at the Austrian Grand Prix, and those negotiations have progressed to the point where Porsche has even applied to the anti-cartel authorities for permission to buy the team.

But when another Volkswagen Group manufacturer (Audi) confirmed its entry into F1 during the Belgian Grand Prix, Red Bull and Porsche’s silence about their future plans suggested that there were some obstacles.

And so the current situation seems to be that there won’t be any joint plans. So the future collaboration between Porsche and Red Bull, which included the sale of shares in the Milton Keynes team, has apparently been swept off the table.

“Porsche will not become a shareholder in our company,” Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko told F1 Insider. Moreover, according to the latest information, Marko’s statement is indeed based on realistic grounds.

This means that there will be no buyout of the team, as originally expected. The best case scenario is that Red Bull and Porsche will only enter into an agreement for the supply of power units.

Initially, all negotiations were quick and almost without any complications. But as Red Bull and Porsche set out to explore the bigger details, and the more executives from the German carmaker sat around the table, the more scepticism grew in the Milton Keynes camp.

In practice, it’s actually a simple decision. Red Bull has a star driver in Max Verstappen, one of the best bosses – Christian Horner, a great designer in Adrian Newey, in short a superb and strong team that can react very quickly to anything.

Red Bull as a whole has never been stronger than when it was fully independent and able to react immediately to any problem. Moreover, if we take into account the operation of the big car companies in the F1 environment, whether it was Toyota, BMW or Honda, which had their own teams in Formula 1, they all had one thing in common.

Bureaucratic processes that made it impossible for these car companies to fully adapt to the needs of perhaps the most demanding sport in the world.

And which in turn suffered from the lack of agility in F1 that makes Red Bull such a strong team. And this is the key point why the Red Bull/Porsche deal can be described as dead.

F1 Insider, Motorsport