by Scuderia AlphaTauri has been renamed the Visa Cash App RB Formula One team with immediate effect, it has been announced.
The Visa logo will also appear on the cars of reigning champions Red Bull in 2024 as part of a new multi-year global partnership agreement.
The AlphaTauri name change was widely sought. At one time last autumn it looked like they would be called ‘Racing Bulls’. But that idea was eventually dismissed, perhaps because it was too similar to Red Bull. The team’s new commercial partners eventually managed to put their names in the new team’s name in the same way that Sauber was rebranded as Stake F1 for the new season following the departure of Alfa Romeo.
Drivers Yuki Tsunoda and Daniel Ricciardo will unveil the newly designed flow when they launch the 2024 Visa Cash App RB challenger in Las Vegas on February 8. The new season starts in Bahrain on March 2.
The rebranding, which extends to the team’s entry into the all-female F1 Academy, is part of a deepening of ties between the two Red Bull-owned teams, which has caused concern in the paddock.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was forced to defend the team from criticism late last season that the relationship gave them an unfair advantage. Horner insisted that Ferrari and Mercedes had similar arrangements with their customer teams.
Red Bull has had two teams on the grid since it bought Minardi and rebranded to Toro Rosso in 2006. But this season the synergy between the two ramps up as far as the rules allow, especially from the commercial side, with a new company created to bring marketing and communications under one roof.
Visa Cash App RB, which has a new chief executive Peter Bayer and team principal Laurent Mekies, will continue to operate from Faenza in Italy.
But the team’s UK operation in Bicester will be expanded and some personnel will move to Red Bull Racing’s Milton Keynes campus in preparation for the team’s adoption of the Red Bull-Ford power unit from 2026 onwards, which will see both teams progress.
“It’s great to unveil the new identity and welcome new partners as we embark on the next phase of the team’s Formula 1 story,” Bayer said in a team press release. “Faenza is entering a new era of racing, staying true to our roots as a home for talent but now with an even greater focus on competing for the biggest prizes in F1. We have a bold vision for the team led by myself and team principal, Laurent Mekies and it is extremely exciting to have future-oriented partners such as Visa and Cash App alongside us on that journey.”
There is nothing new to worry about – but big questions remain
“And this is Guanyu Zhou’s F1 Stake car! It’s on the back of Yuki Tsunoda RB’s Visa Cash App!” David Croft is unfortunate. Murray Walker was never going to deal with such nonsense.
This rebranding of AlphaTauri is unlikely to go down well with F1 fans. There will be a joke. There will be memes (see below). F1 will be charged with providing even more evidence, if needed, that the [commercial] The tail of the sport is now very much wagging the dog.
But beyond the ugly name – VCARB appears to be an early frontline for an abbreviation, which equates to a low-protein diet – there’s a wider issue at stake. Repeated calls, CEO of McLaren Zak Brown last week on the FIA to crack down on what he called “teams A and B”. Brown expressed new concerns in particular about the relationship between the two Red Bull-owned entities. “I think the AB team is a real problem going forward,” he said. “I think you have co-ownership, you don’t really have that in any other sport, and I think that provides a lot of conflict of interest.”
These concerns are nothing new. F1 regulations allow for certain ‘transferable components’ designed by one team to be purchased by another team, with VCARB (it will take some getting used to) among many to use this rule. Haas also has an extensive technical partnership with Ferrari, including an office at the Italian team’s Maranello factory.
Horner insisted in Abu Dhabi last season that the two relationships were “the same” and insisted that what his team was sharing with AlphaTauri was in compliance with all regulations. They were scrupulous about what they shared with their fellow staff.
“Obviously,” said Horner, “it’s up to them how they use those tools and you can see that McLaren used the tools in some ways better than their supplier. [Mercedes] done in the second half of the year.”
He added: “We are a long way from the pink Mercedes.” That last comment was a reference to Racing Points 2020 [now Aston Martin] machine, which was very similar to the dominant Mercedes car from the previous year.
He had a point. But you can also understand Brown’s paranoia. Especially when the two Red Bull teams are getting closer in certain areas. And especially in this era of cost caps.
“When the rules [on ownership] implemented, the sport was in a different place,” said Brown. “We had a big gap between teams like ourselves with huge budgets, and smaller teams. Now everyone is pretty much at the [limit of the budget] cap. So I think everyone is playing with the same size bat to use a baseball term. That’s a serious question about the fairness of the sport, for the fans. That’s why it’s not allowed in any other major sport.”
However, Red Bull insist that they are doing things by the book, as much as they claim that it is the same for Ferrari and Mercedes, there will always be that fear that the dual ownership gives competitive advantage for Red Bull.
