The return of Ford’s famed Blue Oval to Formula 1 may be denigrated by some rivals as a badging exercise, but the US giant generated a tremendous legacy of 176 grand prix victories by lending its name to Cosworth-designed and built engines in the past, a figure that took Ferrari until 2003 to exceed. And it is now just as determined to add to that tally in its new alliance with Red Bull Racing and Red Bull Powertrains.

“It’s got some poke!”

“I thought that it would win grands prix, and I also thought it could win a world championship”

With those choice four words, spoken in that piratical manner that so distinguished him from his peers after testing the new Ford Cosworth DFV-powered Lotus 49 for the first time at Snetterton early in 1967, Graham Hill kicked off Ford’s involvement in racing’s highest echelon. And, at the time, unknowingly ushered in a dramatic new era of F1.

Back then, Ford of Britain made some fairly dull customer cars in its Dagenham factory: the Anglias, with their strange cutback rear screen; the family sized Cortinas; and the floaty upper-range Zephyrs and Zodiacs. Its motor sport image was only a few years old. But the far-sighted Walter Hayes was to change all that.

In 1965, when the talented former Daily Express journalist-turned-PR-man had suggested to Ford of Britain’s Policy Committee that the company should build on success with Cosworth and its junior formulae engines, and commission Keith Duckworth and Mike Costin to design a grand prix engine, he was given the green light. Weeks later he went to Dearborn to give Ford’s head office an update on the European road car programme, but also mentioned the grand prix engine and the deals with Cosworth and Colin Chapman at Team Lotus (with whom Ford was already very familiar following Jim Clark’s Ford-powered victory at Indianapolis that year).

Ford boss Henry Ford II (‘The Deuce’, who will be familiar to all who saw the recent Ford vs Ferrari movie) asked him how he expected the engine to do. Hayes told writer John Blunsden, “I said, well, I thought that it would win several grands prix, and I also thought that it could win a world championship; in fact I said that I thought that this was fairly likely to happen. I had already told them what it would cost us, and of course they laughed, because it didn’t sound like a very expensive programme.” The price even then was an extraordinary £100,000. After a pause, Mr Ford had said, “Well, I think all we can say is good luck… and we’d like to know how it all comes out.”

Rather well, was the answer.

The Ford Cosworth DFV was not actually the first Ford engine to race in F1. Various privateers ran their Ford-engined F2 Brabhams, Lotuses and Lolas in minor non-championship F1 races in the mid-60s, and Bruce McLaren had originally opted for a linered-down version of Ford’s hefty 4.2-litre DOHC Indianapolis 500-winning V8 in his original McLaren M2B F1 car for the new 3-litre F1’s inauguration in 1966. But he had soon tossed that boat anchor into a skip and made do with an underpowered but mercifully lighter Serenissima V8.

The bespoke DFV, however, was the real deal. After Hill’s pole-winning Lotus 49 had led but retired from the Dutch GP at Zandvoort with a broken timing gear, Clark’s lower-mileage engine had propelled the Scot to an historic fist-time success. Rival Dan Gurney, still seeking reliability in his beautiful Weslake V12-powered Eagle, encapsulated what everyone was thinking when he summarised: “We all saw the writing on the wall that day.” Clark won three more races that year, narrowly missing the title.

When Chapman very charitably agreed at the end of 1967 that the engine should be made available to anyone – “otherwise we’ll kill F1!” Hayes said – it would go on to win 155 grands prix, in Lotus, McLaren, Matra, Brabham, March, Tyrrell, Hesketh, Penske, Wolf, Shadow, Ligier and Williams cars, and make champions of Hill, Jackie Stewart, Jochen Rindt, Emerson Fittipaldi, James Hunt, Mario Andretti, Alan Jones and Nelson Piquet. And it gave countless constructors and race teams their chance to fight at the top in grand prix racing.

The DFV’s towering achievements also included derivatives winning at Le Mans (with Mirage in 1975 and Rondeau in 1980) and 10 consecutive Indianapolis 500 triumphs. Surely no engine ever generated such huge value for money!

“The DFV gave countless teams their chance to fight at the top”

Subsequent grand prix successes with later power units kept the Blue Oval in lights for a while longer, the DFR derivative winning with Alessandro Nannini and Benetton in Japan in 1989; the HBA4 with Nelson Piquet and Benetton in Japan and Australia in 1990, and Canada in 1991; the HBA7 with Michael Schumacher and Benetton in Belgium in 1992; the HBA7/8 with Schumacher and Benetton (Portugal) and Ayrton Senna and McLaren (Brazil, Europe, Monaco, Japan and Australia) in 1993; the EC Zetec-R with Schumacher and Benetton in 1994 (Brazil, Pacific, Imola, Monaco, Canada, France, Hungary and Europe); the Ford Cosworth V10 CR-1 with Johnny Herbert and Stewart in Europe in 1999; and the RS1 with Giancarlo Fisichella and Jordan in Brazil in 2003 – Ford’s 176th and, thus far, final grand prix victory.

After a 20-year break, Ford CEO Jim Farley is determined to generate new successes.

Where that original story back in the ’60s read Ford – Cosworth – Lotus, this time it’s similar, but different. And the names run in a different order: Red Bull – Red Bull Powertrains – Ford. But for a while it could have been Red Bull – Red Bull Powertrains – Porsche…

Dietrich Mateschitz, surely one of the most important and influential characters in F1’s history, was a far-sighted leader. When he purchased the Ford-owned Jaguar team and turned it into Red Bull Racing for 2005, he brought to an end the Blue Oval’s disastrous last involvement in the category before its return this season. In Red Bull’s first year, the team relied on Ford power; then came Ferraris for 2006 and Renaults from 2007. That worked out very well, with four titles with Sebastian Vettel between 2010 and 2013. But the relationship curdled when Renault’s post-2014 power units failed to satisfy Red Bull’s lofty goals. From 2018 its second team, Scuderia Toro Rosso, used Honda power after the Japanese company split with McLaren, and for 2019 Red Bull followed suit. The result: four more world championships with Max Verstappen between 2021 and 2024.

But Mateschitz and Christian Horner had learned hard lessons in the later stages of their relationship with Renault and neither wanted to be beholden to an external supplier in the long term. They wanted their own engine and thus Mateschitz funded the creation of Red Bull Powertrains on the Red Bull Technology Campus in Milton Keynes. How appropriate that it’s housed in the Jochen Rindt Building. History matters…

“Red Bull’s mission to bring all aspects of its Formula 1 operations in-house through Red Bull Powertrains is an enormously exciting undertaking but also an extremely demanding one,” Horner said in 2021 when RBP was announced (securely ring-fenced from Honda Racing Developments’ sector of the building), “and we know that success will only be achieved by bringing in the best and brightest talent, by providing them with the right tools and by creating the right environment in which they can thrive.

“We certainly benefit from our campus being located in the UK where we have access to a huge wealth of engineering talent. Working with our new technical director, Ben Hodgkinson, and alongside key personnel retained from Honda Racing Development, each of the senior personnel bring experience, expertise and innovation to the Red Bull Powertrains programme and provide us with the strongest possible technical platform for the future.”

Porsche was an obvious candidate to help design and create future power units. A tentative deal was discussed to initiate a partnership whereby Porsche could activate an option to buy the team and all of its various activities, leaving Red Bull to withdraw from the sport when ‘Didi’ deemed the time was right. But neither he nor Christian was impressed by Porsche’s apparent wish to influence the decision-making from the outset. As a bedfellow, neither party found the other sufficiently attractive in the end, even though the Germans had been interested in particular by the hybridisation and synthetic fuel aspects.

Later still, after Mateschitz’s death on October 22, 2022, factions within the company started worrying that the engine side was far too expensive (something that amused many in the paddock given Red Bull’s massive profits) even though it had been their sorely missed founder’s pet project. Horner was smart enough to convince them that the main financial heavy lifting had been done, especially as the project had progressed so well that by July 6, 2023, when I was among a group of journalists he had shown round the engine factory, they had passed from the usual preliminary stages of single-cylinder engines on the test bench to the first pukka V6 prototypes.

Red Bull sought a more suitable partner, and Ford came into the frame late in 2022. The deal was announced in January 2023. Jim Farley is a decent racer himself and understood the sanctity of Red Bull’s racing culture. And in New York in February that year he made it clear that the deal was not just about a badge, but technology transfer.

“We will help them with their software for the battery control and the battery chemistry, the battery tech as we’re investing a lot in EVs,” Farley said. “We’re going to have two million EVs on the road in 2026, so we know a lot about EV batteries. And on the other hand, we can learn a lot from them [Red Bull] about telemetry, but especially about aero. Aero is becoming the most important thing in vehicle design now, and the best aerodynamics in the world are at Red Bull. So it’s a great exchange of technology.”

So, rather than Ford paying for Cosworth to design and build an engine which would be placed with Lotus, Red Bull had created its own engine factory to design and build a new 1.6-litre V6 to complete its self-determination, and Ford would pay to badge it. Nothing can be viewed as hinky about the Ford deal, especially with Dearborn contributing on the electrification side. A major new power unit creator plus the return of a huge manufacturer can only be good for F1.

With Honda, Red Bull had access to a depth of technological expertise generated over decades of racing at the highest levels on two and four wheels. Now it has to stand on its own two feet. But RBPT technical director Hodgkinson was a key figure in Mercedes’ domination of the first turbo-hybrid era, and doesn’t expect the ICE itself to be the biggest performance differentiator.

“There’s going to be quite a bit more for the driver to do. Max will give us an advantage there”

“All the power units will probably be more similar than in 2014,” he suggested back in that 2023 visit, adding recently: “We’ve now got sustainable fuels and we’ve lost the MGU-h, and there’s been a compression ratio limit and lots of tweaks to the regulations that reset the combustion technology, but it’s not a million miles away. The biggest differences are probably going to be on the ICE side, and our partner ExxonMobil has been vital in getting as much performance as we can out of the ICE with sustainable fuel. But it’s still a V6, and it’s still fundamentally the same.”

“The final phase of engine development will focus on driveability,” Ford Performance director Mark Rushbrook said prior to the Barcelona shakedown, which was the first real chance to work on reliability too. Despite F1’s heavily enforced secrecy, the DM01 power units – named in Dietrich Mateschitz’s honour – showed well. Isack Hadjar headed the first day’s times with 1min 18.159sec (though that was admittedly of little real significance), but when he crashed on the second day it took days to get the RB22 back on track.

Of course, a driver of Max Verstappen’s talent will be crucial in this new era, where the man at the wheel will play a greater role than previously. “The amount of power that you’ve got from the ERS is such a large amount of the performance of the power unit, and it can be deployed in different strategic ways,” Hodgkinson points out, “so there’s actually going to be quite a bit more for the driver to do. There’s going to be quite a lot of choices to make, and strategies. Max will give us an advantage there, because his ability to be able to process things while doing 200mph is absolutely world class.”

Max was cautiously optimistic. “We did a lot of laps and that was really the key,” he said of the shakedown. “We learned a lot and there are, of course, still a lot of things that we want to look into, but it’s a good start. So much work has gone into this power unit over the last few years and to see it then go into the car and on the first day, immediately do so many laps, was great. There were a lot of emotional faces in the garage and that was very special. We have hit the ground running quite well. We need time to understand the engine and make set-up changes, so you try to put as many laps on the board and try as many things as you can on the day. This is what this shakedown was about.”

Overall, Red Bull did 303 laps and Racing Bulls 319, with Max, Isack, Liam Lawson and newcomer Arvid Lindblad. That amounted to 2896km. Mercedes topped the charts with 5290km, with Ferrari next on 4619km, but in a test when sheer performance was far from the ultimate imperative, the Ford’s strong reliability was a source of great satisfaction to RBPT and a good indication that it is already at a respectable level.