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Ken Gratton14 Mar 2014
NEWS

Infiniti and RBR working closer together

Prestige car manufacturer and struggling F1 team develop stronger ties
Infiniti has "stepped up" in its sponsorship of the Red Bull Racing F1 team, according to the prestige car company's F1 guru, Andreas Sigl. 
"After two years of dating we got married," Sigl drily told a packed room at Monash University earlier this week. 
The timing might have been better. Infiniti has crossed the line from lesser sponsor status to 'naming' partner, and providing extended technical assistance just as RBR grapples with new hybrid-based technology for the 2014 season. 
But there's a synergy now; both organisations are feeling their way with hybrid-drive technology in their respective fields. Infiniti is not in a panic after RBR's showing in Bahrain, says Sigl, who welcomes the latest GP rule changes. 
"I think the good news is that it's heading the same way as we are heading, in terms of sustainable performance. But of course it also gets very complicated... 
"Even if [RBR is] not going in as favourite this weekend, it's a long season. 
"It's not going to be decided this weekend... it's more a question of catching up and finding the reliability.
Sigl says that the predictability of previous seasons is very much a thing of the past with the migration to the new hybrid-drive technology, and even ahead of race strategy the teams will be focused first on reliability. 
"Tactics will come once reliability and everything is sorted out," he confirmed.
Sigl recognises that the new rules will be difficult for a TV audience to comprehend fully, offering an anecdote from the father of RBR driver Sebastian Vettel. 
"He said: 'In the past, it was you and me running to the finish line with this cup – and whoever gets there first is the winner. Now it's you and me running – and whoever has the most coffee [left in the cup] is the winner."
"I'm a bit more concerned about [explaining] that complexity to the viewers, because there's so much going on that the average guy watching TV would barely understand all the exciting stuff."
Infiniti's sponsorship of Red Bull Racing was a good fit for the brand, says Sigl, because a major event like the Olympics "only happens every four years" and a global sport like grand slam tennis is "a stretch to tell that story" from the perspective of a performance car brand. 
"F1 actually made it through that initial filter with a good result."
The race calendar in 2011, with the AGP in Melbourne kicking off the season, presented an excellent opportunity for Infiniti to announce it would launch into the Australian market. 
"It's a huge global audience..." Sigl says of Formula One.
The sport is providing a useful springboard for Infiniti to achieve market awareness of its own brand, says Sigl. Exposure from the media through F1 is reportedly worth US $250 million to Infiniti. Sigl won't reveal what the company spent to achieve that exposure, but he says that it is actually less than the return on investment. 
"The money is on the right horse," Sigl also acknowledged, explaining that Infiniti's relationship with Red Bull Racing has been fruitful on both sides. 
While RBR's facility at Milton Keynes is a self-contained mini research and development centre, the race team was lacking the resources of other teams in F1. 
"If you look at Red Bull Racing, as an independent team, they didn't have this kind of 'deep toolbox', like Ferrari has... we just offered it up and said: 'we have 19,000 engineers'. They have 400 in Milton Keynes," explained Sigl.
"We have a technical centre in Cranfield, which is just 15 minutes [down] the road from Milton Keynes; so now we have an on-going relationship, with some of our engineers going over every month to go through stuff."
An Infiniti electrical engineer, an expert on hybrid drivetrains and energy management, has been embedded with the RBR team, according to the Infiniti exec. And Cranfield has a climate chamber that RBR can use to assess heat resistance for environments such as the Middle East, where the F1 circus competes.
As a concrete example of technology crosspollination, Sigl mentioned the development work on magnesium shift paddles for the RB10 race car. While RBR has undoubted high-level skills working with carbon fibre and 3D printed components in resin, Infiniti has more expertise with handling magnesium as a material. And in an ironic twist, Sigl points out that shift paddles were developed in F1 and migrated to road cars, but in this specific instance, the road-car product has made its return to the F1 cockpit. 
"Now, suddenly, they're finishing that loop."

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Written byKen Gratton
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