Red Bull culture explained: 'There are no excuses'

As Red Bull's Head of Driver Academy, Guillaume Rocquelin is responsible for training Red Bull talent. He does so using the Red Bull culture, but what exactly is that? Speaking to GPblog, the former race engineer explains.

The Red Bull Junior Team

Red Bull was there first in Formula 1 with its own development programme. Even before the F1 teams Red Bull Racing and Toro Rosso (now AlphaTauri) were founded, Helmut Marko was already looking for talent. First to sponsor them, when the teams were in place, it became a real route to train F1 winners.

Since 2022, Rocquelin has been responsible for guiding those talents. Marko is still the man who scouts the talents, but once in the Red Bull Junior Team, it is up to 'Rocky' to train those talents. "It's a very fundamental part of the development process to integrate these junior drivers within the Red Bull F1 team organisation and culture," the Frenchman told GPblog.

If Red Bull's organisation and culture are so important, it is of course interesting to know exactly what that Red Bull culture entails. Rocquelin, who won four world titles as Sebastian Vettel's race engineer and was also involved in Max Verstappen's successes, can give a good idea of that.

The Red Bull culture

"That's a difficult question," begins 'Rocky' when asked to define Red Bull's culture. "I think that the general part of it is purely how we operate. So how we do things so that it processes, you know reports, analysis, research things. That's how we would do our job in terms of the operation side of things but it also there's a culture literally on how we do these things, which is there are no excuses with."

"We do things slightly differently, push the boundaries, coming second is not good enough, we need to get the job done. That's how we try to impress more drivers as well, they need to come with those characteristics of being slightly maverick, thinking outside the box and ultimately getting the results. Winning is the end result but it's how we go about these things, particularly the Academy is based on data, science and hard work. That's what we try to pass on to them," the Frenchman concludes.

Want to read more about the Red Bull Junior Team? Then also read Rocky's story on finding the right characteristics in talent or which talents Helmut Marko finds interesting from other F1 teams.