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Red Bull Racing F1 Car: Owners’ Workshop Manual, Haynes 2011
My interest in motor racing and Formula 1 goes back to my teens, if not earlier. Having been brought up in the motor trade, as soon as I was able to drive I would go to Silverstone for both practice and race days. But that was in the days of Jim Clark and Graham Hill, with whom racegoers could literally rub shoulders in the paddock. However, career, home and family had their inevitable effect and my interest became limited to watching the races on Sunday afternoons, while being entertained by Murray Walker’s idiosyncratic commentaries.
Title Red Bull Racing F1 Car 2012(RB6) Owners’ Workshop Manual
Authors Steve Rendle
Publisher Haynes Publication date July 2011
Reviewer Graham Jeffery BSc (Hons) CEng FIED FIMechE ISBN 978 0 85733 099 4
Fast forward almost half a century and I found myself watching the end of the 2011 Singapore Grand Prix from the Singapore Flyer, incidentally the largest observation wheel in the world. Sebastian Vettel had his ninth of a total of 11 wins during the season in the Red Bull Racing RB7 car, on his way to winning the drivers’ championship. How things have changed in the past 50 years: motor racing is now big business, with huge sponsorship deals and lavish corporate hospitality.
The Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual for the RBR F1 car is obviously a spin-off from the sponsorship business. It gives more visibility to the name of a product that has no connection with automotive engineering other than providing finance and gaining exposure on a high-technology, high-speed advertising hoarding. I actually heard this description of an F1 car some years ago at a technical presentation, from the head of an F1 team, no less.
The manual, is, unsurprisingly, written around the RB6, the 2010 model – RBR was hardly likely to release details of its 2011 car. On first picking up the book, with its full-colour CAD illustration of the RB6 on the cover, my immediate expectation was that it would be full of action shots of the cars, with some relatively superficial information about their design and engineering. However, whilst there are certainly numerous photographs, I soon discovered that the book does give a good insight into the engineering and construction of the cars and I found it quite absorbing.
The major components of the car are described in some detail, with photographs, diagrams and 3-D CAD illustrations. Presumably, RBR was quite content to release such detailed information about the 2010 car, as, by the time the manual was published, Vettel and the 2011 car were well on the way to winning both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships. By then, the competition would, presumably, be able to extract very little of real use to them.
The one major system that is not illustrated in any detail is, disappointingly for me, the engine. There are a few photographs of external views, a single photograph
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