Red Bull make surprisingly-priced purchase from Ford to kick off new F1 venture - On This Day

On 15 November 2004, Ford Motor Company confirmed it had sold Jaguar Racing to Red Bull, closing the book on a troubled factory project and opening the door to what would become one of Formula 1's most successful teams.

The American manufacturer simultaneously confirmed the divestment of engine builder Cosworth to Champ Car owners Kevin Kalkhoven and Gerald Forsythe, drawing a line under its wider involvement in grand prix racing.

No official transaction figure was ever published, but it was revealed Ford had sold the team for a nominal $1, on condition that Red Bull committed to funding operations and ploughing hundreds of millions of dollars — believed to be $400 million — into the project over the following seasons.

Ford had first signalled its intention to quit F1 in September 2004, after a strategic review concluded there was no longer a compelling business case for any of its brands to remain in the championship.

Ford group vice-president Richard Parry-Jones said at the time that the move marked "the passing of an era," adding: "After over 35 years in the sport, deciding to exit F1 was a very tough decision for us to make."

Jaguar's struggles were rooted in soaring costs and financial strain across Ford's core road car business, with restructuring and job losses at its Coventry manufacturing base coinciding with the team's decline on track.

Ford had concluded it could not match the roughly $200 million budgets of rivals such as Ferrari, Mercedes and BMW, making a backmarker campaign under a premium badge untenable.

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A costly Ford failure

Jaguar technical director Gary Anderson later placed much of the blame on Ford's internal culture rather than a lack of resources.

"We had some very clever individuals from Ford working with us, but they were tied up by Ford's bureaucracy," Anderson said years later.

"This made it very difficult for them to express themselves and get on with it rather than protecting themselves from the people at Ford, who were themselves just looking after their pensions and being yes men to their superiors."

Parry-Jones struck a more conciliatory tone as the sale was finalised, praising the backing the team had received from its own staff. "I am really pleased that Red Bull has bought Jaguar Racing," he said.

"Since we announced our intention to sell our Formula 1 businesses back in September, we have had fantastic support from both the management and employees of Jaguar Racing."

For Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz, the purchase of the Milton Keynes squad, originally built by Jackie Stewart before its sale to Ford in 2000, represented the logical next step after a decade of motorsport investment.

"There are things which, alongside their strategic fit and logicality, also give me personally a great deal of pleasure," Mateschitz said. "Our own Red Bull team in Formula 1 is definitely one of those." He called the takeover "a provisional summit of our 10-year involvement in motor sport."

Mateschitz did not stop there. Less than a year later, he signed an agreement with Paul Stoddart during the Belgian Grand Prix weekend in September 2005 to acquire the Minardi outfit outright, with official ownership transferring to Red Bull on 1 November 2005.

Stoddart made preserving the Faenza base and its workforce a condition of the sale, while Red Bull's motivation was rather different to the Jaguar deal: this purchase was intended primarily as a proving ground for its growing roster of junior drivers.

Minardi, the perennial Italian backmarker that had contested 643 grands prix without a win or a podium to its name, gave Red Bull a second chassis on the grid and a pipeline for its young talent.

That Faenza entry has since undergone several transformations. It became Scuderia Toro Rosso for 2006, an Italian rendering of the Red Bull name chosen to honour the team's roots, before being rebranded Scuderia AlphaTauri ahead of 2020 to promote Red Bull's fashion and apparel label on the global stage.

Ahead of the 2024 season, the team adopted its current identity as Racing Bulls, built around the RB chassis name to tie it more closely into the wider Red Bull corporate structure alongside commercial partners Visa and Cash App.

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From Jaguar's wreckage to a six-time champion

Twenty-two years on, that provisional summit has become one of the defining success stories in modern F1.

Red Bull has gone on to win six constructors' championships and 136 of its 913 race entries, climbing from the back of the Jaguar grid to become a dominant force through the Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen eras alike.

Ford's own return to the paddock has come full circle too. The manufacturer re-entered F1 in 2026 as technical partner to Red Bull Powertrains, under a deal agreed back in 2023 running through at least 2030, supplying battery cell technology, electric motor design and control software for the new hybrid regulations.

Ford chief executive Jim Farley framed the comeback around the company's broader direction.

"Ford's return to Formula 1 with Red Bull Racing is all about where we are going as a company, increasingly electric, software-defined, modern vehicles and experiences," he said.

Ford Performance director Mark Rushbrook detailed the scope of that collaboration earlier this year.

"When we arrived, we said that Ford wanted to focus on the electric side. And that's where we've put our main focus," he said. "But beyond that, we've been able to contribute our expertise in controls and calibration to combine the combustion engine with electrification."

The results through 2026 have been strong if not spectacular. Red Bull sits third in the constructors' standings with 415 points and three wins after 20 rounds, behind Mercedes and Ferrari but ahead of McLaren, as the Milton Keynes-based squad continues building its in-house power unit project from scratch.

Rushbrook has stressed the value of real-world data as the partnership beds in.

"As much as we can see in our offline simulation, even using the driver in the simulator, getting their real feedback from the track is very important," he said.