Nissan’s luxury brand Infiniti is the latest and most prominent sponsor of Red Bull Racing, and it is wasting no time in milking the potential. Infiniti has plans to collaborate with the F1 champions on a high performance road car project, it has been revealed.
“Our relationship with Red Bull is only five races old, but the trajectory for it is to move on and work more closely together. One way of doing that is on a road car project,” said Simon Sproule, Nissan’s Corporate VP for Global Motorsport.
The Brit cited the well regarded Renault Clio Williams as a “credible” and successful example of a collaboration between a road car maker and a race team. He said that whichever base car chosen will have to be substantially reworked and would have to be re-homologated before it can go on sale.
The Clio Williams was launched in 1992, but it was entirely engineered by Renault. This collaboration is likely to involve real F1 engineers from Red Bull. “There’s no reason not to be involved. We have proved that Red Bull can take on the likes of Mercedes in F1 despite their heritage and a natural evolution of that would be to use our expertise we have in [developing] road cars,” said RBR team boss Christian Horner.
Infiniti has a two-year sponsorship deal in place with Red Bull, and they expect the fruits of this collaboration to be on sale within 18 to 24 months from now.
© 2011 Paul Tan's Automotive News. All Rights Reserved.
This story originally appeared on Paul Tan's Automotive News on Tue, 24 May 11 02:53:53 +0000.
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