From the Pulpit

Do you think Formula One's biggest sponsor, Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz, is happy that he's getting value for money from his investment? Is F1 selling enough cans of Red Bull for him?

It's a moot point. He currently owns two teams, at a combined running cost to him of around US$325 million per annum (around US$250 for Red Bull Racing and around US$75 million for Scuderia Toro Rosso).

Scuderia Toro Rosso is part-owned by Mateschitz's great friend Gerhard Berger - the terms and conditions of whose part-ownership, as I'm given to understand them, include an obligation to make best efforts to attract sponsorship.

With that in mind, he's hired the shrewd, experienced and professional Jim Wright (ex-marketing director, Williams ); Wright now works from Monaco, alongside Berger, as his sponsorship-acquisition man.

So far, however, no sponsorship has been acquired - other than official suppliers and other Red Bull-associated supporters such as Bridgestone, Amik, Avus, USAG, Volkswagen and Hangar-7, whose names appear on the team's website (itself a sub-section of www.redbullf1.com).

Dietrich Mateschitz © LAT

That isn't Jim's fault, believe me. As I say, he's a capable guy, and his track record at Williams was good. No, it's because acquiring sponsorship for Scuderia Toro Rosso is an almost impossible task.

Why so? Because the team, its ethos and even its cars' livery are dominated by Red Bull - indeed its name is nothing more than a cute Italian rendition of 'Team Red Bull'.

And, bearing both those facts in mind, if you were (a) the marketing director of a company whose board had decided that they wanted to sponsor a Red Bull-dominated F1 team, you'd choose Red Bull Racing, wouldn't you? And if you were (b) the marketing director of a company whose board had decided that they wanted to sponsor a Italian-sounding F1 team, you'd choose Scuderia Ferrari, wouldn't you?

Having said that, Ferrari's sponsorship rate card is stratospherically costlier than Scuderia Toro Rosso's, and rightly so.

And Red Bull Racing haven't been conspicuously successful in terms of sponsorship-acquisition thus far, either: their website's roster of sponsors also contains a goodly number of official suppliers and other Red Bull-associated supporters. For the record, the complete list reads as follows: Bridgestone, Renault, Rauch, Quehenberger, Metro, Mac Tools, UGS, Platform, MSC Software, Leica and Hangar-7.

Red Bull itself - the unctuous carbonated cordial, I mean - is a very youth-focused product.

Moreover, Red Bull is a young company, which can trace its origins as far back only as 1982 - when Mateschitz, then working as a travelling salesman in Asia for the Blendax toothpaste company (now a part of Proctor & Gamble), sampled in Thailand a cheap tonic, sold in a brown bottle, called Krating Daeng (literally, 'red bull').

He liked it - and, fearless entrepreneur that he was and is, moved fast to agree terms with the then owners, TC Pharmaceuticals, to create Red Bull GmbH in 1984.

Red Bull was first sold three years later, in 1987, and only in Austrian petrol stations. But, over the next two or three years, something rather strange happened: trendy young Austrian snowboarders took to the drink, and began taking it to nightclubs, where vodka-Red Bull became a cult cocktail among adolescent ravers. Its image was set - for ever.

By 1992 Red Bull was being exported to nearby Hungary and Slovenia, and to Germany and Switzerland by 1994. In 1997 it was first sold in the United States, but only in California, and it only went national across all 50 States in 2002. And, by using a word-of-mouth marketing strategy, subtly and surreptitiously encouraging cool kids to create a buzz around a new 'energy drink', Red Bull's Stateside operation achieved extraordinary success.

Mark Webber and David Coulthard © LAT

Why am I telling you all this? Because, if F1 is worth anything to Red Bull, it should be an extension of that strategy. It should be youthful and edgy, trendy and cool. Clearly, it would be nice if the sport's 76-year-old commercial rights holder, Bernie Ecclestone, were a bit edgier, trendier and/or cooler (he can't really do anything about his age!), and better still if the sport were therefore marketed in an edgier, trendier and/or cooler way.

To be fair, Red Bull's spectacular Grand Prix parties are an attempt to drag the sport in that direction, as is its irreverent paddock-distributed in-house mag, Red Bulletin; but F1 is still F1, and you can't change a sport's cultural image via a few VIP shindigs and a magazine that few fans ever see.

So, assuming Ecclestone isn't going to come over all edgy/trendy/cool any time soon, why doesn't Red Bull do more? Why, at the very least, don't the guys in charge make their team(s) a little more like what we all assumed they'd become when those two solid-but-unsexy ex-Jaguar Racing men, team principal Tony Purnell and managing director Dave Pitchforth, were bundled out within weeks of Red Bull buying Jag Rac? Why don't they make their team(s) visibly edgy, trendy and cool? And, above all, youthful?

Why, indeed, for example, does Red Bull Racing currently field the oldest driver pairing on the 2007 grid?

Why, when McLaren's 25-year-old Fernando Alonso and 22-year-old Lewis Hamilton (the youngest driver pairing) are converting previously apathetic general sports fans to F1 all over the world (and, axiomatically, making them positively aware of not only McLaren but also Mercedes-Benz, the team's sponsors and, lest we forget, Bridgestone), are the most youth-focused team in the sport running a 36-year-old Scot with a grey beard (David Coulthard) and a 30-year-old Aussie whose serious, hard-working image is hardly likely to wow the nightclub crowd?

Don't get me wrong: both David and Mark are very good drivers. The magazine of which I've been editor in chief these past 10 years (and counting), F1 Racing, has published screeds of complimentary copy about both men, and rightly so.

But I'm making a marketing point here, not a racing point - and, whether we like it or not, F1 is now as much about marketing as it is about racing; Coulthard's and Webber's images jar with what Red Bull appears to be all about.

So what, in a nutshell, are the problems, and what can be done to fix them?

Alex Barron testing the All American Racers Eagle-Toyota at Homestead in 1999 © LAT

Well, in a nutshell, problem 1 is that Scuderia Toro Rosso has little brand collateral of its own, and problem 2 is that Red Bull Racing's drivers are too old for the team's image.

But here's the rub: both problems can be fixed, I fancy, and in the same fell swoop.

Here's my fix. At the end of the 2007 season, Coulthard should move to another team to which youth is less important a brand value - or retire.

He hates it when journalists use that r-word about him, because he contends that (a) he's still driving as well as ever, (b) he's still enjoying it, (c) he's still very fit, and (d) experience and expertise of the kind that he has in spades are increasingly useful to 21st-century Grand Prix teams. And he's right on all counts. He just doesn't have to drive for a team which is owned by a company whose target marketing audience is hip, happenin' teenagers, that's all.

Coulthard would be a good signing for Toyota, for example, assuming they give up on Ralf Schumacher at the end of the year. David and Jarno Trulli would be an excellent pairing.

Besides, in Webber, Red Bull have a driver who is (a) six years Coulthard's junior and (b) can offer everything DC can (in terms of speed, experience, expertise, fitness etc). So Red Bull Racing should retain Mark for 2008, no question about it.

Webber's team-mate for 2008 should in my view be Tonio Liuzzi, whose time at Scuderia Toro Rosso has made him somehow invisible - an odd outcome to befall a good-looking and talented 26-year-old disco-dancing aficionado who was born and raised in a place as exotic-sounding as Locorotondo, Italy.

What, then, of Scuderia Toro Rosso in 2008? Ah, well, here's the most radical bit of my thesis: the team should retain Scott Speed - because although, lap for lap, Liuzzi has usually got the better of Speed over the 20-odd Grands Prix they've driven together as Scuderia Toro Rosso teammates, the gap hasn't been large. Besides, and perhaps even more important, Scott is American.

And that gives Dietrich Mateschitz a wonderful opportunity, because one of the conditions that pertained to Red Bull's purchase of Minardi from Paul Stoddart in late 2005 was that the team would continue to be based in Faenza, Italy, until at least the end of the 2007 season.

It may continue to be based in Faenza for a lot longer than that - or it may not - but, either way, there's nothing in the small print that says it must continue to be called Scuderia Toro Rosso, or even that it should continue to have an overtly Italian flavour.

Marco Andretti © LAT

So why not recreate and rename the team, for 2008, as Red Bull-All American Racers (reinventing the name made so famous and so beloved in motorsport circles on both sides of the Atlantic between 1965 and 2000 by the great Port Jefferson [New York] -born Dan Gurney), and hire 20-year-old Marco Andretti, from Nazareth (Pennsylvania ), to drive alongside 24-year-old Scott Speed, from Manteca (California )?

Okay, in F1 terms, Andretti Jnr may be (loosely) contracted to Honda at the moment, but we all know that such contracts are made to be broken, and the Brackley-based team wouldn't be able to offer Marco a race drive for 2008, would they (not unless they got rid of either Jenson Button or Rubens Barrichello, anyway , and I doubt if they'd want to discuss either option openly, which they'd probably have to if they were aggressively to challenge Red Bull's right to poach Marco and race him in 2008 )?

And, besides, who'd even want to race for Honda in F1 right now, or even in 2008? I wouldn't be surprised if Mario, Marco's granddaddy, is already secretly planning to steer an F1 course for his grandson that involves giving the troubled Brackley team a wide berth.

Moreover, Mateschitz has done many far bolder things in his professional life than take on a man as beleaguered as Honda's Nick Fry - and, when he's done so, he's usually come out smelling of roses (and dollars).

But, above all, Marco is quick. And if someone somewhere couldn't get a hefty marketing buzz (yes, and acquire plenty of sponsors, too) out of a stars-'n'-stripes liveried All American Racers F1 team, with a couple of all-American boys driving the two cars, one bearing the surname of America's foremost racing dynasty (Andretti) and the other bearing the fastest motorsport surname of all time (Speed) ... then, for Chrissakes, I give up.

Come on, Dietrich, make it happen. You'd have Bernie eating out of your hand. And just think how many cans of Red Bull you'd sell to young clubbers in the States...