Modifying a Red Bull F1 Car Into a Drift Machine Is Way Harder Than It Sounds

A Formula 1 car is a purpose-built vehicle with an extremely short list of possible uses. It's not designed to be the fastest car in a straight line; that's a Top Fuel dragster. It's not designed to be the fastest on an oval; that's an IndyCar racer. And while it can be driven in wet conditions, its own fragility—and not to mention extremely low ride height—renders it useless outside of a world-class road course. Making matters even worse is the fact that F1 cars are far from being plug-and-play machines, requiring loads of computers and engineers just to fire up the engine.

The radical-thinking folks at Red Bull, however, have managed to tweak F1 cars to run everywhere from skyscraper heliports to frozen lakes, and even the Florida Everglades over the years, defying their very single-purpose nature. But how exactly do they do it?

I recently caught up with Australian F1 superstar Daniel Ricciardo and Red Bull Racing's Heritage Team Manager Tony Burrows to find out what it takes to run and drive an F1 car on the streets.

From Monaco to the Music City

The arsenal for the Red Bull Showrun Nashville consisted of a modified 2011 RB7 with a shrieking V8 engine (pre-hybrid era), which a fully recovered Ricciardo used to generate enough tire smoke to engulf hundreds of country music bars and thousands of fans lining the world-famous Broadway Street. More importantly, though, this marked the Honey Badger's return to the cockpit of an F1 car after he severely hurt his hand in a crash at the Dutch Grand Prix in August.

Now, bringing an F1 car—or two—to these somewhat remote locations (in the sense that they are far from world-class race tracks) is no easy task and requires lots of logistical work.

"There are 12 of us in the team responsible for bringing two RB17s around the world," Burrows told The Drive. "There are two engine engineers, two systems engineers, mechanics, management, marketing, and so forth. We have our own jobs back at the factory in Milton Keynes with the racing team, but with the banning of testing we find ourselves with a lot more time on our hands so we get asked to go out and have some fun."

Red Bull F1 designers and engineers spend nearly every waking hour optimizing their race cars to go as quickly, safely, and efficiently as possible around the season's race tracks. With most F1 races taking place about the same time every year, teams build enormous caches of historical performance data to help them fine-tune their cars. You can see how randomly showing up at the parking lot of the United Center in Chicago or Nashville's downtown streets—places where very few people knew F1 even existed until the sport's recent explosion—would be extremely unorthodox.

"The biggest challenge at every Showrun has to do with the surface of the road, so the smoother the road, the better the show will be because we can go faster and we have a lot more control of the car," said Burrows. "In roads in bad condition, the car is slightly out of control when going over the surface so we have to keep the speeds down.

"Safety is obviously paramount so it helps when the course is as wide as possible so we can do our thing safely. Sometimes when you go places and it's so narrow you don't feel safe to do anything. This is a great track here in Nashville with some big spaces and big intersections where we can really show off," he added.

Drivers, too, typically race on a lot of the same tracks from a very young age, as the junior racing series typically visit the same venues as the bigger series. This means it's not very often that drivers have to learn completely new tracks. Even as a veteran of the sport, Ricciardo still has to adjust his mindset, vision, and reflexes to driving in such a unique environment as Broadway Street.

"I always worry that the donut space is super narrow, so I'm always like, 'Uhhhhh!' But this space was pretty generous and we had plenty of room," Ricciardo told The Drive. "There was a bit of water in some areas so it was a bit slippery but it was okay. You know, it's not about going super fast—as long as we can create some noise and some smoke the people are pretty happy. Once you get the first set of donuts done you can feel a bit more relaxed."

While Ricciardo and Burrows analyzed the street surface the morning of the show to identify potential hazards like deep ruts or oversized potholes, Ricciardo had another more important issue at hand—literally.