Red Bull Racing’s Team Principal Christian Horner, one of Formula One’s most tactical minds, caught up with Boss Hunting’s Tom Kilmister at the start of the 2017 Grand Prix season, to discuss racing and Hisense.
It’s day one of Grand Prix one for the season. How are you approaching the first practice session here in Melbourne?
It’s a little bit like the first day back at school — everybody’s in a new uniform and you’re just itching to get going. It’s the start of what is a very long journey and it’s the first opportunity to see how we fare against our opponents. From here, it’s just a development race, flat out until the end of November to get performance on the car.
You’ve had a long offseason. A raft of technical and rule changes to the cars. How does your partnership with Hisense benefit the Red Bull Racing Formula One team?
Red Bull Racing is absolutely at the cutting edge in everything we do in Formula One, and if we can get any kind of advantage on our opponents, then we’ll chase all those details. Our partnership with Hisense is now in its third year and it’s been fantastic to see new TV product unveiled, and how quickly the quality of technology improves and changes. It’s constantly evolving — a bit like the Grand Prix car.
“The Hisense “megawall” at Red Bull Racing’s headquarters in Milton Keynes has been a talking point in F1 circles for a long time. It has absolutely revolutionised the way we work.”
Can you go into more detail about how and why Hisense supports the team?
We’ve got I think the biggest TV in Europe, and one of the biggest in the world live-linked from trackside, wherever we are in the world, back to the factory in Milton Keynes to enable our team of engineers to collaborate in real time.
We’ve got probably 50 engineers working off this huge Hisense TV, looking at all the content we see including all the timing screens, all the visuals from the garage and importantly all the data analysis and race statistics coming through as well. They can identify immediate problems watching the TV. It helps that Hisense picture quality and detail is so true to life.
We’re restricted by the amount of personnel we’re allowed to have working on the car at the Grand Prix, so this connection back to the factory with the quality of visuals that Hisense technology can provide, is like having extra staff at the circuit. It’s insane. In fact, our engineers will be arriving for work right now (that’s midnight in the UK) for the on-track debrief with the team around 11.30am AEST here in Albert Park.
“They’ll be interacting all the way through every session throughout the weekend on a Hisense TV. It’s a fantastic piece of equipment for us. It’s like something out of a James Bond Movie.”
F1 technical matters aside, let’s talk driver management. Red Bull Racing has quite an affinity with Aussie drivers. 2017 will be the 11th season Red Bull Racing has an Australian in at least one seat. What’s up with that?
Well we can nearly understand them (laughs). They can do strange things like “shoeys” but I mean Mark and Daniel are both very different personalities, and they’ve both been great to us. We love Australians.
Tom Kilmister: Thanks to Hisense for hosting Boss Hunting in Red Bull Racing’s suite for the entirety of this year’s Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne. Stay tuned for our review of Hisense new Series 8 + 9 TVs later this year. Series 9 will be available in massive 75 and 85-inch versions.
Find out more about Hisense 4K ULED TVs here.
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