The pre-season car and team launches are now officially underway and the excitement is especially high this year, with the huge changes in the rules that are in effect from this year onwards.
Oracle Red Bull Racing became the first team to launch their car this year (Haas only launched their livery last week), as today they unveiled the RB18, its car for the 2022 Formula 1 season.
In a much-hyped launch event that put fans at the centre of hosting the event; several motorsport content creators hosted live streams of the event on their channels on their preferred platforms. This method of hosting the event has been unique amongst the other teams and, if it’s been proven that it can work well, could be utilized more in the future by Red Bull and possibly other teams as well.
The car will be driven by Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez for the 2022 season, with Verstappen having the all-important number 1 on his car. He will be the first person to use the number 1 in Formula One since Sebastian Vettel was the defending champion for the same Red Bull team in 2014. The car that was shown looks broadly similar to the generic 2022 car that was unveiled at last year’s British Grand Prix, although by the time pre-season testing starts could look very different.
The car’s livery has also been officially revealed via this launch event, which has remained broadly the same as previous Red Bull liveries except with Honda logos no longer present on the car and prime placement of the team’s new title sponsor Oracle Corporation, a multi-national cloud computer technology company based in Austin, Texas.