Red Bull’s domination of Formula 1 might wax and wane, but there is one area it continues to be market-leading: pulling off mind-boggling stunts with its F1 cars.
From demonstrations in crazy locations all over the world to hitching colour-coded caravans onto the back of Aston Martins at Zandvoort, Red Bull is F1’s single biggest asset when it comes to taking the show to the people.
And Red Bull’s most ambitious, crazy and sometimes seemingly impossible stunts take F1 cars to truly bizarre places.
We’ve seen yet another example of that following F1’s triple-header, but where does that rank among some of Red Bull’s greatest F1 stunts?
Here’s our take:
17th: Red Bull vs Leeds United
Red Bull’s latest stunt featured its Formula 2 driver/next-in-line for an F1 seat, Arvid Lindblad heading to Elland Road, the home of Championship winners Leeds United Football Club.
Red Bull became Leeds’s shirt sponsor from the 2024/25 season and celebrated Leeds’ return to the Premier League with a special drag race between Lindblad and three of Leeds’ players.
Willy Gnonto, Largie Ramazani and Isaac Schmidt were picked as the Club’s fastest players to sprint alongside Lindblad, who was at the wheel of Red Bull’s 2011 title-winning RB7.
They had to negotiate Elland Road’s turf and do a 180-degree turn in the opposition box before sprinting to the finish.
It was a cool stadium stunt, but Red Bull has set the bar so high with its previous major stunts…
16th: Verstappen's road trip to the Italian GP
The 2021 Italian Grand Prix will be best remembered for Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton’s big shunt and Daniel Ricciardo’s final F1 victory, but there was also a memorable road trip for Max Verstappen before then.
Verstappen drove through the streets of Palermo, including the Ballaro market, forest roads and stopped on his marks atop a boat to cap it all off.
It managed to top anything even Ferrari produced for the Monza race and made it feel as if it was Red Bull’s home race, not Ferrari’s. Subtle but great execution.
15th: Ricciardo's Aussie outback homecoming
When Daniel Ricciardo returned to the Red Bull F1 fold in 2023, it wasn’t long before he was back behind the wheel of one of its F1 cars as he took the RB7 through Australia’s iconic outback.
He raced alongside a Daniel Sanders-ridden motorbike that flew over the top of him, an aerobatic seaplane and Aussie enduro icon Toby Price tailed Ricciardo in his Trophy Truck.
To top it all off, Ricciardo headed to Bathurst to duel with Supercars legend Shane Van Gisbergen in his Red Bull Camaro across the iconic Mount Panorama circuit.
It’s the kind of stunt that makes you wish we could see F1 cars racing around Bathurst!
14th: Ricciardo vs Bath rugby club
In 2016 Red Bull released a video of Daniel Ricciardo and an RB8 from 2012 going up against an eight-man scrum from Bath Rugby.
A specially-engineered scrum machine and a rugby player-inspired flat nose for the RB8 were created to facilitate the face-off, with Red Bull’s video even showcasing the intense heat from the car’s engine and rear tyres, and the players’ bodies.
What counts against this video slightly is that it took place on private property, at the team’s swanky training facility. However, that did throw up the very cool image of Ricciardo sliding the car past the rugby players across the gravel.
13th: Jordan road trip + Dead Sea show run
The first time we were properly introduced to the concept of a Red Bull road trip was when David Coulthard explored Jordan in April 2016, ahead of a show run with Pierre Gasly on the banks of the Dead Sea.
The desert run posed a major challenge for Red Bull, as the intense heat took the engine temperature beyond 100 degrees and the car was sucking up sand and dust.
And via the Amman citadel to chariots and Roman soldiers in Jerash, a Salt City mosque to the Al-Khazne temple in Petra, this had more than a touch of the spectacular to go with the logistical challenge.
At the time, Coulthard said: “I’d say of all the journeys I’ve been on with the team, this one has been the most epic.”
12th: 'Dirt track' version of COTA
While longer cross-country road trips would be explored in later years, Red Bull’s 2011 takeover of Austin before the return of the United States Grand Prix took in lots of locations around the city.
And as each venue brought something to the table, leading up to a spectacular dirt track lap of an unpaved Circuit of the Americas, this could be considered the first time a simple show run was shunned in favour of more complex storytelling.
DC’s dirt road ‘escape’ from the ranch has him being chased by a car, a quad bike, horses and a helicopter. Bonus points if you spot the failed attempt from one rider to lasso the car!
11th: New York and the Lincoln Tunnel
It’s not unusual for Red Bull to be able to briefly take over a major city. But when that city is New York, it is already a little different. And when it involves clocking nearly 200mph in the Lincoln Tunnel, you see why this is on the list.
One year after their dirt track exploits, Red Bull and Coulthard returned to America to promote the 2012 US GP, and the F1 street track in New Jersey slated to be used the following year.
With a Liberty Island backdrop, a drive through Liberty State Park, a sample run through the New Jersey course that was never realised and the Lincoln Tunnel blast, Red Bull’s project was a massive undertaking.
The 190mph run through the tunnel is the star attraction. But Coulthard cracking on through residential areas is not far behind.
10th: Driving on a frozen lake in Montreal
Red Bull likes to use older-generation cars for show runs because of the V8 engine’s durability. But even this engine has its limits, which were tested in the Canadian winter.
In temperatures of -10 Celsius, Red Bull’s biggest problem was avoiding the axles freezing and locking, so the priority was to keep the cars warm instead of cool.
Sebastien Buemi was tasked with controlling the RB5 on ice, aided by specially produced tyres, with a run across a frozen lake and then a circuit that was mapped out loosely on the Montreal F1 track.
9th: A Rocky Mountains (and beach) road trip
In 2018, Red Bull’s F1 road trip concept evolved into an absolute monster. San Francisco, Monument Valley, Las Vegas, the Rocky Mountains and Miami Beach – it was truly worthy of the road trip name.
The lengths Red Bull went to for this were intense. The desire for sunrise and sunset shots meant days sometimes started at 4am, and ran until midnight. In between, there were still plenty of locations to hit to get the footage, and operationally Red Bull sends a very small crew.
Jacking up the ride height wasn’t enough for the beach running, as the coarse sand was like running on sandpaper and shredded the tyres.
All in all this was a massive undertaking from Red Bull and put an F1 car in not just one unusual place, but many.
It would feature further up the list, but it gets docked a couple of places because although it’s presented as Ricciardo and Verstappen, Patrick Friesacher is doing the driving. And we’re a stickler for authenticity.
8th: F1 car in a Vegas casino!
A few months before F1’s inaugural Las Vegas Grand Prix, Red Bull plonked an F1 car in a casino alongside some questionable (but humorous) acting from both Sergio Perez and Christian Horner.
The stunt involved Perez driving the RB7 car inside and outside of the casino, but probably the most impressive element was Perez racing in the Nevada desert against Bryce Menzies' Trophy Truck, which at one stage leapfrogs over the F1 car.
To top it off, the stunt ends with Perez’s Red Bull hanging off the top of the roof of the casino. Cinema.
7th: The New York sequel
What makes Perez’s road trip before the 2022 Miami Grand Prix so impressive and a worthy successor to Red Bull's original New York 2012 stunt, is its scale.
Red Bull manages to pack in so many iconic locations into Perez’s trip from New York to Miami, with the premise being that Perez misheard Horner’s instruction of the race being ‘in May’ as ‘being today’.
From pulling side by side with iconic yellow New York taxis to driving along the Florida coast to driving down Wall Street at night with a search light from an overhead helicopter lighting his path to driving along the Manhattan Bridge to making an F1 pitstop on 5th Avenue. This had everything.
6th: Dutch road trip
Two title-winning Red Bulls (RB7 and RB8) and months of work were required to realise four days of filming in which Verstappen and team-mate Alex Albon travelled to Zandvoort via windmills, shipping containers, a greenhouse, the Netherlands’ seat of government (The Hague) and a beach.
Temperatures were just over zero in January and it was so cold when they were filming the scenes in Rotterdam port that one of the starter motors broke, and then the back-up packed it in as well. They had to craft a replacement on site.
Other parts of the Dutch road trip encapsulate a variety of the normal problems on these kinds of events, including overheating while running at low speed, crowd control and checking roads for potholes and welding down manhole covers.
It had its own problems too, such as filming the cars drifting through a live action house, and postponing the final day of filming by an entire month because of torrential rain on the final day.
It’s the sheer quantity of tricky locations, and the challenges that had to be overcome that make it so impressive.
5th: Coulthard races an inverted plane
Coulthard discovered Czech Republic and Slovakia aboard the RB7 in 2021 and had an unusual companion above him.
The stunt’s showstopper features Coulthard racing against an inverted plane piloted by Red Bull Air Race world champion Martin Sonka.
“We have both have very limited vision out of our cockpits and for me to fly at such a low level and inverted, I more or less need to look to the front to be able to control the height of the plane,” Sonka explained.
“The driver also has to look to the front but because of the head and neck restraint F1 drivers use he can’t look up.
“So we solved the problem by placing a small mirror in front of him so he could see me and look to the front.”
Coulthard singled out Sonka’s contribution to this one: “When the aircraft is just a few metres above the RB7 and upside down, that is real, that is the skill of Martin. It’s a professional right at the top of his game.”
4th: Jani goes 18,000 feet up in the Himalayas
It’s been almost a decade and a half since Neel Jani and Red Bull tackled the Himalayas in 2011, a feat we had forgotten about entirely before compiling this list.
Offering a phenomenal view at around 18,000 feet, the Khardung La mountain pass quite literally took Red Bull and its demonstration team to new heights.
Red Bull needed to take oxygen bottles as the crew battled altitude sickness, and the reduced air intake for the engine - down around 20% - meant the car was barely keeping alive.
But Jani coped well, despite the first snow of the season and a road that was so potholed the the final few kilometres had to be abandoned and completed on the back of a truck.
However, given that happened at over 18,000 feet, we’ll let it slide and afford the Himalayan heroics a similarly high place in our rankings.
3rd: Donuts on a skyscraper helipad
Many will think of Coulthard doing donuts on the helipad of the Burj Al Arab hotel when they think of Red Bull putting an F1 car in crazy places.
Named the Seven Star Spin project, the nauseatingly high feat claims the third step on a podium of bonkers ideas. The consequences had this gone wrong is part of why it ranks so highly.
Rigorous tests were undertaken on the ground and on the helipad to test its surface for weight tolerance and grip, and there was a concern that wind speeds greater than 10mph would force Red Bull to cancel a run it described as one of the “scariest” it has done.
Everything about this shattered preconceptions about what an F1 promo could be. The car was transported by helicopter so the damn thing was also airborne before reaching the almost 700-foot high helipad for Coulthard to do some donuts.
When DC hammers the throttle it is a heart-in-mouth moment for those involved, and those of us simply watching the end product from the safety of sea-level.
2nd: Zero gravity pitstop
What do you do if you’ve conquered the art of the Formula 1 pitstop? Conduct one in zero gravity.
Aided by the Russian space agency, and at 33,000 feet on board a cosmonaut training plane, Red Bull’s mechanics and its car experienced weightlessness lasting around 22 seconds. These are called parabolas, where the plane climbs at a 45 degree angle, then falls at 45 degrees.
One mechanic described the first experience of dealing with the phenomenon as “Bambi-on-ice”. Another headbutted the front wing with their helmet.
The exercise required around 80 parabolas, putting the personnel through an extreme physical challenge. Preparation included a styrofoam mock-up set and a week’s worth of flights. The RB1, Red Bull’s 2005 car, was picked because it’s smaller than its successors.
With around 22 seconds of zero gravity to play with, filming each part was limited to 15 seconds to ensure the car and equipment could be rapidly secured before the period of weightlessness ended.
No wonder this challenge stands out as Red Bull’s most technically and logistically demanding.
1st: Downhill ski race
The men in charge of running Red Bull’s cars on these projects admit they don’t quite know how they pulled this one off. And that, combined with the sheer spectacle of an F1 car tackling a ski slope, means the Kitzbool run locked down the #1 slot very early on.
On day one the car only managed 20 feet out of the garage before sinking in the snow. Overnight some snowchains were made locally and Red Bull spent the next night modifying the car to fit them, such as taking the brake ducts off and trimming the floor.
Even once it became possible, the prospect of Verstappen attacking utterly unsuitable terrain for an F1 car was dicey.
Mark Willis, Red Bull’s support team coordinator, said of the prospect: “The first time he had to drive off the edge of the mountain down the bottom of the ski slope, I was hesitant about sending him. It was very daunting watching him head over the edge, hoping he was going to come back.”
But Verstappen did come back. And in front of 3500 spectators, he committed to an alpine run like no other. The setting, the conditions, the surface, the ‘wow factor’ - this one simply has it all, edging out the zero-gravity pitstop with a slim victory in how spectacular the end product was.
