
Red Bull’s champagne moment
Taken from Mark Sutton’s column ‘Japanese Joy’
This is Paul Monaghan on the podium with Seb, he’s the head of car engineering at Red Bull. Most of the time you want to keep your mouth and your eyes closed but he wanted all the champagne he could get! You’ve got to keep your eyes closed though; I’ve had times when I’ve been stood under the podium shooting upwards and champagne’s dripped down in to my eyes and it really stings! But in this moment there’s pure emotion; it seems to be that soaking the team member collecting the constructors’ trophy is a thank you from the driver! Paul is a big part of the team, works with Adrian Newey on the aero side, and I was watching him at the weekend actually as he’s a big photography nut. He had his camera focused on doing all the aero paint, I saw him in the garage taking photos to analyse all the paint. Whereas Newey was looking around at where the aero paint was going, Paul was going in to a bit more detail. He’s a nice guy and I’ve known him for a long time so it was good to see him on the podium collecting the trophy at the end of what was obviously a successful weekend for Red Bull.
