AlphaTauri

Debut:  Bahrain 2006 (as Toro Rosso who they still are regardless of what some Marketing bell end would tell you)

Grands Prix: 268

Constructor’s Championships: 0

Driver’s Championships: 0

Wins: 1

Team Principal: Franz Tost

Drivers:

Daniil Kvyat                                                                      Pierre Gasly

Significant Others: Helmut Marko: sour-faced former ski instructor now sour-faced driving instructor -if your driving instructor typically woke up in a coffin each morning and listed his main hobbies as hanging out with virgins and achieving immortality via a carefully controlled secret sauce liquid diet

History: Previously Minardi, then Toro Rosso: the marketing equivalent of a stale fart in an empty Coke can.  Now AlphaTauri, (Red Bull’s clothing company): the marketing equivalent of shitting yourself in a pair of dungarees.  And in either incarnation a one-way talent factory ramp featuring either a cliff edge or a lottery win at the end.

Red Bull’s junior driver program, built on a ruthless divestment of under-performing resources finally reached it’s logical conclusion of self-consumption when it suddenly discovered its talent cupboard was so bare it had to re-hire drivers it had publicly derided as not good enough.

Now pedalled by not just one but two alumni prematurely fired up the greasy Red Bull ladder only to be found wanting in the most egregiously destructive way, one would have thought the team had reached maximum embarrassment before surprising everyone by re-branding as the world’s most pointless fashion retailer.

Talent-spotting fails aside the team now exist in a pointless midfield hinterland serving no conceivable purpose for no apparent reason other than to spend the other half of Dietrich Matterschitz’s fortune.

Distinguishing Markings: Blue and white.  Evoking nothing but a stark, pitiless wasteland of desiccated post-it notes covered in human excrement and marketing slogans

Reasons to support them, part 1: You know something nobody else does, couldn’t be proved in the past, present, future or by any sort of mathematics real or imagined

Split Personality? Previously – as Minardi – a low budget, passionate Italian racing team wedded to that taking-part-is-the-whole-point philosophy, now utterly committed to the exact opposite of that.  See also: MK Dons, RB Leipzig

Owned By: Red Bull: and what’s wrong with Red Bull owning lots of sports teams? apart from every single country in which them doing this has created nothing but ill will, anger and consternation?

Fun fact(s): AlphaTauri is the fashion arm of Red Bull.  Conjuring up a similar warm fuzzy feeling the words “the IRA are the armed wing of Sinn Fein” once did

Not to be confused with: Alphabetti-Spaghetti, Alfa Romeo, Alfalfa sprouts, Matalan