Red Bull believed they had an agreement in place to use Mercedes engines in 2016, prior to cancelling their deal with Renault, according to Bernie Ecclestone.
The Milton Keynes team have found themselves without an engine partner after terminating their deal with Renault a year early, but they only did so when they believed they had an agreement with Mercedes to switch to the German manufacturer’s engines.
“In defence of Red Bull, or Christian in particular, the reason they cancelled their agreement with Renault is so they could do the deal they thought they had done with Mercedes,” Autosport quote Ecclestone as saying.
Mercedes executive chairman Niki Lauda recently confirmed that he went to see Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz in July to discuss doing a deal, but things feel apart when Mateschitz failed to follow up on the talks.
“I went to see him. I said to him ‘Can you freeze your negative thinking about Mercedes’, otherwise it will never work.
“The other thing we discussed is that if we were to give an engine we wanted to grow together because we want the young Red Bull kids driving Daimlers.
“This is what we aimed for. But he never came back, so the discussions never really started, and the whole thing died.”
It’s believed Mercedes were willing to do a deal up to that point, but the Daimler board later stepped in and cautioned against it in.
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