Contrary to some reports, Ford Motor Company’s technical partnership with the Red Bull Racing Formula 1 Team goes way beyond stickers on a car and promo videos of Max Verstappen flogging Mustangs on a track. With Ford employees working in Milton Keynes and Red Bull employees commuting to Detroit, there’s a constant exchange of intellectual and physical property between the two parties, and therefore, between the U.S. and England. And like with any new relationship, there are growing pains and a few headaches along the way.
One of those times was back in 2022, when an engineer traveled from the team’s HQ in the U.K. to Ford’s HQ in Michigan with a rather unique—and needless to say, valuable—component in a briefcase. The partnership between the two companies was fresh back then, and with a looming FIA-mandated summer shutdown and a narrowing window to test the part, some housekeeping steps went amiss, the right legal transport paperwork wasn’t prepped, and Customs and Border Patrol officials said, “Hey, I’ll take that off your hands.”
I recently caught up with Christian Hertrich, Ford Racing’s powertrain chief engineer, and he shared a few anecdotes from the last four or so years leading Ford’s new adventure into the pinnacle of auto racing. Most of them concerned the intense pace and wild demands of working with a championship-winning F1 team, but others, such as this one, were equally interesting and entertaining. Or at least they seem entertaining now, but not so much at the time.
“I’ll tell you about when it finally hit me that I was working in Formula 1: When I went to Red Bull for the first time, they were still setting up their facilities,” Hertrich told The Drive. “They had developed a turbocharger but had no place to test it, so the part had to come to the U.S. to be tested at Ford’s facilities just before the mandatory summer shutdown.
“We had a limited amount of time to transport it here, get it set up, and test it. So, one of the engineers carried the turbo with him on the plane, and upon arrival in Detroit, he was just walking through the airport when a Customs agent asked him what it was. He was honest, and they said, ‘We’ll take that.’
“I got the call and they said, ‘How do we get this back?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but we’re gonna figure it out.’
“So, I realized I was working in Formula 1 when I was at Customs and Border Patrol at 2 a.m., trying to recover this turbocharger because within 12 hours, we had to pull the plug for the summer shutdown, and after that, we couldn’t do any more testing. We had to get data off of this to meet our deadlines. That was my opening experience, and it was legitimately sitting at the airport dealing with Border Patrol,” he added.
Hertrich went on to explain that the issue was simply not having the right forms to temporarily import the component into the United States, as technically every bit of hardware that enters the country must carry a manifest, whether it stays in the country or not. I’m not a logistics expert or an import/export advisor, but due to previous job experience in a different industry, I know that U.S. Customs and Border Patrol doesn’t like it when you don’t tell them what you’re bringing into the country, whether it’s benign or not. For example, as a tourist, you can bring your camera, computers, and other stuff without declaring them. If you’re a professional, however, certain items over a certain value must be declared either verbally to an agent or by filing a manifest.
This value depends on the country’s laws. Sometimes, import tariffs must be paid if the goods are staying in the country long-term or permanently. If imported temporarily, such as when an F1 team visits a country for four to five days, officials typically defer this, and teams must prove that the hardware that entered the country eventually leaves the country to avoid these charges. Likewise, sometimes officials require deposits to be paid up front and refunded when the parts leave the country, as is the case in some South American countries. Brazil and some Middle Eastern countries are notorious for their often-complicated, unscripted import/export laws.
In this case, with Ford and Red Bull, it was a simple snafu: steps weren’t followed, not because they wanted to break the law, of course, but because the project was new and moving quickly.
It didn’t take long after that for the right processes to be established at the offices on either side of the pond, of course, and there are dedicated logistics people who now look after the humans and hardware of Ford and Red Bull as they travel back and forth.
“We’ve gotten pretty good at shipping things to each other now, and we can have parts here or there in two days at most, but a lot of times it’s still just better to hop on a plane and handle things in person,” Hertrich concluded.
Email the author at jerry@thedrive.com