Interview | Racing Bulls, Alan Permane speaks: “Being successful doesn’t just mean winning”

Alan Permane is on the eve of his first full season at the wheel of Racing Bulls, with the ambitious goal of doing better than sixth place in 2025, one of the best results in the history of the Italian team. The Faenza team is one of the youngest teams in the Circus, which makes the promotion of talent its mission, both for the drivers and for the technical staff. Many of these are Italian, in a team that makes the location between Faenza and Milton Keynes its strong point, also attracting thanks to this some British minds, eager to work in our country. FormulaPassion met Alan Permane on the occasion of the team’s presentation in Detroit, delving into these and other topics. The growth of the team Racing Bulls is experiencing a period of profound transformation, strengthening synergies with sister company Red Bull, but also changing internally. “I’ve only been here for two years and I can see a constant growth in knowledge, skills and confidence,” says Permane. “In our approach to racing, I think we are a very credible Formula 1 team. Off the track we have this beautiful mix of young people who help us maintain a light spirit. We want to attract the new generations, but on the track we are a very serious team. What I see is not a huge change, but a focus that becomes more and more focused as the months go by.” Permane inherited the role of Team Principal last July, when Mekies took the reins of Red Bull. Faenza’s new number one focuses on continuity with the recent past, avoiding radical upheavals: “The priority for me is to build on what we have set in the last two years. I have to give much of the credit to those who preceded me, to what Laurent Mekies and Peter Bayer started. I inherited all this in the middle of last season, so that I could move forward and continue to learn.” Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images The Racing Bulls’ mission Like any self-respecting team, the Racing Bulls’ raison d’être is victory, but not the only one. Permane explains: “We are here to win, like everyone else, but being successful can also mean many other things. We are here to bring young talent to the Red Bull group. We saw Isack [Hadjar] progress quickly from Racing Bulls to Red Bull and of course I wish him all the luck. This is part of the reason we exist. Even when it comes to talented engineers, we like to involve young people, recent graduates and apprentices. In our engineering department there are many who started with an apprenticeship in Italy and then made a career. This is a beautiful thing.” The Faenza team makes the location free approach one of their reasons of pride, offering their staff absolute freedom in which location to work in. This way, employees are not forced to leave their families, but there is no shortage of cases of those from the UK deliberately choosing to move to Faenza: “We have a couple of senior British engineers who recently joined us and who specifically wanted to work in Italy. It’s not that we want Italians over the English, we are open to everyone and I think this is the beauty of our system free from geographical constraints: you can come from anywhere.” Rudy Carezzevoli/Getty Images The objectives for 2026 Permane has clear ideas about the objective that Racing Bulls must achieve to do better than 2025: “Last year we experienced some very successful weekends, like Hadjar’s podium or Lawson’s second row in Baku. We’ve qualified into Q3 several times and I think that’s great. What we are working on is eliminating those weekends where we had a car eliminated in Q1. Rather than trying to improve those exploits, we want to not necessarily eliminate the bugs, but deepen our understanding of them. We want to get to the bottom of certain things before arriving on the track, study the car and avoid those critical moments, as well as obviously preserving the positive ones.” However, be careful not to attribute the difficulties solely to the execution or design. The Team Principal prefers to have a broader vision: “I believe it’s all interconnected, it’s not about one part versus the other. It’s the same principle that to have a good car you need everything to work together. It’s not a single thing that’s holding you back. It could be that a design choice doesn’t allow you to use the set-up you would like, but also that the track engineers make a mistake in setting it up. It’s not easy to point the finger at something.” Photo Sal Rodriguez/Red Bull Content Pool The season around the corner. However, there is no doubt that the sporting fate in 2026 will depend a lot on the project of the single-seater and the Red Bull-Ford power unit. Despite the many question marks, however, Permane appears serene: “I think there are many changes. I don’t have a particular concern, we are not struggling in any specific department. When I talk to the powertrain staff, they seem satisfied with what they are doing. I don’t think there is any particular apprehension, but rather enthusiasm. There is a great unknown: no one knows what the hierarchy will be on the track and I think this is precisely the reason for excitement for this year.”