Fascinating stuff - I’ve noticed over the years that numerous energy drink companies seem to pop up out of nowhere, but seemingly have tonnes of money to throw around, sponsoring f1 teams, other race teams, sportsmen etc. It all has a familiar ‘scent’ to it that anyone who’s been involved in motorsport for any length of time will recognise. The likes of Rich Energy for example. To this day the only actual physical can I’ve ever seen has been in the race teams fridge. Not that I would, but it seems virtually impossible to buy it yet they were talking about stumping up 100million to buy an f1 team a while back... We all know that sponsorship is largely a waste of time, but it serves a purpose for both the sponsor (tax related) and the recipient (free money yay)... I just wonder to what end for this lot. I mean if you hardly have a product in the first place... the more you look in to these firms the more unusual it gets. Everything from the people involved, their expenditure. Companies house showing they’ve got £700 in the bank... 50 million £ manufacturing facilities that turn out to be hot desks... Most people I talk to who are heavily involved in motorsport seem to unquestionable believe these are blatant large scale money laundering firms. My theories are that it’s a front for money coming from distasteful avenues. straight up and blatant money laundering. drugs. potentially Eccentric billionaires who just want something to pile money in to.. whether legit or not, there’s tonnes of unusual ‘goings on’ with these companies. you don’t have to look far to find loads of speculation on this, but here’s some examples; https://www.thedrive.com/news/32225...energy-is-somehow-backing-a-racing-team-again https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/27221746/the-bizarre-haas-rich-energy-saga-explained?platform=amp
Its like perfume Advi. The drinks are 99% markup. It baffles me that people pay >£50 for smelly water. Same with fizzy pop. Isnt it something like £1.50 for a skinny can of pop?
Coca cola successfully sell water for more money than coca cola. Which is mainly water. People get sucked into buying anything it seems...
I think his point is that you don’t seem to be actually able to buy any actual products from some of these companies and so it looks like they’re fronts for money laundering. Perhaps @Advikaz needs to do a sort of Panorama style Advestigation? Hopefully he won’t end up poking his nose into cartel business and end up becoming part of the secret recipe for their non-existent drinks.
It sounds as if they’d be better off bidding for Govt PPE or track and trace contracts than sponsoring F1 teams
UK Track & Trace is probably the most successful financial venture in the world (for some). Too bad it didn't works worth a damn, but the £15billion additional funding in the last budget might resolve that, then again, it might not...
Probably not as good as loading up an entire motorsport teams worth of shipping containers and regularly transporting it between America, europe, the Middle East etc though. The cynic in me might suggest you could hide anything in those containers with minimal checks conducted
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rich-Energy-3-Pack-250ml/dp/B07QLDYS3Q Its expensive and probably costs nothing to produce (in relative terms). But Red Bull - how much must they sell?! They are into all sorts of sports, extreme sports and probably even extreme ironing
I heard rumours of a smoothie company starting out as a similar front, until the smoothies actually sold gangbusters and it turned out much easier and more profitable a business
So far Track & Trace has had £38Bn in just over a year - that's more than the entire MoD defence budget - and has achieved no measureable results what-so-ever... To put that into perspective NASA's Perseverance Rover - the most complex astrobiological laboratory ever launched into space - travelled 293 million miles to Mars, landed safely and will be carrying out tests and observations for the next two or three years and it cost £2.7Bn. Another way to look at it is this : a 6% pay rise for NHS nurses would cost less than £500 Million - a lot of money, granted, but a tiny fraction of what Track & Trace has cost, and yet the government claim not to be able to afford more than a 1% pay rise for nurses... I doubt they will be short of money to spend when it's time for MP's to get a pay rise...
Looking in from the outside, it always appeared obvious to me that the whole Rich Energy thing was dodgy as hell... Everything from the beardy-weirdy boss to the "we're going to be bigger than Red Bull" claims struck me as odd. I'm amazed that Haas got involved with them after their attempts to "sponsor" Force India and Williams fell through... Then after they got taken apart by Whyte Bikes I thought they would just disappear, but no, they pop up again. There are some similarities with the DeLorean / Lotus fiasco if you look back at that.
But then again, without these shady companies, you wouldn't see mad stuff like this! https://fb.watch/4suSok0a8c/ <iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/vi...s/2970954429802131/&show_text=false&width=380" width="380" height="476" style="border:none;overflow:hidden" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="true" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowFullScreen="true"></iframe>
Rich energy is definitely a really dodgy situation. It’s going to end badly and Tbf I hate that dick that owns it so much I don’t even want the BSB team to succeed. Leopard is the same... I’m sure there are dozens of others
