The Red Bull Racing Taxi

22 Mar, 2025

I was reminded recently of some antics of mine to show support for Mark Webber in the opening race of the 2011 season in Melbourne.

Scheduled for March 27, 2011, Shannons¹ was hosting a "show 'n' shine" style car show on the lawns of Old Parliament House in Canberra. I was planning to show my Evo 7, but due to a suspected blown turbo² on a recent hillclimb, the car was in pieces in the garage.

When tracking your daily driver, you take on some inherent risks, and my recent hillclimb experience meant that I could no longer drive to work. The solution? Spending $1,000 on an ex-taxi. With half a million kms on the clock and running on LPG, it truly was a performance weapon.

But what to do with my spot at the car show? Here are some facts:

1. I lived in Canberra, Mark Webber's home town (sort of³)
2. The show was on the same day as the opening F1 race for 2011 in Australia

So it made perfect sense to do something in support of Mark, and I decided to paint my ex-taxi in Red Bull livery. I consulted with my mate Andy, and while we could have done a rushed spray job, we thought it would be much funnier if it was full of brush marks.

Friday evening was a late one, consisting of mapping out the design and making some terrible stencils out of sticky-taped A4 sheets of paper. Then early Saturday morning, armed with loads of sample pots of Dulux house paint, brushes, and cheap masking tape, we got to work.

Using black permanent marker turned out to be a mistake - it took loads of paint to stop the marker bleeding through.

For reasons that escape me now, getting crisp edges seemed extremely necessary at the time, so we masked things up. I'm not sure why I doubted the steadiness of my hand. You can see the black marker showing through the paint.

It's starting to take shape now.

The paint was still tacky the next day, so we couldn't get the clear coat on before the show, and the paint looks a little flat.

On the way to the show - I couldn't believe my luck - on the side of the road, abandoned by its previous owner, was a vacancy light from the top of a Canberra Cab. I promptly scooped it up, went home and picked up the front roof rack bar, affixed the light with zip ties, and wrote "F1" in black electrical tape.

Here it is at the show. Note the Pirelli P Zero tyres we fitted to complete the look.

Next to my mates' cars. Andy, who put in enormous numbers of hours helping paint the car, had the blue STi Forester, and Mitch had the XT.

I bet this Lambo owner couldn't believe his luck when he found out he was going to be parked next to me.

I never removed the paint and continued to use the car as my daily until the gearbox eventually gave out.

Mark took a very respectable fifth place. No studies have been published on the causal link between RBTaxi and his performance.

Footnotes

#f1