Mercedes Says Those Aston Martin To F1 Rumours Are Complete Rubbish

On Saturday Autocar reported that Aston Martin is currently holding talks with Red Bull Racing about a return to F1. The manufacturer would join as a brand partner to the team, in exchange for securing a deal for Red Bull to run Mercedes power units from 2016 onwards.

According to the article, Aston Martin would become a technical partner to the Milton Keynes-based outfit, with branding on the cars in a similar way to Infiniti’s current deal, which was negotiated by Andy Palmer and Simon Sproule when they worked for Nissan’s upmarket brand - both now work for Aston Martin with Palmer as CEO and Sproule the director of marketing and communications.

However, Mercedes has rubbished the claims that a tie-up between Red Bull and Aston Martin would lead to the four-time constructors’ champions using its engines.

Mercedes’ non-executive chairman Niki Lauda told Motorsport.com that no discussions have been made:

“There’s not even a discussion. No discussion at all. I haven’t heard anything from them and we never talked about it. I have breakfast every morning with Helmut [Marko] so I should know. We never thought about it because we have four teams running our engines, so we don’t even have capacity.”

Aston Martin raced in Formula 1 between 1959 and 1960, but with limited success. Would you like to see them back?