Chapter 466: RedBull’s Dilemma

"How does the national anthem sound under these premium speakers?" Fatih asked as he jumped onto Dennis Hauger’s back, forcing him to stagger forward.

"Better speakers don’t make shit songs sound good," Hauger said as he gently put Fatih down.

Fatih, putting on a look of concern, placed his hand on Hauger’s shoulder before saying, "I understand that after a traumatic incident people can end up hating something beautiful, so I won’t begrudge you for your wording, but I’m sure you missed hearing it," before breaking out into a smug smile.

Hauger looked at him, dumbfounded for a moment, before breaking out into laughter as they hugged.

Still under Red Bull’s wing, Hauger was now in his second year of Formula 3 after a short season last year due to the pandemic.

Once they separated from their hug, Fatih turned to the camera and said, "This is my friend, who trauma-bonded with me after I beat him mercilessly in British F4," while pointing at him.

At the moment, he knew he was the hottest star on the track, and Netflix, which had started following him even before his first race, had now upgraded him with multiple cameras to ensure more angles, and these people followed him wherever he went.

Confident that a large part of this season’s *Drive to Survive* was going to focus on him, he decided to spread the fame to those around him to increase their public perception and also provide them an opportunity for free publicity, since with his introduction, Netflix was definitely going to want to put him in the dark interview room.

After all, Red Bull had only made an exception to fully fund his racing career, and all the other drivers, barring Verstappen, had to fund a portion of their junior careers either through sponsors or from their own pockets while Red Bull covered the rest. The bigger his public profile was, the more chances he had of getting a bigger or wealthier sponsor to allow him the freedom to race without any worries.

"That is not true. They can watch the final race to see for themselves where we gave you a tow and inadvertently harmed our qualifying and race," Hauger, forced to start thinking about how to find sponsors since an early age, immediately caught on to it and went along as the two of them talked back and forth for a bit before Fatih was invited into the Prema Racing hospitality building, as a crowd was starting to form now that the rumor that the race winner was in the F3 paddock had spread.

They spent about twenty minutes just talking about random things before Fatih had to leave, since he only had about a half-hour gap to rest and had decided to visit him before finally bidding him farewell.

"See you in Austria," Fatih said before he started jogging in the direction of the entrance to the F3 paddock, where a golf cart was waiting to take him back to the team garage for the scheduled team photo.

Once the team photo was done and all of his obligations were completed, he immediately headed to the airport, where he saw Horner talking with somebody, which he ignored and pretended not to see as he went through the process before boarding the private jet and starting his journey home, completely unaware that Horner was leaving this fast because he was heading to Austria to try and seal his fate of never promoting him.

....

"Thanks," Gasly said as he referred to the tablet he had received from the performance engineer.

"If you have any questions, you can reach out to us for clarification at any time," the performance engineer said as she waited for Gasly to leave.

"Or I can just ask Fatih, right?" Gasly said, chuckling before he started walking away with a tablet that contained data related to all of Fatih’s races.

Had it been rudimentary data, he could have gathered it from the many open-source websites or even F1, but he needed more detailed data regarding everything that a driver controlled in a race car, wanting to know where and what exactly Fatih did differently compared to him and see if he was gaining lap time in areas he didn’t know to exploit.

It was not the first time he had done this, as he had done it when he was at Red Bull, but this was the first time doing it for a driver who was only three races old.

However, Gasly already knew that Fatih had been doing simulator work since Bahrain, and even there he had shown capabilities that, when Gasly tried to emulate them on the track, resulted in him ending with a DNF in the first race.

Now he had a whole week to go through it and learn everything that could be learned, or even ask for more details on the parts he couldn’t understand.

To some, it might look shameful or bruise their ego, because to him, ego was not important enough to risk his F1 opportunity when he knew there were hundreds who were eyeing his seat.

.......

"He is ready to see you now. Please head to his office," Dietrich Mateschitz’s secretary said to Christian Horner, who was waiting in the waiting room.

The secretary led him to the office, opening the door for him before asking if either of them wanted any type of drink.

"Skip me," Dietrich said before looking at Horner to see if he wanted anything.

"None for me either," Horner said, as he was too restless to have the stomach to drink anything at the moment.

"I will be on standby. Please call me if you need anything," the secretary said as she walked out of the office, closing the door behind her.

"You seem to be very busy," Horner said when he saw the stack of papers lying in front of him.

"Yeah, it seems like we are being attacked by someone in a few of our rapidly growing markets and have to think about a solution," Mateschitz said, raising his head as he neared the end of his sentence.

"I don’t think we have any competitor for our energy drink with whom we have a bad relationship, as far as I know," Horner said, at the same time wondering why Mateschitz was even telling him this when it was unrelated to what he was doing and couldn’t help him at all.

"You might be wondering why I’m telling you this," Mateschitz said as he looked at Horner as if he could read what was going on in his mind.

"Pardon me, but yes, I was wondering that," Horner answered, though deep down he started feeling a sense of foreboding.

"A company called Fatih Y?ld?r?m Holding has sent offers to all of the distribution companies we work with in both South America and India, offering to buy them out at a 20% premium. Do you know anything about that?" Mateschitz asked, expecting Horner to know something.

Horner furrowed his brows as he became speechless at what he had heard. The name of the company made it very obvious to anyone who looked at it that this was deliberate.

Although he was responsible for the F1 team, he was still knowledgeable regarding the matters of the parent company when it came to its energy drink side of things.

And to him, it was very obvious that this was an attack targeting Red Bull’s weakest point: its asset-light style of operation. To be able to not own the distribution side of things and allow for their margins to be as big as they were, subcontracting things to local companies was their modus operandi. When signing those contracts, there were clauses pertaining to informing them if there was a buyout attempt, with Red Bull having the first right of refusal on those offers.

So it seemed like Fatih and his family had gone directly to targeting all of the companies contracted with distribution in an attempt to buy them out, gain control over the distribution routes for Red Bull in their fastest-growing markets, and put them in a chokehold using multiple legal ways.

"How many of them, and for a total of how much?" Horner asked, wondering just how large the scale of their retaliatory attempt was, because in his mind, they should be worth only a few million dollars. He wondered how they managed to do it and target them in all of these markets, because it seemed like a shrimp was trying to swallow a whale.

"They are proposing to fully buy all of them out, and it should cost them about 2.7 billion dollars," Mateschitz said as he slid the document that contained the list of the companies and the purchase offers towards Horner, who picked it up and started reading it.

He read each name and the proposed purchase price, with each of the companies being in the millions of dollars, totaling the exact amount Mateschitz had said.

"Dietrich, do they have that much money anyway? As far as I know, they are only worth a few million dollars at most," Horner said, trying to make it clear that this was just them making noise and they didn’t have the money to go ahead with it, and that it was a bluff and they should call them on it.

"Proof of a direct line of credit from ten different banks, all open to fully provide the loans needed to go ahead with the purchase," Mateschitz said as he slid over the documents showing proof of Fatih’s family having received a line of credit from multiple banks.

As he looked at the documents, Horner couldn’t help but feel sweat pooling on his back because he knew that for a bank to provide an entity with a line of credit, and ten of them to do it at that, it meant they were confident that the Y?ld?r?ms could pay it at any time of the day. That meant their wealth had to be multiple times the total of the line of credit, meaning they were billionaires the likes of the Stroll family, or maybe even richer.

And now they were using the power of having those billions to make their move and were putting Red Bull in a dilemma: either accept that a single entity was going to take over the companies they contracted with and have a monopoly on their distribution in these regions, or bring an end to their asset-light operation style and spend 2.7 billion dollars to buy these companies, carry heavy assets, and be responsible for operations and everything else after being forced to spend money they were not planning on spending.

"Do you know anything about why they would make such an aggressive move?" Mateschitz asked as he tilted his head to the side as if trying to see the face of Horner, who was looking down at the papers.

He didn’t sound happy at all and seemed to be barely holding himself back from directly contacting the Y?ld?r?ms himself, because doing that without prior knowledge of the reason was going to put him at a disadvantage, and he didn’t like that.

The Y?ld?r?ms had now finally sent their response.