Road trips aren’t always fun. They can be long, they make your butt numb, someone always has to pee, everybody gets sick of each other an hour in and at least one person is bound to get sick after a quick stop for food goes wrong. But a V8 Formula One car driving across America? That’s a good road trip right there.
Red Bull Racing has a thing for entertaining promotional videos, and the team decided to send its honorary Texan F1 driver Daniel Ricciardo on a trip from San Francisco to Miami to promote the F1 Miami Grand Prix, which is supposedly in the planning stages but is not happening.
(The Miami race was supposed to kick off a 10-year deal in 2019, but now won’t kick off in 2019. Cliffhanger.)
But once you’ve committed, you’re committed (unless you happen to be the Miami Grand Prix, which presumably cannot read blogs), so the video for the first part of Ricciardo’s road trip came out on Thursday. It’s full of lovely shots of iconic places on the western side of the U.S., and pit stops along the way that make even the finest of gas stations—the ones that make you go, “Oh, that’s going to have a good bathroom” upon driving up—look lame.
It’s also full of lovely V8 roars instead of the V6 turbo F1 uses now, since Red Bull often uses old V8s like this one, its 2011 RB7 car, for promos.
A V8 is the only real way to travel America, anyway, and nobody would want to use the current Red Bull car for a road trip.
One of the only downside of this road trip is realizing that America is a big land, full of great roads to tear up—for those who have the power to officially clear those roads for the tearing. The rest of us are stuck getting tickets while going 57 mph in a 55, with our only recourse in life being expensive track days.
Oh, and there’s the downside that this is the least economical or efficient road trip ever, in the order that the video showed it.