Infiniti

Infiniti

Infiniti and F1 world champions Red Bull Racing are considering collaborating on a new high-performance road car.

The Japanese luxury brand has a two-year sponsorship deal with the championship-leading Red Bull Racing team, and the performance Infiniti is expected to be on sale within the next 18-24 months.

Simon Sproule, who leads Infiniti's motorsport involvement, said: 'Our relationship with Red Bull is only five races old, but the trajectory for it is to move on and work more closely together. One way of doing that is on a road car project.'

Sproule stressed that any project had to be 'credible' and cited the example of the Renault Clio Williams as a collaboration between a road car manufacturer and race team that had been a sales and marketing success.

As a result, Sproule added that whatever car was chosen as the base for the project would be substantially reworked and would have to be re-homologated before it could go on sale.

A limited run of 500 Clio Williams cars were launched in 1992, but it was entirely engineered by Renault and not the Williams F1 team.

It was so successful that further special editions were later launched. However Red Bull Racing boss Christian Horner said he'd consider getting his F1 engineers in on the project.

He said: 'There's no reason not to be involved. We have proved that Red Bull can take on the likes of Mercedes in F1 despite their heritage and a natural evolution of that would be to use our expertise we have in [developing] road cars.'

Last year, parent company Nissan has filed for trademark protection for the names Infiniti Performance Line and IPL in America, suggesting Infiniti planned to launch a performance sub-division to rival Mercedes AMG and BMW M cars.