What's going on with Team Red Bull?

They knew it would be an uphill battle, two young drivers and new manufacturer and yes, they've struggled, but there seems to be more going on over there than meets the eye.

First we had the rumors back in early September that they might be switching manufacturers possibly to Chevy.  That rumor floated around a bit and then was denied by Team Red Bull, yet the rumors kept floating around despite the denial.  Then they came out with this statement in a USA Today article...

The rumor keeps coming up, but we are staying with Toyota," Team Red Bull vice president of competition Guenther Steiner said Friday. "We don't want to want leave Toyota, we want to stay with them and I hope I have to say it for the last time now."

OK, rumor denied, the team will stay with Toyota and move on, no changes expected.

Then there was the rumor earlier this month that they wanted to buy Yates shops, because they needed more room to start their own chassis and engine departments.  But Team Red Bull had this response...

"Robert Yates did contact us awhile back to see if we were interested in talking with him about purchasing his building or his teams. We weren't - so the conversation ended there. We're committed to building our team from scratch and making our cars competitive. We don't have plans to buy anyone else's team."

That one was kind of strange especially with the fact that Yates decided to retire and hand everything over to his son, but another rumor denied here.  Seems like things would stay status quo over at Team Red Bull as they state once again how committed they are.

Then just yesterday we learn that Crew Chief Doug Richert and Team Red Bull part ways, effective immediately.  They say it was an amicable split, but that's usually just what teams seem to put out to the media.  Usually when it's an effective immediately thing, things didn't end well.  Now Vickers will have a new crew chief this weekend at Atlanta and for the rest of the season. 

Put all those things together and it's easy to see things aren't going well over there.  It just seems like somethings up over there and maybe there may be some truth to some of these rumors floating around.  With the rumors and the immediate changes, just says that somethings going on, we just don't know what it is and can only speculate.

Whatever it is, they sure like to keep it quiet and we probably won't hear of anything until the end of the season.

Your thoughts?