The Rich Energy drama is, truly, the gift that keeps on giving. Even though the brand has moved on from Formula One to sponsor or partner with drivers in British Superbikes and the British Touring Car Championship, CEO William Storey has been cryptically tweeting about returning to F1 for a while. Now, however, it seems that the first plan of action to getting back into the F1 fold is taking its former partner, Haas F1, to court.
If you weren’t lucky enough to track the drama during the 2019 F1 season, here’s the summarized version: a previously-unheard-of energy drink company became the title sponsor of the Haas F1 team. The brand’s whole premise was built around being “better than Red Bull” both on and off the track, which led to both a lawsuit from Red Bull and to Rich Energy withdrawing from the F1 season due to a combination of Haas’s poor performance and the “PC attitudes” of F1.
Rich Energy also got sued for copying the logo of a bike company. And, as far as we were able to learn in Drive to Survive, Rich Energy didn’t pay Haas anything, with the exception of the initial payment. It’s not a great look!
Now, Rich Energy is purportedly going to be on the other end of a lawsuit, if one of its Twitter accounts has tweeted the truth.
Rich Energy has several Twitter presences. There’s Storey himself, an account for the Rich OMG Racing team, the “official” Rich Energy account, and the Rich Energy HQ, said to be the account used for global operations, which fielded the tweet in question.
“After a forensic audit of events in 2019 with #HaasF1 we are taking legal action against 2 senior executives of @Aon_plc,a broker for @tigerrisk & another firm for acting as shadow directors, loss of £50m, misrepresentation & defamation of our CEO William Storey,” the tweet read.
Aon describes itself as “a leading global professional services firm providing a broad range of risk, retirement and health solutions.” Similarly, TigerRisk says it is “a privately-held reinsurance broker and risk/capital management advisor with a selective list of current and prospective customers.”
While Storey’s tweet is a little unclear, it sounds like representatives from Aon, TigerRisk, and one other company were operating behind the scenes at Haas F1, which somehow led to Rich Energy’s eventual departure from the team branding.
We asked Storey for clarification on several points, including the nature of the lawsuit and how the £50 million loss was calculated. So far, we haven’t heard back, but we’ll update when we do.
Storey’s recent track record in the court of law hasn’t been particularly great. Whether this suit ends up the same way remains to be seen, but it sure as hell makes for another fun storyline in the ongoing saga.
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