Red Bull boss returns to F1 dream

Red Bull Cheever Racing in action in the Indy Racing League

Austrian billionaire Dietrich Mateschitz, who has bought out the Jaguar Formula One team, has been involved in the sport for a decade.

The 59-year-old, the boss of the Red Bull drinks company, owned 64% of the Swiss-based Sauber team until 2002.

He failed in his bid to take over now-defunct Arrows and turn them into a Red Bull All America team with US drivers.

But now Mateschitz's dreams have come true and Red Bull Racing will take their place on the 2005 F1 grid.

Mateschitz is determined to bring in F1's first American driver since Michael Andretti in 1993 and runs a programme to bring young US drivers to Europe to groom them for the sport.

The aim is to have an established team of three to six American drivers.

In 2001, the Red Bull junior team was launched after funding individual drivers such as Brazilian Enrique Bernoldi for several years.

Colombian Federico Montoya, younger brother of Formula One driver Juan Pablo Montoya, is one of their junior drivers racing in Germany's Formula BMW series.

Mateschitz has a net worth of $1.4bn and owns a Fijian island

And this year Austrian rookie Christian Klien, who wrote to Mateschitz as a 13-year-old asking for help, was placed at Jaguar with Red Bull funding while Italian Vitantonio Liuzzi won the Formula 3000 title, the last step on the ladder to F1.

The company backs American Champ Car rookie of the year AJ Allmendinger and Red Bull Cheever Racing, run by former Grand Prix driver Eddie Cheever, competes in the rival Indy Racing League (IRL).

Narain Karthikeyan, the first Indian to drive a Formula One car, raced as a Red Bull driver in this year's World Series by Nissan and tested with Cheever's IRL team.

Mateschitz, whose company sells in excess of a billion cans a year in more than 100 countries, traces his fortune back to an idea that came to him in 1982 as he sat at hotel bar in Hong Kong.

Realising that popular local "tonic drinks" could be marketed to a wider audience, he founded Red Bull GmbH in 1984 with Thai businessman Chaleo Yoovidhya and started selling his energy drink in Austria in 1987.

Red Bull is now popular throughout the world and the company employs 1,850 people.

On the back of this success, Mateschitz now ranks 406th in the Forbes.com's list of the world's richest people and owns the Fijian island resort of Laucala.