Want to see Daniel Ricciardo slide an F1 car around Australia?

Red Bull, the energy drink consortium / marketing firm / patron of everything properly mad that you know and... have an opinion about, has released a little film that involves a bit of... well, everything we just said – energy drinks, marketing and proper madness. Also Daniel Ricciardo and an old RB7 F1 car.

Ricciardo, who seems to be a student of the great driver / terrible car school (owned and operated by Fernando Alonso), is now back at Red Bull Racing... as a test driver. Yeah, that figures.

But, like the absolute honey badger he is, Ric’s dived into his new role of... testing F1 cars from 2011, apparently. And to ensure the RB7’s fitness for... um, storage, he’s been sent out across Australia to do typically Australian things. Like going to work in an office, having lunch at a café with friends, sitting in Sydney traffic... oh. No, that other thing. That thing that everyone expects Australians to do – live in red dirt country, call each other ‘maaayyte’ and never stray more than 15 feet from some form of machinery or livestock.

After an intro/setup at RB HQ in good ol’ Blighty, Ricciardo starts off from his home on Australia’s west coast, meeting a roster of Red Bull riders and drivers along the way*.

Like Daniel Sanders, who is an absolute monster on a motorbike, as well as Toby Price, who is a slightly older one.

Both Sanders and Price have multiple Dakar rallies under their belts, with Toby racking up a pair of wins at the event. Sanders has demonstrated serious pace at the event, too, as well as the practical effects of physics on the human skeleton. But then find us a Dakar rider who hasn’t.

Price actually joins the action behind the wheel of a four-wheeled desert assault vehicle. But that’s as it should be, in a way – he’s won Australia’s Finke Rally (think Dakar, but with much more beer) six times on two wheels and twice on four wheels. He’s also done the Finke ‘Iron Man’ challenge, where he raced in both the car and bike divisions... at the same rally. And yes, that means racing, getting in a helicopter and flying back to the start, then doing the entire thing again.

Mr Ricciardo also finds himself up against a mustering helicopter (some stations in Australia’s wilder parts are so large that doing it any other way would take a lifetime or six), driving around Mount Panorama with V8 Supercar champion Shane van Gisbergen (Jamie Whincup’s manning the gate), sliding through an off-road obstacle course (complete with drop bears) and rolling in for a pit stop at the Silverton Hotel. It’s a few miles from where they filmed Mad Max and Mad Max 2. Fury Road was done in Namibia after Australia actually got some rain for a change, and we don’t talk about Thunderdome.

In fact, there’s barely enough time for a quick stopover to mention the sponsors (thanks, TAG Heuer, the Carrera Chrono really is a wonderful idea for anyone who forgets the Omega Speedmaster exists), before it’s time to ‘take the car down to Melbourne’ ahead of the Albert Park race this weekend. Cut to a very obviously fake sign pointing to Melbourne and a shot of Ric driving... out at Silverton. Which is 540 miles north of Melbourne, and more than 600 miles west of Bathurst, where the film suggests he was.

If it were up to us, we’d probably just bus the 480-odd miles directly south from Bathurst to Melbourne. But then we’d also have V8s in F1, and Daniel Ricciardo on the grid.

You can watch the video here

*Well, the graphic points in the vicinity of Perth, but we harbour a few doubts that Red Bull’s involvement in Western Australia went past the usual cans tipped back on City Beach