Formula 1: Rich Energy rogue revealed, and it’s exactly who everyone thought

The rogue at Haas Formula 1 team title sponsor Rich Energy was revealed, and it is exactly who everybody thought it was from the start.

After Rich Energy tweeted that they had terminated their title sponsorship contract with the Haas Formula 1 team last Wednesday, more reports surfaced about the matter stating that the British beverage company were in the process of attempting to salvage their partnership with the sport’s lone American team.

More reports then surfaced that this tweet was sent by a “rogue” individual, verifying what Haas team principal Guenther Steiner had previously stated that despite Rich Energy’s tweet, they were still the title sponsor of the team.

Rich Energy CEO William Storey took to the company’s twitter page to denounce the company’s statement about salvaging this relationship, calling it “ludicrous” and “risible”. He accused “minority shareholders cosy with Red Bull and Whyte Bikes” of an attempted “palace coup”.

But as more and more reports began to surface, including one that contained a quote by Storey stating that Rich Energy had, in fact, terminated their title sponsorship contract with Haas due to the team’s “poor performance” as a “milkfloat” at the back of the grid, something became clear about the “rogue” that Storey supposedly denounced.

Storey is that “rogue”, and now that has been confirmed.

As a part of a lengthier interview with RACER, which you can read here, here is what Neville Weston, one of Rich Energy’s shareholders who have grown tired of Storey’s style and have been attempting to remove him from his position as the CEO of the company, had to say about the matter.

"“Things weren’t being done to the standards they should have been, so we started to step in. We were working amicably with William to say ‘look, you need to move out, you’re not doing this well, you’re not doing that well’. He was playing ball. We were on a shareholder call on Wednesday, he didn’t show up on the call to discuss these items and then during the call sent out this thing saying ‘I’m terminating the Haas contract’. We knew straight away that was him going rogue, so we then had to deal with that situation.”"

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This is perhaps the weirdest Formula 1 situation ever.

Other actions by the company’s CEO since then have further illustrated this, such as him ripping Haas for running Rich Energy’s branding in Sunday’s British Grand Prix since they had supposedly been “sacked” by the company.

He also harassed them for the early double retirement of their two drivers, Romain Grosjean and Kevin Magnussen, in Sunday’s British Grand Prix, and he went on to call the people within the team “liars” in another statement he released on Twitter.

What has already been an extraordinarily strange scenario since it started to heat up last Wednesday just continues to get stranger — and, in some ways, a lot more entertaining.