Mercedes-AMG
So Red Bull has one of the biggest junior driver programmes in the sport, funding a whole squad of up-and-coming racers in F2, F3 and F4. Yet it’s currently struggling to find a suitable candidate for one of its AlphaTauri seats next year – the one alongside the just-confirmed Yuki Tsunoda. Pierre Gasly would like leave for Alpine, but still has a year on his contract, an option activated by Red Bull a few weeks ago. Red Bull can derive some value from that contract because if Alpine wants him to replace Fernando Alonso (which it does) it will have to buy that contract out. So potentially all three parties – Red Bull, Gasly and Alpine – will be happy.
Except… how to fill the hole at AlphaTauri which Gasly’s departure would leave? Nyck de Vries is currently hot favourite to fill that space after his exceptional debut at Monza, standing in at Williams. But De Vries is not on the Red Bull roster of junior drivers. Why is Red Bull having to reach outside of that roster to fill a seat in its junior F1 team?
AlphaTauri needs a new driver just as the tide has gone out for the young guys
It just illustrates that assessing the potential of young drivers and their rate of progress is not a science. People develop at completely different rates, forged not just by their personalities and abilities but also by their circumstances. It’s quite common for a driver who looks very promising early in his career to ultimately hit a lower ceiling than one who initially looks unremarkable but just keeps improving. Then there are those who look terrific in their early careers then stumble and fall out of fashion – but get an opportunity out of the blue to shine, like De Vries. But Nyck is now 27 years old, a year older than Gasly who is in his fifth season of F1, has been in and out of the senior Red Bull team and has an impressive grand prix victory on his CV.
None of Red Bull’s current F2 drivers Jehan Daruvala, Liam Lawson, Dennis Hauger and Ayumu Iwasa have made a strong case for being ready yet for F1 and there is no Max Verstappen-like comet searing through F3 demanding that he be on the F1 grid at the earliest opportunity. With more experience, those drivers may well develop to become potentially terrific F1 drivers – or maybe not. It’s all about how much potential they have and how effectively they are able to access it.
That’s just how it is with the ebb and flow of the tides of young drivers. AlphaTauri just happens to potentially need a new driver just as the tide has gone out for the young guys – and that’s possibly going to create De Vries’s chance of a full-time F1 seat. Thanks to him being ready when the opportunity appeared at Monza and grabbing it with both hands to do a flawless job.
F1’s annual game of musical chairs is approaching its end, with several more hopeful drivers than there are seats. We look at who is in line for the vacant spaces on next year’s grid
Twenty-seven years old would not have been considered an unusually big age to be making an F1 debut a couple of decades or more ago. Nigel Mansell was 27 when he got his break with Lotus – and there is the perfect case study of a driver of immense ability who took a little longer than usual to be able to access it. The circumstances of his early life were difficult, his emotional development took time, some of the people around him who didn’t take to him made life difficult. When you have a team boss saying, “Oh he’s complaining we didn’t put enough petrol in is he? Well, next season I’m going to make sure he doesn’t have a car to put petrol in,” you probably aren’t going to be able to show your full potential.
So because he was a late developer, it’s often assumed – wrongly – that Mansell didn’t have the natural gift of the top guys and simply made himself the driver he became by graft. Anyone who had witnessed his phenomenal achievements in Formula Ford knew that to be nonsense. He simply wasn’t able to access all the ability in his early F1 years, sometimes because of his own limitations outside the car, sometimes because of the wrong perception people had of him and the difficulties that caused. He went on to become one of the most exciting performers F1 has ever seen.
Junior driver academies mean that struggling in old machinery, taking occasional drives as they appear when someone else has fallen short, just being around for the big break aren’t typically how a driver progresses these days. It’s all much more structured. But that doesn’t mean there is not still a wild variance in the development rate of young drivers and how it’s impossible to take accurate readings of their potential at just the time the investment is needed.
