Originally posted on my old blog 13/10/2020
2020 (ignoring the global pandemic) should theoretically be Red Bull’s most comfortable year in F1 for a while. With Ferrari dropping considerably off the pace to the back end of the mid-field, their closest rival of the last few years has effectively been eliminated. Having pushed through the pitfalls of his aggressive driving style and refined his approach to racing, Max Verstappen has barely made a mistake of the kind that hampered his first few years at the team. They have on their hands a man who is widely considered (I believe rightfully so) to be the second best driver on the grid. And the results in part speak for this – they seem to have 2nd in the constructors championship in the bag. But a number of issues are plaguing the team that are making this an increasingly difficult season for them.
Firstly, Alex Albon simply isn’t delivering. It pains me to say this, as I love Alex; he is a genuinely nice guy and a great driver, and wouldn’t have been promoted to F1 and then Red Bull if he weren’t. He has pulled off some of the most exciting overtakes I’ve seen in a while since he landed the seat, braking late enough to make Daniel Riciardo jealous. But he is being majorly let down by his qualifying performance. In Russia for example he could only manage 10th (before a penalty dropped him to 15th), 1.1secs off his teammate in 2nd. Max is beating him 11-0 in the qualifying battle, and whilst Alex did manage to line up alongside him at Mugello and convert that into his first podium, when Max has finished a Grand Prix it has always been above his teammate. Plenty of people have said this isn’t a fair battle, that the team and car is built around Max, and that anyone going up against him will never have a fair chance. Of course the team is going to invest in Max – they would be stupid not to. He has a long-term contract with them and increasingly looks like the only alternate World Champion to Lewis Hamilton whilst the Brit remains in the sport. It doesn’t mater how good the second driver is, top teams have to choose a number one driver and get behind them if they want to have any chance of winning – just look at the mess Ferrari got themselves into last year with Leclerc and Vettel. But the accusations that Red Bull are sabotaging Alex are completely laughable. His success in the car means financial gains for the team, and it would be extremely beneficial for them and Max if Alex was closer to him, allowing for split strategies to attack the Mercedes. We’ve seen plenty of instances where a driver has entered a team built around one personality and managed to succeed: obviously the circumstances are all different but Ricciardo and Vettel, and Hill and Prost come to mind for me.
I think a major factor in this that has been overlooked a little though is the quality of the car, which due to the disappearance of Ferrari from the top has been more difficult to discern this year. Just because the team are second in the constructors championship by quite a way does not mean they have the second best car by quite a way. Even in Max’s hands, the RB16 looks a handful on the track, often more so than the Mclaren or pink Mercedes/Racing Point. Although impossible to tell for sure, I think the gap between the Red Bull drivers is exacerbated by the fact that Max is outperforming the car to quite a degree, whilst Alex is sadly underperforming. The pace of a team’s fastest driver isn’t always a direct indication of the pace of the car (Ferrari are experiencing something similar with their two drivers). The position of P3 that Max so often manages to slot himself into isn’t representative of the strength of the car, but neither is P8 (Albon’s average qualifying position this season). If Alex could consistently qualify and finish around the p4, p5, p6 mark (as he did after joining Red Bull mid way through last season), and on occasion stick together with Max throughout the race, then I think he and Red Bull could be proud of the results. There’s also rookie errors and clashes with other drivers from misjudged moves that end up landing Albon with a time penalty, damaged car, or both. His incident with Daniil Kvyat at the Nurburgring for example was completely avoidable, and reminiscent of the kind of incidents Max was causing in 2017 and 2018 (his clash with Vettel in China comes to mind). But whilst Max was making reckless manoeuvres, he was also getting results for the team, and Albon isn’t.
I don’t think there’s any chance at this point in the season of Red Bull swapping him out a la Gasly or Kvyat, but if things don’t improve his seat for next year is very much at risk. If they do decide to replace him though, who do they choose? For so long Red Bull were at the front of the pack when it came to their driver development programme, reflected in the fact that nearly half (7/16) of the podium sitters on the current grid are from the Red Bull Junior Team. But their talent pool seems to have dried up recently. The shuffling around of drivers between Alpha Tauri and themselves has left them in quite an awkward position, where the sister team they should be able to pick up-and-coming talent from consists of two demoted Red Bull drivers. Moving one of them back up to the number one team would be something of an admission that they fucked up their driver choices. I can’t see Gasly having any more success than Albon is having now, or he had during his first stint at Red Bull, if he makes the move back up (despite his strong form so far this season) and Kvyat definitely hasn’t proved himself deserving of a promotion. Out of the nine Red Bull juniors, Yuki Tsunoda is the only driver with a realistic chance of gaining enough super licence points to move to F1 next season (I believe he needs to maintain his P3 in the F2 drivers standings for this), but he would only ever begin at Alfa Tauri. If they want to fill a seat at Red Bull with a new driver, they’ll have to look to someone older and more experienced – Nico Hulkenberg and Sergio Perez’s names have been thrown around a lot, but again this shows a weakness and a failure in how the entire Red Bull outfit is being managed.The troubles don’t stop there though. Whilst certainly better than during the 2017 and 2018 seasons, the RB16 is suffering far more reliability issues than its immediate predecessor. In last year’s 21 races, the Red Bull cars only suffered one reliability-based retirement (Gasly in Baku). In the 11 races so far this year they have had four, five if you consider Verstappen’s PU issue in Mugello that dropped him into his crash and would have ended his race anyway. Add to that Honda’s announcement that they will no longer be working with Red Bull after 2021(more on this another time), and the Austrian team’s situation is not looking at all rosy. For the sake of F1 fans everywhere eager for a close fight for the title, I hope they sort it out
