Quick quiz: what is the fastest thing in the sporting world?
It’s faster than an Indycar, faster than an LMP1 machine, and faster than a Formula One car.
It’s even faster than 1000 milligrams of taurine being absorbed into the bloodstream.
The answer: the average speed of Red Bull management’s knee jerk.
News broke overnight that Daniil Kvyat, two-time Formula One podium-getter and Red Bull Racing’s 2015 points leader, has been dumped from the aforementioned Red Bull senior team to resume his place at Toro Rosso, effective from the Spanish Grand Prix.
The Faenza-based squad will relinquish its claim to 18-year-old Max Verstappen, who will duly fill the Russian’s shoes in Milton Keynes.
That’s bad news for all those Russian Formula One fans who were decked in newly bought Red Bull Racing gear last weekend; bad news for the official Spanish Grand Prix, which will already have gone to print; and especially bad news for my humble Box of Neutrals podcast, which was pre-recorded on Wednesday for play out today (but which is still well worth a listen).
The precise details of how Red Bull ended up in this unusual situation in which a driver with more than two years of experience ended up at a self-defined junior team will undoubtedly become clearer with time, but today the straight swap leaves us with many pointed questions.
The first question is the most obvious: how is it that Red Bull management concluded that the driver who scored their only podium so far this year deserved the boot?
Certainly Kvyat had an average start to the season, but it was far from unrecoverable.
In Australia and Bahrain, he was caught out early in the controversial elimination qualifying format. In Australia, his car failed on the formation lap and in Bahrain Kvyat pulled himself out of a lacklustre opening half of the race to finish a solid seventh, albeit overshadowed by Daniel Ricciardo’s fourth-place classification.
But in China he came alive. Though he was blown away by Ricciardo in qualifying, he made the race-defining move on Sebastian Vettel at turn one to finish third, earning Formula One’s fan-voted driver of the day award in the process.
His Russian Grand Prix performance was messy, to say the least, and two collisions with Vettel in a matter of metres – one resulting in collateral damage to Ricciardo’s car and the other putting Vettel out of the race – incensed the team, which scored no points for the weekend.
And that crash apparently outweighs the podium in the minds of Red Bull’s powers, so Kvyat has been punted back to Toro Rosso to, according to Christian Horner, “continue his development … giving him the chance to regain his form and show his potential”.
It’s no secret that Kvyat was promoted at least one year earlier than management expected after Vettel’s sudden departure for Ferrari at the end of 2014, which makes the wisdom of replacing the apparently undercooked Russian with a teenager with less than 18 months of experience under his belt unconventional at best, which is the second question.
There’s no doubt Verstappen is talented. He is surely a future champion, circumstances willing, and he’s already shown well against more experienced drivers on track. Most expect him to fare well against proven race winner and new teammate Ricciardo.
But if sending Kvyat back to Faenza is an admission from management that it promoted him too early, how does promoting Verstappen part of the way through a season correct that error?
In Australia – where Verstappen was already being rumoured to have inked a deal to replace Kvyat next season, which bizarrely turned out to be false – Max allowed himself to be overcome with emotions in a petulant race arguably more indictable than Kvyat’s Russian efforts.
Angry he wasn’t allowed to pit first, Verstappen pitted himself, catching his team completely unaware and ruining his own race. He later almost took teammate Carlos Sainz out of the grand prix in a botched attempt to pass.
Better or worse than essentially misjudging your braking zone? You decide.
But with logic so shaky, necessarily a third question must be asked: why send Kvyat back to Toro Rosso, and in doing so break with a tradition of (a) trialling only new drivers and (b) a willingness to sack established drivers midseason to promote new drivers?
Verstappen’s courting by F1’s big beasts is an open secret, and despite his contract running through to the end of 2017, the Verstappen camp is nothing if not ambitious.
So to answer that question with another question, was it easier for Red Bull to disrupt both its Formula One teams and undermine the career of a driver it invested heavily in just to avoid a protracted contract battle with, say, Ferrari?
And if one of its supposedly watertight contracts was breachable after all, what does it say about its contract with Formula One’s other hot property, Ricciardo?
It wouldn’t be the first time a Red Bull knee jerk had backfired.
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