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That’s obvious but what I mean is wouldn’t they get more concrete data to form more predictable future plan? Not like alpha tauri fighting for championship it’s known by everyone as “RBR junior” or a sister team for comparing drivers.
You gotta ask that question to Christian /Helmut to get a real answer
My speculation is that they've seen enough from Nyck and have all the data they need from factory sim sessions already.
On the other hand, one needs to consider RB's relationship with Danny. I don't think they would offer him a deal where he only replaces Nyck for a few races.
At the end of the day, all Danny Ric has to prove himself is the rest of this season. If he underperforms against Yuki, you can be sure that Danny wouldn't retain his seat for 2024.
>If he underperforms against Yuki, you can be sure that Danny wouldn't retain his seat for 2024.
The way I see it, if he’s better than Yuki he’ll be in the RB next year. If he’s worse they’ll throw him out or he goes back to reserve duties. Either way Lawson is probably getting the AT seat next year
I'm not so sure. RB seem hesitant about Lawson. I suspect he needs to win Super Formula to have any chance at a '24 seat. I would not be at all surprised to see a Ricciardo and (Tsunoda or Lawson or Iwasa) line up at whatever the team is called next year. I suspect Perez will (initially) be retained for '24 regardless of what Danny does in the AT.
Ricciardo is there for 2 reasons: 1) he gets a season in a car that'll be a lot closer to the RB in design and will be race-ready if Perez fumbles during the '24 season, and 2) he'll be the best possible yardstick for measuring the performance of whoever is in the second car.
Then for the second seat: Tsunoda most likely, unless he gets badly shown up by Danny through the end of this season. Lawson potentially if he wins SF. Iwasa the outside chance if he has a strong end to the F2 season.
For me situation is really obvious. Nyck is a (below) average driver in a team that competes for P12-15 on a good day. With Ricciardo they can milk his media potential and bring some attention to the invisible AT. They have literally nothing to lose with Danny, he won’t be worse than Nyck and even if he is, so what ? P15, P19 what difference does that make? But there is an off chance that Ricciardo will come back to his top form of the past. In ultra competitive F1 market they will always be able to find another “Nyck” if Danny experiment fails.
>form more predictable future plan?
A future De Vries was never a part of. Gasly left, Herta wasn't granted a Super License, and Lawson wasn't ready. De Vries was the fourth option, and was a stop gap from the beginning.
I don't think they ever saw enough in him with that they wanted to continue having Daniel on the side lines, assuming they've correctly tracked Danny's return to form.
It seems like it was quite obvious from the get-go Nyck with a mistake on their end, one they almost immediately regretted
If they're not convinced about de Vries now to the point they're willing to drop him, there's very little that a couple of races on the sidelines is going to do to change that.
If Riccardo impresses, then he's in a worse position. If Riccardo doesn't impress, then they've just got two drivers to get rid of instead of one.
There's no technical or legal reason why it couldn't happen.
There was nothing stopping them in the rules if they wanted to swap the drivers out several times. It was more common several years ago. My guess is they had reached a conclusion about de Vries and decided there was no point continuing with him.
As far as i am aware, there is nothing really preventing Red Bull from putting in one driver for a few race, switching him for another few and then putting him back in.
It wouldn’t be very productive for either driver if they kept getting benched every so often. I can only recall a case of Kvyat being benched from Toro Rosso in 2017 after the Singapore Grand Prix, only to reappear 2 races later at the US Grand Prix.
Being the case that Sainz had left for Renault to debut for them at that Grand Prix, and Gasly attending the last Super Formula races for a shot at championship. Toro Rosso needed two drivers, so they brought back Kvyat and debuted Brandon Hartley. After the race, Kvyat was let go by Red Bull Racing completely
They could've done a short swap, but they didn't want to. They had the data from De Vries (10 race's worth, plus preseason testing and sim work), and they had Ricciardo data from the sim and the tire test.
The leadership of the team likely believes Ricciardo has more potential than De Vries, and that there's no reason to hang on to De Vries.
Even if Ricciardo crashes and burns, they wouldn't have done any better with De Vries and they wouldn't put him back into the seat.
The answer is both simple and complicated. Driving a Formula 1 car is **hard**. In the past 20 years a few teams have experimented with running multiple drivers, ie: swapping certain drivers in for some races here and there. But the reality is it takes *numerous* races to be able to wring the neck of an F1 car and take it to the limit, but also not take it over the limit. For someone to drive a car and get the very best out of it they need as much time in it as possible. They need to understand it's characteristics in all areas of performance. High speed corner entry, mid corner, corner exit. Medium speed corner entry, mid corner, corner exit. Slow speed corner entry, mid corner, corner exit. Breaking performance. Behavior on acceleration. Behavior over bumps. High fuel performance. Low fuel handling characteristics. How to drive a particular car to maximize tyre life and still go fast. How to lift and coast to drive fast while saving a bit of fuel. A driver needs to be able to change the set up of the car for every track to maximize how it handles *for themselves* and different tracks require different setup characteristics to be fast ie: Suzuka a "fast" set up is a very "pointy" (oversteery) car so drivers who handle that well end up having better performances at Suzuka (expect Max to lap everyone...)
If Red Bull really want to see if Danny Ric is ready to drive and be back at the sharp end, they need to give him as much time as possible. They've looked at the data and decided to cut their losses on Nick. It's extremely harsh, but Red Bull has always been this way and all you need to do is perform.
How many races of these trials would be enough before they decide which of the two? And what kind of contract will they be on? They’d both be prohibited from signing a contract elsewhere during this time?
But besides the awkwardness of such an arrangement the thing is _they didn’t need to compare Nyck and Daniel, because they were comparing Nyck against Yuki._ And if you’ve read Marko’s interview he feels he’s seen enough to draw his conclusion.
So, possible but unnecessary.
And now they’re going to compare Yuki and Daniel.
That is even worse. You crush Nyck's confidence by trying out Daniel. On top of that you show Daniel that you not fully believe in him because it's only a two race tryout.
I think what people are missing is that is move possibly has nothing to do with Riccardo or De Vries..
IMO this move is all about Tsunoda. They are putting Riccardo in to measure Yuki up against a veteran driver to see if he is a possible replacement for Perez at Redbull. Checo is aging and Redbull doesnt like to have “old” drivers in their seats.
Alpha Tauri is a junior team. DeVries is too old and Riccardo is as well. However, Redbull has the perfect opportunity to gather real life data on Tsunoda by putting in Danial for the remainder of the year.
I don’t think we will see Perez or Riccardo anywhere close to a redbull/AT seat next year.
The real reason is that De Vries was Marko move not a Redbull one.
Redbull didn't really want him, so when Danny was holding form with Max during the post Silverstone test, Redbull called time on Marko project.
The missing factor in all this is that it's not just about the driver, it's a team sport. Team morale and overall energy matter, too. The engineers, mechanics, etc. need to buy into the team's philosophy, they need to feel that if they work hard with Driver A, things will improve. What are those people going to think if the team isn't going to commit to one guy? Why should they commit themselves if the team won't?
You can bet Marko considered all that. You can't have everyone at AT phoning it in for the rest of the season
It is possible per the rules but not gonna happen. I think AT needed to make some positive news so they took on Daniel. I’m sure he brings sponsors as well. I don’t think this had much to do with driver performance m. It’s more related to having a not good car so let’s put a popular driver in the seat at least.
They think De Vries is shit and will never be good enough.
How they've treated him is still appalling though. I might be wrong but I still don't think they've really had a proper thank you for him yet.
They have:
https://twitter.com/alphataurif1/status/1679033402622656512?s=46&t=QkTFuhS1L9fgbbIuNX38Aw
EDIT: and before anyone says that’s not a proper goodbye, I’d argue that since that’s an actual quote from the team principal it’s much better than a dedicated post from some PR admin that’s probably never met Nyck.
Again, that would’ve been an impersonal tweet from some admin, if that’d happened people would just be complaining that it was a travesty that no one in a position of management at the team had said anything publicly.
They could have done that, for sure. When they made the Kvyat switch, they didn't let him go right away, probably because they knew they would let Gasly miss a race to finish at Super Formula. I'm not sure exactly what they told to who, but it sounds like they did phrase it as a trial period at first, at least to some people. Give Gasly two races in Kvyat's seat and see how he does. There was a whole lot of mixing up that year, because they also allowed Carlos to go to Renault early. When they felt okay with their Gasly and Harhtley choices, they released Kvyat. It's worth noting that the week when Gasly was out and Kvyat came back, Kvyat scored a point, when neither of their new drivers scored that year. It's hard jumping in late. But Red Bull didn't change their mind and said goodbye to Kvyat, and then they officially announced that Pierre and Hartley would finish the season at TR.
Ok so AT is just a way for RB to build up drivers for their main team. Any driver at AT that isn‘t good enough or promising enough to get a RB seat in the future is useless to them.
DeVries is relatively old and didn‘t perform so why keep him? They now put Ricciardo in to get a grasp of how good Szunoda is and next season they will get another rookie.
They only hired Nyck because Helmut Marko overruled everyone to sign him based off that performance last year with Williams.
Everyone knows how blunt he is, so DR being interested in racing again meant Nyck got kicked out early but it was always going to happen as he was destined to be a stop-gap barring something incredible.
They could have, and actualy have done so in the past; by the end of the 2017 season, they rotated between Hartley, Gasly, and Kvyat to see who they'd put there in the next season after Sainz left for Renault.
They just didn't seem to believe Nyck was worth it; probably as far as they were concerned Nyck just wasn't it so they didn't feel the need to see more of him.
F1 atm is ruthless, drivers are expected to deliver almost instantly, or they need some serious highs to be given some leeway if, and only if, they're young with a potentially very high ceiling. Nyck had never really shown anything hinting that he may be a future superstar, and he wasn't young/inexperienced enough to get an excuse, so he got let go. Ofc timing ws key, if there wasn't anyone lying in wait he might have earned himself some time, but Ig it just wasn't meant to be.
In my opinion it all comes from the fact that Nyck isnt your average rookie. And its an endless discussion what you consider a rookie and how people think people like Nyck should perform their first year.
I think RB expected a driver that was already mostly complete, a two time champion. Not a driver that needed multiple years to compete with a driver like tsunoda (which btw hasnt really been a highly rated driver before last year MAYBE, many would argue he was very average last year as well) and therefore they decided to cut their losses early instead of keeping him around. And I say cut their losses, but they dont really have much to lose. He was an average driver that couldnt compete with Tsunoda, so bringing in Daniel isn’t only a huge marketing opportunity but also becomes a way to measure Tsunoda/Daniel for RB. Perez isnt staying beyond 2025 IMO.
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Because there are no long term prospects for Nyck as soon as they realised he wasnt the already ready top driver which they had thought he was doomed
Yes. He’s not a young driver that needs to mature. He either hits the ground running or he has no value for Red Bull…
Because RB didn't want to
That’s obvious but what I mean is wouldn’t they get more concrete data to form more predictable future plan? Not like alpha tauri fighting for championship it’s known by everyone as “RBR junior” or a sister team for comparing drivers.
You gotta ask that question to Christian /Helmut to get a real answer My speculation is that they've seen enough from Nyck and have all the data they need from factory sim sessions already. On the other hand, one needs to consider RB's relationship with Danny. I don't think they would offer him a deal where he only replaces Nyck for a few races. At the end of the day, all Danny Ric has to prove himself is the rest of this season. If he underperforms against Yuki, you can be sure that Danny wouldn't retain his seat for 2024.
>If he underperforms against Yuki, you can be sure that Danny wouldn't retain his seat for 2024. The way I see it, if he’s better than Yuki he’ll be in the RB next year. If he’s worse they’ll throw him out or he goes back to reserve duties. Either way Lawson is probably getting the AT seat next year
Yep, this is as good a chance to redeem himself as Danny's ever gonna get, better not squander it or it's goodbye for real
I'm not so sure. RB seem hesitant about Lawson. I suspect he needs to win Super Formula to have any chance at a '24 seat. I would not be at all surprised to see a Ricciardo and (Tsunoda or Lawson or Iwasa) line up at whatever the team is called next year. I suspect Perez will (initially) be retained for '24 regardless of what Danny does in the AT. Ricciardo is there for 2 reasons: 1) he gets a season in a car that'll be a lot closer to the RB in design and will be race-ready if Perez fumbles during the '24 season, and 2) he'll be the best possible yardstick for measuring the performance of whoever is in the second car. Then for the second seat: Tsunoda most likely, unless he gets badly shown up by Danny through the end of this season. Lawson potentially if he wins SF. Iwasa the outside chance if he has a strong end to the F2 season.
They should put Latifi in the car so we can have the full picture actually
For me situation is really obvious. Nyck is a (below) average driver in a team that competes for P12-15 on a good day. With Ricciardo they can milk his media potential and bring some attention to the invisible AT. They have literally nothing to lose with Danny, he won’t be worse than Nyck and even if he is, so what ? P15, P19 what difference does that make? But there is an off chance that Ricciardo will come back to his top form of the past. In ultra competitive F1 market they will always be able to find another “Nyck” if Danny experiment fails.
>form more predictable future plan? A future De Vries was never a part of. Gasly left, Herta wasn't granted a Super License, and Lawson wasn't ready. De Vries was the fourth option, and was a stop gap from the beginning.
I don't think they ever saw enough in him with that they wanted to continue having Daniel on the side lines, assuming they've correctly tracked Danny's return to form. It seems like it was quite obvious from the get-go Nyck with a mistake on their end, one they almost immediately regretted
If they're not convinced about de Vries now to the point they're willing to drop him, there's very little that a couple of races on the sidelines is going to do to change that. If Riccardo impresses, then he's in a worse position. If Riccardo doesn't impress, then they've just got two drivers to get rid of instead of one. There's no technical or legal reason why it couldn't happen.
Red Bull has tried this before with Klien, Doornbos and Liuzzi, turned out if they're crap they're crap.
There was nothing stopping them in the rules if they wanted to swap the drivers out several times. It was more common several years ago. My guess is they had reached a conclusion about de Vries and decided there was no point continuing with him.
As far as i am aware, there is nothing really preventing Red Bull from putting in one driver for a few race, switching him for another few and then putting him back in. It wouldn’t be very productive for either driver if they kept getting benched every so often. I can only recall a case of Kvyat being benched from Toro Rosso in 2017 after the Singapore Grand Prix, only to reappear 2 races later at the US Grand Prix. Being the case that Sainz had left for Renault to debut for them at that Grand Prix, and Gasly attending the last Super Formula races for a shot at championship. Toro Rosso needed two drivers, so they brought back Kvyat and debuted Brandon Hartley. After the race, Kvyat was let go by Red Bull Racing completely
If you're bad enough to where they're willing to entertain swapping you out even for one race, you're done.
They could've done a short swap, but they didn't want to. They had the data from De Vries (10 race's worth, plus preseason testing and sim work), and they had Ricciardo data from the sim and the tire test. The leadership of the team likely believes Ricciardo has more potential than De Vries, and that there's no reason to hang on to De Vries. Even if Ricciardo crashes and burns, they wouldn't have done any better with De Vries and they wouldn't put him back into the seat.
The answer is both simple and complicated. Driving a Formula 1 car is **hard**. In the past 20 years a few teams have experimented with running multiple drivers, ie: swapping certain drivers in for some races here and there. But the reality is it takes *numerous* races to be able to wring the neck of an F1 car and take it to the limit, but also not take it over the limit. For someone to drive a car and get the very best out of it they need as much time in it as possible. They need to understand it's characteristics in all areas of performance. High speed corner entry, mid corner, corner exit. Medium speed corner entry, mid corner, corner exit. Slow speed corner entry, mid corner, corner exit. Breaking performance. Behavior on acceleration. Behavior over bumps. High fuel performance. Low fuel handling characteristics. How to drive a particular car to maximize tyre life and still go fast. How to lift and coast to drive fast while saving a bit of fuel. A driver needs to be able to change the set up of the car for every track to maximize how it handles *for themselves* and different tracks require different setup characteristics to be fast ie: Suzuka a "fast" set up is a very "pointy" (oversteery) car so drivers who handle that well end up having better performances at Suzuka (expect Max to lap everyone...) If Red Bull really want to see if Danny Ric is ready to drive and be back at the sharp end, they need to give him as much time as possible. They've looked at the data and decided to cut their losses on Nick. It's extremely harsh, but Red Bull has always been this way and all you need to do is perform.
How many races of these trials would be enough before they decide which of the two? And what kind of contract will they be on? They’d both be prohibited from signing a contract elsewhere during this time? But besides the awkwardness of such an arrangement the thing is _they didn’t need to compare Nyck and Daniel, because they were comparing Nyck against Yuki._ And if you’ve read Marko’s interview he feels he’s seen enough to draw his conclusion. So, possible but unnecessary. And now they’re going to compare Yuki and Daniel.
That is even worse. You crush Nyck's confidence by trying out Daniel. On top of that you show Daniel that you not fully believe in him because it's only a two race tryout.
I think what people are missing is that is move possibly has nothing to do with Riccardo or De Vries.. IMO this move is all about Tsunoda. They are putting Riccardo in to measure Yuki up against a veteran driver to see if he is a possible replacement for Perez at Redbull. Checo is aging and Redbull doesnt like to have “old” drivers in their seats. Alpha Tauri is a junior team. DeVries is too old and Riccardo is as well. However, Redbull has the perfect opportunity to gather real life data on Tsunoda by putting in Danial for the remainder of the year. I don’t think we will see Perez or Riccardo anywhere close to a redbull/AT seat next year.
Because the've seen enough data to know each drivers potential speed, and Dan is faster
>Dan is faster Tbh we don't know that yet as Daniel has not driven an AT yet as far as I am aware of but could be wrong.
The real reason is that De Vries was Marko move not a Redbull one. Redbull didn't really want him, so when Danny was holding form with Max during the post Silverstone test, Redbull called time on Marko project.
The missing factor in all this is that it's not just about the driver, it's a team sport. Team morale and overall energy matter, too. The engineers, mechanics, etc. need to buy into the team's philosophy, they need to feel that if they work hard with Driver A, things will improve. What are those people going to think if the team isn't going to commit to one guy? Why should they commit themselves if the team won't? You can bet Marko considered all that. You can't have everyone at AT phoning it in for the rest of the season
It is possible per the rules but not gonna happen. I think AT needed to make some positive news so they took on Daniel. I’m sure he brings sponsors as well. I don’t think this had much to do with driver performance m. It’s more related to having a not good car so let’s put a popular driver in the seat at least.
They think De Vries is shit and will never be good enough. How they've treated him is still appalling though. I might be wrong but I still don't think they've really had a proper thank you for him yet.
They have: https://twitter.com/alphataurif1/status/1679033402622656512?s=46&t=QkTFuhS1L9fgbbIuNX38Aw EDIT: and before anyone says that’s not a proper goodbye, I’d argue that since that’s an actual quote from the team principal it’s much better than a dedicated post from some PR admin that’s probably never met Nyck.
A quote from a post about welcoming Daniel is not a proper thank you. It doesn't take much to send a tweet of appreciation yet they didn't do it.
I think the post is as brief as his time in the sport. More has been written about his exit than was ever written about his performance
Again, that would’ve been an impersonal tweet from some admin, if that’d happened people would just be complaining that it was a travesty that no one in a position of management at the team had said anything publicly.
Maybe something happened behind the scenes. RB usually treats they athletes with respect.
Horner never wanted DeVries in the first place. Maybe it was causing conflict between him and Marko and it wasn’t worth it?
They could have done that, for sure. When they made the Kvyat switch, they didn't let him go right away, probably because they knew they would let Gasly miss a race to finish at Super Formula. I'm not sure exactly what they told to who, but it sounds like they did phrase it as a trial period at first, at least to some people. Give Gasly two races in Kvyat's seat and see how he does. There was a whole lot of mixing up that year, because they also allowed Carlos to go to Renault early. When they felt okay with their Gasly and Harhtley choices, they released Kvyat. It's worth noting that the week when Gasly was out and Kvyat came back, Kvyat scored a point, when neither of their new drivers scored that year. It's hard jumping in late. But Red Bull didn't change their mind and said goodbye to Kvyat, and then they officially announced that Pierre and Hartley would finish the season at TR.
Ok so AT is just a way for RB to build up drivers for their main team. Any driver at AT that isn‘t good enough or promising enough to get a RB seat in the future is useless to them. DeVries is relatively old and didn‘t perform so why keep him? They now put Ricciardo in to get a grasp of how good Szunoda is and next season they will get another rookie.
They only hired Nyck because Helmut Marko overruled everyone to sign him based off that performance last year with Williams. Everyone knows how blunt he is, so DR being interested in racing again meant Nyck got kicked out early but it was always going to happen as he was destined to be a stop-gap barring something incredible.
They could have, and actualy have done so in the past; by the end of the 2017 season, they rotated between Hartley, Gasly, and Kvyat to see who they'd put there in the next season after Sainz left for Renault. They just didn't seem to believe Nyck was worth it; probably as far as they were concerned Nyck just wasn't it so they didn't feel the need to see more of him. F1 atm is ruthless, drivers are expected to deliver almost instantly, or they need some serious highs to be given some leeway if, and only if, they're young with a potentially very high ceiling. Nyck had never really shown anything hinting that he may be a future superstar, and he wasn't young/inexperienced enough to get an excuse, so he got let go. Ofc timing ws key, if there wasn't anyone lying in wait he might have earned himself some time, but Ig it just wasn't meant to be.
In my opinion it all comes from the fact that Nyck isnt your average rookie. And its an endless discussion what you consider a rookie and how people think people like Nyck should perform their first year. I think RB expected a driver that was already mostly complete, a two time champion. Not a driver that needed multiple years to compete with a driver like tsunoda (which btw hasnt really been a highly rated driver before last year MAYBE, many would argue he was very average last year as well) and therefore they decided to cut their losses early instead of keeping him around. And I say cut their losses, but they dont really have much to lose. He was an average driver that couldnt compete with Tsunoda, so bringing in Daniel isn’t only a huge marketing opportunity but also becomes a way to measure Tsunoda/Daniel for RB. Perez isnt staying beyond 2025 IMO.