The Red Bull Junior Team

Riddle me this: what do Sebastian Vettel and Enrique Bernoldi have in common? On the face of it, not an awful lot – the former is a double world champion who is already well on the road to becoming an all-time Formula One great, whilst the other disappeared without trace after a season-and-a-half of mediocrity at the foundering Arrows team.

The answer is that both were able to reach the highest level in motorsport with the help of Red Bull, today the most prevalent backer of young racing talent. In fact, Bernoldi was the first such beneficiary of the scheme that unofficially began back in 1999 as a Formula 3000 team ran by Helmut Marko. Bernoldi's results in F3000 were hardly spectacular, but equally not an accurate representation of his performances. If not for a brace of unfortunate mechanical failures, Bernoldi would have in all likelihood taken third in the championship ahead of such talents as Mark Webber and Fernando Alonso in the 2000 season, hence Red Bull’s desire to see the Brazilian promoted to an F1 seat for 2001.

Red Bull were title sponsors to Sauber at the time, making the Swiss équipe the obvious team at which to place Bernoldi. However, team boss Peter Sauber instead elected to sign the largely unproven Kimi Raikkonen, leading Red Bull to instead negotiate with Arrows to find a berth for Bernoldi. A deal was done, but in the year-and-a-half remaining before the collapse of the Leafield-based team, the Brazilian achieved little besides notoriety at the 2001 Monaco Grand Prix as he held up David Coulthard’s McLaren for a considerable distance after the Scot stalled on the dummy grid from pole position.

The next man to represent Red Bull in F1 would be Christian Klien in 2004, who was parachuted into a Jaguar race drive in lieu of Red Bull's F3000 drivers Vitantonio Liuzzi and Patrick Freisacher after a single season of Formula 3 Euroseries. In spite of being regularly out-performed by his teammate Webber, Klien was retained as the team was bought out by Red Bull, originally supposed to share the second car with Liuzzi alongside new signing Coulthard in 2005. The Italian however would end up competing in just four races after the Austrian press pressured Red Bull to give Klien the seat full-time.

Indeed, Klien proved a consistent performer during 2005, and his reward was his retention by the senior Red Bull team for 2006 while Liuzzi was placed at the re-branded Scuderia Toro Rosso (née Minardi) along with GP2 graduate Scott Speed, who received his Red Bull backing courtesy of the corporation’s US-based ‘Driver Search’ scheme. Klien however disappointed in 2006, and was dropped three races before the end of the year having been outscored seven-to-one by Coulthard. Test driver Robert Doornbos was given the final three rounds of the season, but he had no real chance of hanging on to his seat with Webber joining the team for 2007.

Having racked up just a solitary point between them in 2006, it was evident that neither Liuzzi nor Speed had any long-term future in the Red Bull fold, and Speed was the first of the pair to be shown the door after ten races in 2007. His replacement was the somewhat more promising Vettel, who had finished runner-up in the 2006 F3 Euroseries en route to becoming the youngest ever F1 points-scorer with a fine eighth place finish at Indianpolis as a substitute for the injured Robert Kubica at BMW. That particular performance led to Vettel being selected for the job as opposed to more senior members of the Red Bull junior team such as Neel Jani or Michael Ammermueller, a decision vindicated little under a year later as Vettel earned the title of the sport’s youngest ever race winner in the sodden conditions at Monza. Cue a well-deserved promotion for the Heppenheim native to Red Bull Racing in the place of the retiring Coulthard.

By this time, Liuzzi had been forced to follow in Klien’s footsteps and accept a test drive with a rival team as Sebastien Bourdais filled the subsequent vacancy for 2008 at Toro Rosso. Buemi meanwhile had seemingly done enough while serving his apprenticeship in GP2 to merit a promotion to the highest level in 2009, soon joined by Jaime Alguersauri after Bourdais was dismissed having struggled to adapt to F1 after his years racing in Champ Car. Alguersauri had beat teammate and fellow Red Bull protégé Brendon Hartley in 2008 to become the first of three successive Red Bull-backed British F3 champions, current Toro Rosso drivers Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne being the others.

Ricciardo and Vergne were given their chance this year in place of Buemi and Alguersauri, who despite performing solidly just weren’t considered championship material in the same mould Vettel had been. In fact, Vettel remains the only driver to have been promoted from Toro Rosso to the primary Red Bull team, a proposition made all the more attractive by the latter’s fairly recent transformation into a championship-winning outfit. It seems all but certain that one of the Toro Rosso drivers will become the second man to do so; precisely which of them will naturally depend on how they both perform this year, and possibly the next if Webber chooses to hang around for an extra season.

Of course, just as easily as Ricciardo and Vergne replaced their Toro Rosso predecessors, so may they eventually be replaced if they fail to meet Marko’s high expectations – the fact that there is always a multitude of drivers rising through the ranks of the Red Bull junior scheme means that there is constant pressure to perform. Other notable drivers to have been dropped by the scheme in light of disappointing results in recent times include include Hartley, Mikhail Aleshin, Stefano Coletti and Daniel Juncadella, all of whom are still competing in various junior formula categories with varying degrees of success.

The most senior member of the Red Bull junior team currently is Britain’s Lewis Williamson, who competes in World Series by Renault this season at Arden (incidentally a team originally founded by current Red Bull team principal Christian Horner). Another potential Red Bull driver of the future is Carlos Sainz Jr., the son of the double World Rally champion of the same name. The Spaniard has progressed from Formula Renault to British F3 this season with the category’s dominant team, Carlin, and thus will be expected to emulate Alguersuari et al. in taking the title in his debut season. Meanwhile, Daniil Kyvat, Stefan Wackerbauer and Alex Albon will all be out to impress in Formula Renault this season, with Callan O’Keefe setting his sights on winning this year’s Formula BMW Talent Cup.

Not all of the aforementioned will be destined for F1, but one would have to contend that even those who have been axed by the scheme in the past are in a better position for it than they would have been otherwise. I certainly applaud Red Bull for giving so many young drivers a chance, and it seems that other top F1 teams including McLaren, Ferrari and most recently Mercedes have felt the need to launch similar programmes to nurture talents of the future. It follows that the more young driver schemes there are out there, the less likely it is that a talented driver would have to give up on his F1 dream due to a lack of funds - this therefore ought to mean that we continue to see the quality of drivers on the F1 grid improving in the future.