Max Verstappen is the new Red Bull champion, and his dominance, as things are going, will be destined to last a little longer in Formula 1, while Max is in fact already ready to secure a third consecutive drivers’ title. But this enormous competitiveness and enormous ambition of the young talent cost Red Bull dearly, and with Max’s rise the Milton Keynes team’s new driver selection system was thrown into crisis.
Now alongside Max Verstappen is Sergio Perez, and although at the beginning of the season the Mexican seemed to be able to put a spanner in Max’s wheels, over time he revealed the true temperament of the champion that Max possesses and Sergio, at least not at the moment. Now the number #1 is well behind his teammate by 125 points and is preparing to once again become the best driver in the world.
However, the choice of Perez as a teammate was the result of a particularly troubled and complex journey that began several years ago with Daniel Ricciardo. The Australian had been part of Red Bull since 2014, but in 2016 when Max arrived as his teammate, something broke: Daniel understood the boy’s potential and the importance that the team placed on him and in a couple of years he preferred to decide to leave the stable (where he would have been an eternal second) in favor of a project (Renault) that he could have carried on as leader.
Now the main problem for Red Bull remains that of finding a worthy driver to work alongside the world champion, not an easy task for various reasons.
In the first place difficult because anyone coming to Red Bull would try to establish himself to dominate and win a world title, considering what kind of machine the energy drinks team has managed to put together. But this is not possible, an internal struggle for the dominance of the team and the recognition of the status of first driver would jeopardize the possibility of successes themselves and Red Bull is certainly not willing to take a risk of this caliber.
Secondly, because Red Bull has always had a tough approach to the world of Formula 1, changing, testing and torpedoing the drivers as if they were necessary but interchangeable parts of a wider mechanism. In a certain sense this has paid off (see Verstappen), but net of the number #1 this strategy has laid the foundations of a bigger problem such that now not only in Red Bull it is not even possible to imagine a post-Verstappen but it is also difficult to find a mate to mate with; in support of this thesis it suffices to see that in recent years Verstappen has been the only figure perpetually present in the team, while his companions have always changed very suddenly, some even being replaced in the middle of the seasons due to poor performance ( see recently with De Vries or in the past with Gasly).
Perez himself, who is now Max’s partner, was actually signed from outside and not from the Red Bull academy. This highlights the problems, currently masked by Verstappen’s incredible success, which nevertheless remain and which concern the basis of the Milton Keynes team’s talent selection: the stable is now focusing all its resources and commitments on Verstappen (and from one part of it is correct given the enormous successes they are achieving), but they are not currently thinking of investing in a youngster to bring forward to support Max, nor in a youngster who could one day replace the world champion. A problem which, if not resolved, risks, paradoxically, potentially putting the team’s performance in crisis in the future and the inevitable recourse to selecting external talent.
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