The Most Controversial Driver Swap in F1

in early 2016 Red Bull driver Daniel kavia seemed like he was on top of the world he was in a race-winning car the previous season he had just beaten Daniel Ricardo over the course of the year and after four races he also scored Red Bulls first and up to that point only Podium of the year however after a bad home Grand Prix in Russia he was out replaced after four races controversially in many people's eyes and even having other F1 drivers come to his defense in his place Red Bull put an 18 year old Max verstappen in the car and what happened next on Max's Red Bull debut was the sort of thing that you wouldn't believe if you saw it happen in a movie but let's rewind back how did kavia despite seeming like he was on top of the world end up in the middle of one of the most controversial driver swaps in F1 history usually when these high-profile driver swaps happen at top teams most of the time it's because a driver in a fast car is under delivering relative to their teammate and costing the team to the point where something has to change the thing that made the caveat verstappen swap so controversial was that kevia wasn't necessarily under delivering relative to Ricardo as mentioned earlier he had just come off the back of beating Ricardo in the 2015 championship by a narrow margin and he also had just scored the team's first and only Podium up to that point in China as this was not the same situation that Red Bull would later find themselves in with gasly and albon the key to understanding why this swap happened when it did is to understand that the motivation behind it wasn't necessarily to do with kavia underperforming but it was solely because Red Bull didn't want to lose Max verstappen according to articles at the time or when verstappen agreed to join the Red Bull family and make his debut with Toro Rosso and rejected a deal with Mercedes to be their test and Reserve driver for 2015. his contract stipulated that he would spend two seasons at Toro Rosso and then be promoted to Red Bull with a two-year deal for 2017 and 2018. however if Red Bull didn't offer him a promotion then that would trigger an exit clause meaning that he would become a free agent at the end of 2016. it was well known within the paddock that the likes of Mercedes and Ferrari were already interested in the happen and so a readable word is going to allow someone to pinch a driver that they had spent so much to get by the end of 2016 one of the Red Bull drivers was going to have to make way but considering that caveat had just beaten Ricardo in 2015 or why was it him before I answer that I do just want to quickly say that some of you might know that at the beginning of the Season me and fellow YouTuber Tomo put on our very first live show in London or well during the summer break we will be back in a bigger venue and this time with some very special surprise guests who will also be joining us on stage to chat the live show will be on Friday the 4th of August in London tickets are on sale right now you can buy them using the link at the very top of the description if you want to have a fun night chatting with us or laughing at our horrible F1 knowledge or just meeting like-minded F1 fans then definitely grab yourself the ticket and I hope to see you there it always felt like even though caveat was fast he was definitely out of favor compared to Ricardo keep in mind a few years earlier Ricardo in his first season at Red Bull beat a four-time world champion in Sebastian Vettel and at the time Ricardo was then a driver that everyone was touting as a future world champion 2015 was undoubtedly a bad year for Ricardo but he still beat kevia in qualifying showing that the raw speed was still there however he later admitted that there were off track factors that affected his performance which meant that even at the time I think the team and even The Wider F1 fanbase kind of felt that 2015 was just an off year for Ricardo rather than the new norm and that despite getting narrowly beaten by caveat in 2016 the team still believed that he was the future instead of caveat there was also the commercial aspect as well which can't be underestimated kavia was well liked but the smiling Aussie was still a fan favorite even though this was in the pre-drive to survive era Ricardo's personality has always been infectious and so for the Red Bull marketing machine that is a factor that no doubt swayed the team even more in his favor in the end 2016 was going to be caveat's last season almost regardless of what he did the noise and hype around verstappen was reaching fever Point Ricardo also seemed to bounce back and had a clear advantage over caviar he also had that credit by beating Serb in 2014 and then when you add the commercial advantages on top of that for caveats it wasn't a matter of if but when even to start the season caveat's form was starting to look worrying in the opening four races he qualified 18th 15th 6th and eighth and this also coincided with two races that pretty much changed his F1 career despite finishing on the podium in China he had a very memorable incident with Seb on lap one when he dived down the inside of the Ferrari causing Seb to take avoiding action and by doing so he then crashed into Kimmy ruining Ferrari's race and now this was memorable more so for what then happened after the race in the cooldown room with Seb famously dubbing caveat the torpedo for what he did on lap one and now I have always maintained controversially or not that kevia did nothing wrong if that was Max Lewis or Fernando making that audacious dive then I think people would be praising it as an aggressive overtake from a world champion but I think because it was kevia and because it was Seb who had such a big reaction it seemed like in terms of the public perception it was Daniel who came away as the driver in the wrong and the sub factor in particular made it even worse looking at what then happened in the very next race in Russia going into turn one he initially locked up and went straight into the back of Seb Who as a result crashed into Ricardo ruining his race just a few seconds later however caveat then came back to finish the job crashing into the back of Seb again and this time putting him out of the race for good ruining his sebs and his teammates race in just two corners a Red Bull will look looking for ammunition they were looking for a reason to drop caviar and Russia gave it to them on a silver platter speculation started to mount and just five days later it was official caveat was out of Red Bull going back to Toro Rosso with verstappen going the other way now I was curious to get some insight from inside the team itself and so there was no better person to ask than fellow YouTuber Blake AKA break F1 who at the time was caveat's Trackside performance engineer for 2015 and 2016 and then of course became verstappen's performance engineer from Spain onwards first up I wanted to know how he found out about his driver being demoted and also what his first impressions were of Max when he first walked into the factory so usually when you hear about some news in Formula One you almost always hear about it from Auto Sport or a journalist first for sure but the first time I heard that danil had been demoted was my boss Rocky called me and GP the race engineer who's now Max's race engineer into the meeting room to have a quick chat and uh he was like right here's what's happening uh Danny's going to drive with oroso for the rest of the season uh and Max is going to be in the car uh from Spain he'll be in the simulator next week to prepare for the race that's how it worked my first experience or interaction with Max was in the simulator in preparation for the Spanish Grand Prix that year and my initial Impressions were this guy is super young he's just a super nice super chilled out guy and he was pretty quick in the Sim but at the end of the day you don't take time um you don't take lap times from the simulator to say hey this person's good or not swap definitely split opinions because whilst now I think we're a lot more desensitized to Red Bull swapping drivers especially in their sister team back then it was far from the norm and it even had other drivers coming to caveat defense 2009 World Champion Jensen button tweeted saying but really one bad race and caveat dropped or what about the podium in the previous race hashtag short memories hearing another F1 driver from another team openly criticizing Red Bull's choice to swap the drivers is pretty unheard of and I think it just summarized the controversy of this swap because there was lots of sympathy towards caviar yes he had one bad race but there is a very long list of bad Races by other Red Bull drivers in which they then didn't get sacked straight after going into Spain there was the obvious media frenzy and F1 wasted no time in putting both of the drivers shoulder to shoulder in the press conference this was one of those awkward yet entertaining press conferences that you're happy that you're the one watching and not the driver being asked the difficult questions caveat on his Toro Rosso return would have a solid enough race finishing in P10 but this weekend was all about Max jumping into the car for the very first time he managed to qualify MP4 just behind the dominant Mercedes in front of both of the Ferraris and only four tens behind teammate Ricardo in third speaking about his first impressions of Max jumping into the red ball here is what Blake had to say when Max hopped into the car in Spain you could tell that he was definitely on it and he was going to be quick we had to work on feedback and understand just to learn the new driver's language and how they talk about the car but the one thing I say what wasn't really in Spain it was a couple of races after that we started to notice he would go out and free practice one absolutely ballistic like right on the pace right away pushing like hell and sometimes pushing over the limits and you know damaging a front Wing or something but uh I think a lot of drivers are taken aback Now by how quickly and how fast Max adapts and can push a car to the Limit from there well I'm sure most of you know the rest Max found himself at the right place and at the right time in history in a season and year in general that was dominated by Mercedes with them winning all but two races this turned out to be one of those two as just a few Corners into the race both Lewis and Nico took each other out opening up an opportunity for a surprise winner from there it was really all about strategy because whilst initially it looked like it would be Ricardo's race to win with Max running in P2 and Vettel being the lead Ferrari behind in both cases Red Bull and Ferrari opted to give their lead drivers a three-stop strategy with Max and Kimmy running on the two that turned out to not just be the right strategy but the winning call as it gave Max and Kimmy track position when they jumped their teammates which by the way Ricardo was livid about after the race and after soaking up pressure from a pushing raikkonen the youngest driver in F1 was followed over the line by the oldest driver in F1 to win on his Red Bull debut and immediately write a brand new page in F1 history he became by far the youngest F1 race winner at 18 years and 228 days old the youngest driver to ever stand on an F1 Podium the first Dodge driver to ever win a Grand Prix and also the first driver to win on debut for Red Bull however that was not just the first win and a special day for Max as it was also the first win for Blake so when Max joined Red Bull Racing that was his first win but it was also my first Grand Prix win as an engineer on a car and his race engineer GP that was gp's first win in F1 as well um as soon as the Mercedes collided like you don't celebrate that moment that a team Glides and is out of the race but as soon as you realize like right that's happened we've got a shot at winning this race and it was it was awesome um you know fending off Kimmy for the last couple laps that race as I remember it's been ages since I've watched that race but uh you know it was like is he going to be able to keep Kimmy at Bay for the rest of this race and it happened uh it was it was an insane insane Place uh and an insane moment in history and I was yeah I was emotional I was very emotional but uh it was it was quite a special day for me and probably my my proudest moment that I was a part of in um Motorsport history I think even to this day Red Bull and especially helmet Marco are still eating off the bag of that verstappen caveat swap success I think it definitely makes Marco feel as though even when a decision doesn't go right he can always point back to Max and what he's still doing right now as the ultimate license and justification for all of the driver decisions that don't go right the harsh reality is that a Red Bull has always been a numbers game it's not about quality it's not about nurturing drivers it's about quantity in opportunity to find which drivers will deliver in against the odds situations even though Max is the ultimate Benchmark and ultimate success story I have never been fully convinced by Red Bull's trigger finger approach to promoting and demoting drivers I think that whilst in the short term it delivered them a driver like Max I can't help but feel like even to this day outside of Max verstappen in the long term they're still failing to find a suitable and stable long-term partner at red ball or whether the ends always justify the means I'll leave up to you to decide but there's no doubt that the caveat verstappen driver swap remains one of the most controversial and iconic moments in F1 history especially for the movie-like ending that it delivered or well there you have it once again don't forget to check out the link in the description for tickets to the aldas and Tomo live show on Friday the 4th of August and if you did enjoy this video then don't forget to subscribe and I'll see you in the next one [Music]

Channel: Aldas

Views: 571,585

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Id: c-Tyj53oZCY

Length: 15min 32sec (932 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2023