The Problem With The Red Bull Junior Team
The Red Bull Junior Team has brought many young and promising talents to the pinnacle of Motorsport and has often been praised by many for taking the initiative of nursing drivers through the ranks but that does not mean that it is free of problems, in fact it has faced a lot of problems throughout it's history.
It all started in 1993 when Helmut Marko created a team called RSM Marko which was sponsored by Red Bull and entered it in Formula 3000 (The Formula 2 back then). When Red Bull sponsored it, it was known as the Red Bull Junior Team until 2003. However, in 2001, an academy was founded as The Red Bull Junior Team which provided funding to promising talent who were part of this team.
At this point though, there was no Red Bull team and they were title sponsers to the Sauber F1 team. For the 2001 season, Red Bull were desperate to get their junior driver Enrique Bernoldi into the second vacant seat at Sauber and it seemed quite certain that it would come to pass. But Peter Sauber had other ideas as once he caught a glimpse of a young Kimi Raikonnen, he made sure to sign him.
This clearly did not go down well with Red Bull who decided to cut off their relationship with Sauber leaving Red Bull's juniors with no clear route into F1. But when a chance to acquire the Jaguar team for one US dollar at the end of 2004 came up, Red Bull seized the oppurtunity and aquired the team and a year later bought the Minardi team and turned it into their junior team called Toro Rosso.
Since then, this team has funded about eighty-five drivers in an attempt to bring them to Formula One. But only nineteen of them have made it there. But what matters is that only seven of those have had success in the sport. And The main reason that Red Bull have been criticized is because of the way they have harshly handled the drivers in their junior team Alpha Tauri.
The best way to justify this criticism is to look at the post-F1 careers of the drivers who have been dropped from Toro Rosso. First, we have Scott Speed who is now a two-time winner of the Global Rallycross Championship and The American Rallycross Championship. He also made a one-off appearance in Formula E, scoring a podium at the Miami E-Prix.
Sebastien Buemi and Brendon Hartley have both shared success in the World of Endurance Racing as they have both won the 24 hours of Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship multiple times with Toyota Gazoo Racing. Buemi has also won the Formula E World Championship.
Another Ex-Red Bull junior who has won Formula E is Jean-Eric Vergne who won it back to back from 2018 to 2019. Finally, we have Carlos Sainz who since leaving the Red Bull bubble has raced for Renault, Mclaren, and Ferrari and has picked up two podiums podiums in that time including nearly winning the 2020 Italian Grand Prix.
Currently, Red Bull have three juniors in F2 and five in F3 and there is speculation that Pierre Gasly could be on his way out of Alpha Tauri as he has won a race and Red Bull are still not showing any interest in promoting him. This could lead to a vacant seat soon, but what Red Bull would really want is to supply another team with engines so that they could have an extra seat available in case they need to place one of their drivers in F1.
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