Red Bull & Toro Rosso Announce 2020 Driver Lineup
Photo: Red Bull Racing
Red Bull Racing and its sister team Scuderia Toro Rosso have both confirmed they will retain their current driver lineups for the 2020 Formula One World Championship.
At the wheels of next year’s Red Bull cars will be Max Verstappen and Alexander Albon, while Daniil Kvyat and Pierre Gasly will continue as teammates for Toro Rosso.
Star driver Verstappen was already known to be staying with the team as his contract doesn’t run out till the end of the 2020 season, but there was a big question mark concerning Albon and Gasly.
While Gasly had made his F1 debut with Toro Rosso in 2018 before being promoted to Red Bull for 2019, he was replaced mid-season by rookie Albon on account of poor performances compared to his teammate (he had failed to finish better than 5th while his teammate had already won two races and scored nearly three times as many points).
Red Bull said it would use the remaining races in the calendar to evaluate who would drive alongside Verstappen in 2020, and Albon took that opportunity to heart, actually outscoring Verstappen in the second half of the season, though some of the latter’s poor results were no fault of his own.
Gasly, meanwhile, seemed reinvigorated once back at Toro Rosso and performed well compared to Kvyat, even though Kvyat had had the measure of Albon at the time of the mid-season swap. It’s likely that Gasly, while quick, simply couldn’t cope with the pressure of driving for a top team.
The question that now remains is the following: Where will Gasly and Kvyat go in F1? Both started their careers in F1 at Toro Rosso, were promoted to Red Bull, then demoted back to Toro Rosso for poor performances. In Kvyat’s case, he was even pushed out of the sport entirely before coming back for 2019. After all that, there seems to be little room for them for upward movement within the Red Bull organization. With Verstappen and Albon likely to keep those Red Bull seats for at least a few years, Gasly and Kvyat may struggle to advance their F1 careers if they don’t seek employment at other teams.
That being said, with the Honda engine looking more promising than ever, the Red Bull organization may well prove to be the place to be in the coming years.
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