'In the end, many of them wouldn't have raced at all without Red Bull'
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- GPblog.com
The road to Formula 1 is different for every driver. Nowadays, the greatest talents (almost all of them) are attached to the training of a Formula 1 team. In doing so, the teams followed the example of Red Bull Racing, which many years ago was one of the first to make preparing young drivers for F1 a major focus.
With his team MP Competition, Jonathan Moury gave a lot of (then) very young drivers a taste of motorsport, guys who eventually went on to Formula 1. Lando Norris, for example, or Lance Stroll. Yuki Tsunoda also drove for the team, which has its origins in New Zealand. Tsunoda has now been linked to Red Bull Racing for several years, which has also based him at AlphaTauri this season.
Pros and cons
What Moury does for his team, Helmut Marko does for the drivers of the Red Bull Junior Team: provide them with a solid education. "Dr Marko is a strong character," Moury states in conversation with GPblog. "I'm not the first one to say that he's or the Red Bull program is very, very strict with their drivers. There's pros and cons. They do have a lot of drivers going through the ranks. You need to be strong [to make it into F1].
Not every driver makes it with the way Red Bull prepares talents for the top. Moury cites Antonio Felix da Costa as an example. After leaving the Red Bull Junior Team, he told Red Bull there was little to blame. The Portuguese realised that it had been himself who did not make it. "If you have a position with the manufacturer and, it is tough, but at the end of the day, they fund a big part of their racing," Moury believes.
The team owner mentions a few more names: Callum Ilott, Brendon Hartley. Men who ultimately didn't make it at Red Bull, but made a name for themselves in another series. "I think it made them better drivers to an extent because they got to experience something bigger that they couldn't have done anyway, because they didn't have the funding. I mean, at the end of the day, a lot of them wouldn't have raced at all if Red Bull wasn't there."
What goes around comes around
"You can understand that when someone is putting that much money, because at the end of the day, it's a lot of money for anyone because it's years of work, years of salary that you put in. You can expect the return on the other side. But yes, he's very rough and very direct. And it's not always easy for the drivers, but I suppose that's part of it. Some stuff. Well, some academies are very a whole lot milder let's say in how they handle stuff," Moury concluded.