That’s what Christian Horner said to the BBC in 2012 about the role Toro Rosso plays in the Red Bull driver timeline, but it remains a relevant comment even 13 years later.

Red Bull have made the decision to promote Yuki Tsunoda to the top team effective immediately, replacing Liam Lawson after he spent just two races in the seat alongside Max Verstappen. In doing so, Lawson has been dropped back down to the sister team, now Racing Bulls, and has become the third driver to follow that path.

Whereas Toro Rosso once had a clear purpose in raising drivers and preparing them for the top team, with every driver who is promoted and underwhelms and is dropped back down this purpose becomes more muddied. Couple this with the identity crisis the team has had in recent years, branding itself as a separate entity under the AlphaTauri and VCARB names before leaning back into its junior-to-Red Bull identity as Racing Bulls, and the picture dilutes again.

So does the sister team actually serve as a training ground for top talent anymore, where they can be given the time to acclimatise to the ever-pressurised environment of Formula 1, or is it merely a place for Red Bull to put its drivers when they have nowhere else for them?

Toro Rosso’s goal

Toro Rosso was established in 2005 when the late-Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz purchased the Minardi Formula 1 team, and before it entered the championship the following year Franz Tost was placed at the helm.

Tost quickly became integrated into the very DNA of the team, reflecting on the goal of the team when he began his role as to “educate young drivers and bring them to Formula 1”, as told to him by Mateschitz.

Later, this philosophy narrowed and became “to educate young drivers from the Red Bull driver pool to bring them to Red Bull Racing”. This worked almost immediately – in just their third season a young Sebastian Vettel claimed victory for Toro Rosso at the 2008 Italian Grand Prix, seeing him promoted up to Red Bull Racing for the following year.

But Vettel’s story of promotion is one that just seven other drivers have echoed from 2006 to the present day; 39% of the total number of drivers who have got behind the wheel of a Toro Rosso, AlphaTauri, VCARB or Racing Bull.

Of these eight who have followed the promotion path, 37.5%, or three drivers, have then been demoted back down to the junior/sister team after stints of varying lengths at Red Bull Racing. Red Bull’s team principal and CEO, Christian Horner, has given a familiar statement each time:

Daniil Kvyat was the first to suffer this fate when his Red Bull Racing seat was handed to an 18-year old Max Verstappen, as the pair swapped between the top and sister teams ahead of the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix. Horner said, “Dany [Kvyat] will be able to continue his development at Toro Rosso, in a team that he is familiar with, giving him the chance to regain his form and show his potential.”

Next, Toro Rosso graduate Pierre Gasly was dropped back to the Faenza-based team after just ten races at Red Bull Racing in mid-2019. “We felt for Pierre, for him to continue his development, that it would be better in the less pressured environment of Toro Rosso,” said Horner this time.

And of course, most recently, Liam Lawson has been demoted to Racing Bulls after two races next to Verstappen, swapping places with Tsunoda. Horner commented that this was due to their “duty of care”. “Liam can gain experience, as he continues his F1 career with Visa Cash App Racing Bulls, an environment and a team he knows very well.”

What each of these three cases have in common is the lack of experience the drivers had before being plunged into the deep end at the top team, and this being the reason for their demotion. The move back was also cited as a chance for them to further develop, but isn’t that the point of the team in the first place?

Factors behind promotion (or not)

Of the eight drivers who have been promoted from the sister team to Red Bull Racing, just two have had or will have above average experience on their debuts for the top team – Daniel Ricciardo and Yuki Tsunoda.

The average number of starts a driver makes for the sister team before promotion is 30.5, with Tsunoda far exceeding this with his 89 starts, making him the most experienced driver to ever be promoted. While Ricciardo had completed 39 starts for Toro Rosso prior to his move up, he had started 50 grands prix in total given his time with HRT in 2011.

What this means is that 75% of these drivers have had 26 or fewer starts for the sister team before being put in the top team, which in modern Formula 1 terms is just over a season. 

You could argue this is to their detriment, with just two of these less experienced drivers holding the seat for over a year once in it,  but you could also argue that this is because Red Bull get a sense of who they believe will be good enough for the top team in this, relatively speaking, short period.

In fact, this proves true when looking at the stints done by drivers who aren’t promoted – they’re much longer. Four of the nine non-promoted drivers have exceeded the average of 36.89 starts, with Vergne, Sainz and Buemi each doing over 50 race starts for Toro Rosso.

While this experience may be thought of as helpful overall in a driver’s future prospects, Sainz and Liuzzi are the only two non-promoted sister team drivers to have been able to secure a drive beyond their time with the team.

If you aren’t promoted, your success in the seat seems to begin to matter in your chances of securing a drive beyond your sister team tenure, perhaps over and above your experience. Sainz was the highest points scoring driver of this non-promoted group, and his lack of promotion could be attributed to the top team seats being locked up by Ricciardo and Verstappen, particularly as Helmut Marko also viewed him as a “tremendous talent”.

In that sense, a Toro Rosso drive may be viewed in one of three ways: ‘perform then promoted’, ‘perform and move on’ or ‘experience and expire’.

Does the Toro Rosso training come to fruition?

So once a driver has performed and been promoted, what does their time spent training with the sister team say about their chances in that top team seat?

Conducting a correlation analysis between the time a driver has spent at the sister team and how long they retain the top team seat for shows that they are strongly positively related, yet only when Max Verstappen is excluded as an anomaly and Yuki Tsunoda is excluded given that he hasn’t started for Red Bull yet. This suggests that the longer a driver spends training at the sister team, the longer they will hold onto the Red Bull Racing seat – supporting the role it plays in bringing up these drivers as Red Bull Racing prospects, and supporting Tost’s initial aim for the team.

We also see this strong association continue when we consider going up against Max Verstappen as a unique context to taking up the Red Bull seat. Having more overall experience in F1 before becoming his teammate relates to a driver lasting longer in that seat.

But this doesn’t match to how Red Bull choose to fill the seat – historically only promoting drivers from within their own pool to compete against Verstappen who have very little experience – Gasly had just 26 starts, Albon had 12 and Lawson had 11.

As we know, merely holding the Red Bull seat and succeeding while in it are two entirely separate things, with management typically caring more about the latter. So does spending time in the sister team and succeeding there as a junior impact the likelihood of a driver performing well at the top team?

The short answer is no. How many points a driver scores for the top team is not very strongly associated with how many they scored at the sister team, with the time spent training there being more strongly related. What this indicates, albeit non-significantly, is that experience is what matters when it comes to not only retaining a Red Bull seat, but also the notoriously difficult one alongside Verstappen, and in bringing home points while there.

This analysis makes Red Bull’s decision to continually promote drivers with little experience even more unfounded. So could this phenomenon be blamed on the two prodigies they’ve raised since 2006 – Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen?

There’s no doubt that holding out hope for a once-in-a-generation talent has impacted Red Bull’s driver choices, even though there have arguably been just two since the program began. This makes the model high-risk but also potentially very high-reward when it works and when that talent is found. 

Is the approach justified or does it need changing?

Whatever your opinion on Red Bull, its driver setup or talent pool, there seems to be a consensus that what happened to Liam Lawson was avoidable and brutal. It has raised questions, exactly like the one being addressed here, over whether the program works, whether its treatment of drivers is fair, and whether this treatment can be justified by the 2 in 23 chance of finding a Vettel or Verstappen.

The ‘perform and promoted’ thinking may work in getting drivers in the door at Red Bull Racing from the sister team, but the statistics point to ‘experience and perform’ or ‘experience and last’ as being more realistic and successful models.

Yuki Tsunoda’s upcoming stint will be a marker of this at the modern, Verstappen-era Red Bull team. He’s the driver who’s waited the longest at the sister team for the call up, and the third most experienced driver at the start of a stint as Verstappen’s teammate (behind Perez and Ricciardo). The odds say this should work in his favour but the expectations held of him moving into the seat should be tempered by the issues Red Bull feel they’re currently having with the RB21.

But what happens if Yuki can’t succeed?

With Lawson now seemingly out of the picture for the top team (at least for the foreseeable future), Isack Hadjar much too inexperienced (even by Red Bull’s standards), and Arvid Lindblad, their up and coming talent, also being too young, what will Red Bull do if Tsunoda’s stint doesn’t pan out as they hope and as it has to?

This is the big question and one that perhaps they don’t even know the answer to. Helmut Marko has said Tsunoda will have until the end of the season as they believe “he can do the job”, but historically these words have only rung true when the on track results flow in.

A team can only have four drivers a season as per the regulations and with Tsunoda’s move, Red Bull are already on three. They would therefore need to have a fair level of certainty or confidence that who they would put in the seat would perform at a level adequate enough to see them to the end of the year. In the absence of a clear successor to Tsunoda currently and if their promise to give Lawson more time is real, looking outside the pool may be the only option. It has proven successful in the past – Mark Webber, Sergio Perez, and David Coulthard are all examples of race winners or podium finishers for the top team who were outside hires. Who this would be in this case, however, is even more unclear.

On Yuki’s side, this is somewhat a no-lose situation. It’s been widely reported and speculated that his time in Formula 1, at least with the Red Bull camp, would have been coming to an end at the conclusion of this season in line with the end of the Honda-Red Bull partnership. If he can’t succeed at Red Bull, he has still achieved his goal of getting there and can leave the sport satisfied with that as an achievement regardless of how it goes. If he can, he’ll put himself firmly on the radar of other teams when the 2026 silly season inevitably kicks off, or he may even secure a longer-term Red Bull contract even in Honda’s absence.

What’s next for Lawson? 

Though there’s talk over Lawson’s career being tainted by this demotion, there is also a level of understanding of this not being his fault. Yes he underperformed, but yes he was also very inexperienced and the fault of this situation lies higher up than the level of the driver.

Pierre Gasly suffered a similar fate in 2019 but on returning to the sister team had huge success. In the three years that he completed at AlphaTauri post-demotion, he scored 208 points and won a grand prix at Monza in 2020. Though this didn’t result in another chance at Red Bull Racing, it did secure him a future elsewhere at Alpine where he’s become the team leader as they look to move back up to the front of the field.

Gasly’s case should give Lawson hope, as should Sainz’s. Even if his time at Red Bull doesn’t come again, maximising his time at Racing Bulls to gather experience, points finishes, and perhaps more, could pay off in finding a drive elsewhere in the future.

What’s next for the Red Bull driver progression path?

Red Bull is no longer the only option for up and coming drivers as they navigate the junior categories, though its success in getting drivers into Formula 1 is hard to ignore.

The Ferrari Driver Academy and other young driver opportunities invested in by Mercedes, McLaren, Williams, and Alpine are viable options for up and coming talents that are showing themselves to be more nurturing and supportive than the Red Bull ladder. Beyond this, they have also been successful. Piastri (Alpine), Norris (McLaren), Leclerc (Ferrari), Russell (Mercedes), and now Antonelli (Mercedes), have all come through these programmes and are now fighting at the sharp end.

All of this to say that the young driver landscape is now competitive on the team side, and promoting drivers quickly to drop them in just two races doesn’t paint the most attractive picture for young drivers looking at prospective paths to Formula 1.

The experience the programme provides a driver appears to pay off, but only if it actually provides this experience before throwing them in at the deep end. If the priority can shift to maximising this instead of hunting for a generational talent at the expense of several other drivers’ careers, then it may not only prove more fruitful for Red Bull Racing but also for the public perception of the programme.