As a continuation of last week’s column, I will be diving further into the Red Bull drama following the developments in last weekend's race in China. I am very aware of the fact that most of you reading this have little to no knowledge of Formula One so I am going to give you a bit of a backstory to allow you to fully understand this controversy.
With racing, especially a construction based racing championship, there are these sort of eras of dominance. Now, Red Bull joined the grid in 2005 but they didn’t really rise to any fame until 2010, after that initial introduction period that it takes for a team to engineer an impressive car. In 2010 the team won their first driver’s championship with official golden boy, Sebastian Vettel. This began the original era of dominance for Red Bull, lasting until 2014. However during this period is a very infamous racing event known as ‘Multi 21’. Teams ordering drivers to swap positions is generally frowned upon however, not illegal. So during the 2013 Malaysian grand prix, nobody was surprised for such orders to come into play. The shock comes when Sebastian Vettel directly disobeys them. Now, almost all of this information is second hand, as the teams try not to allow for too much speculation fueled by their own statements, it is better to let these things handle themselves. But it is a sort of known truth that there was a team directive titled ‘Multi 21’ that ordered the cars to finish a race in an order so that car two was ahead of car one. We know this because after the race, a race Mark Webber would have won if not for his teammate disobeying orders, he confronted Sebastian on live television, simply muttering that same phrase over and over again.
Eventually this era disintegrated and neither raced for Red Bull any longer, but their impact did not. Fans of the sport believe that Mark Webber’s absence left a so-called curse on the second seat. A driver in his position always succumbs to the same fate, and quits or is fired due to an inability to keep up with the primary driver. Consequently, the team has absolutely run out of options at this point, and is still making the same mistake. Current second driver for Red Bull’s primary team, Liam Lawson, has been in the car for quite literally two races and is already being threatened with demotion. If his potential replacement, Yuki Tsunoda, can’t keep up, all hopes for the team are lost. They have no other options, not a single one. Meaning that any idea of a championship win this year, in either category, becomes myth.