Was Red Bull wrong to choose Kvyat?

When Daniil Kvyat's shock promotion to Red Bull's A-team was revealed, tagged onto the bottom of its press release about Sebastian Vettel's departure at the end of the season, the complaints began immediately.

The argument against the 20-year-old Russian landing the seat was that he had scored just eight points compared to team-mate Jean-Eric Vergne's 19 (the Frenchman subsequently added two more for ninth at Suzuka), so surely this is another Red Bull 'injustice'?

It's not as simple as that. A glance at the scoreboard never tells the whole story. Particularly in marginal point-scoring teams, you have to delve deeper.

For the record, in qualifying, Kvyat has the edge, outpacing Vergne eight times to seven. And in the right races that both have finished, it's a four/four split in terms of who is ahead.

Those are very crude metrics and both have had more car and engine problems than they should have this year, which has often skewed performance.

Vergne has been a bad luck magnet over the past 18 months. So much so that you wonder if he's spent that time smashing mirrors, walking under ladders and running over any black cats that have the misfortune to cross his path.

Bahrain was a good example of this as he was eliminated in Q2, lapping slower than Kvyat, but only because he was underpowered thanks to the fuel-flow meter 'drifting' and the team having to back his engine off.

It was actually one of his better qualifying laps once you take into account the circumstances.

Kvyat holds the upper hand over Vergne in qualifying © LAT

But look at the numbers over the season and it's clear that Kvyat and Vergne are relatively even. The problem is that the comparison is not valid.

Why? Because Kvyat is a 20-year-old in his first season of F1 having jumped from Formula 3/GP3 level and Vergne is a 24-year-old in his third full campaign.

He also started the season having not completed a qualifying simulation, a race distance or a proper practice start. He was so undercooked that the team was concerned about his readiness for the start of the year.

But as technical director James Key puts it, "he has been fantastic from the outset and has learned incredibly quickly".

As a rookie, when you look at Kvyat the main focus has to be the peaks of performance. By comparison, with Vergne you are looking for consistency of high standards.

In short, Vergne needed to outperform Kvyat in every area and conclusively this year to have a shot at getting the promotion that he missed last year.

Both have had good seasons. Kvyat is currently the rookie who has had the most impressive campaign, despite strong opposition from Kevin Magnussen.

He scored points in his first two grands prix after a terrible run through pre-season testing and while he has yet to finish a race higher than ninth, the signs of promise are there.

As for Vergne, he deserves praise for the attitude he has carried into the season, but it has not proved enough to convince Red Bull that he can hack it right at the sharp end.

Many drivers would have reacted badly to missing the Red Bull chance this season, but according to those in the team Vergne came into this season far more focused than before.

His qualifying performances, so often blighted by over-driving, have improved markedly and there have been some outstanding performances, with both Monaco and Singapore standing out.

And those working with him have no doubt that his consistency has taken a step forward, just not quite by enough to convince Red Bull he should move up.

Vergne has failed to convince Red Bull © LAT

So he is frustrated, and he's perfectly entitled to be because it's his career at stake and he's worked damned hard to get so far. And only he will really know just how much he has been held back by problems this season.

Even if Kvyat's nationality played a part in Red Bull's decision, that would have been over-ridden had Vergne aced the season, rather than just having a good year.

Perhaps having passed Vergne over for promotion once, Red Bull never saw him as anything other than a benchmark for Kvyat? But even so, had he made an unanswerable argument with his performances, even Helmut Marko would have had to think again.

The trouble is that Kvyat has made that extremely difficult for him to do.

Kvyat is still improving at a rate of knots and the competitive trend favours him. In the last four races, Kvyat has outpaced Vergne in qualifying three times. That is the sign of a driver who is becoming increasingly assured in the rarified surroundings of F1.

It stands to reason that there is more potential to be fulfilled in Kvyat than in Vergne, and that is why Red Bull has chosen him. The decision is justified.

But tempting as it is to cast him as the new Daniel Ricciardo, Kvyat is in a very different situation. The 20-year-old's promotion to a Red Bull seat is broadly analogous to Ricciardo's, but only when viewed in low resolution.

For starters, Kvyat is replacing, not partnering, a quadruple world champion. It's a significant distinction, for while Vettel has proved the lesser Red Bull driver in terms of performance in 2014, he remains the fulcrum of the team.

Kvyat cannot assume such a role, not in the short term at least. The dynamic between him and Ricciardo will, by its very nature, be different.

Red Bull is also a team in a tough spell. Three wins and second the world championship hardly represents a fallow period, but it is a relative trough. Kvyat goes not into the reigning champion team but a giant that, while not sleeping, is somewhat dozy.

And in no way is Kvyat at a comparable point in his career to Ricciardo. The Australian started the season with two full years at Toro Rosso under its belt, plus 11 starts at HRT in 2011. Kvyat has just 15 F1 starts to his name. By comparison, Ricciardo is a veteran.

But the Russian has many admirable qualities. Mentally, he deals extremely well with both triumph and disaster, refusing to get carried away when things go well or losing focused if they go badly.

Ricciardo will lead Red Bull in 2015 © LAT

Ricciardo's phlegmatic attitude has been decisive in his emergence and Kvyat seems similar, albeit without the infectious beam of the almost-universally upbeat Aussie.

Don't underestimate how important attitude is. It's seen as absolutely essential by Red Bull driver scheme boss Marko. While his tendency to convince just about every driver that they have been guaranteed the next vacancy to come up is frustrating, he's right to focus on that.

When Kvyat earned his shock promotion to Toro Rosso for this year ahead of Antonio Felix da Costa, a man now in the DTM who still has genuine potential as a Formula 1 driver, and Carlos Sainz Jr, it was the Russian's greater resilience in adversity that sealed the deal.

Likewise, when Jaime Alguersuari was dropped at the end of 2011, Red Bull cast no aspersions about his speed or ability behind the wheel. Instead, it was his attitude that, rightly or wrongly, made many lose patience with him even though he is a driver of very real ability.

Even so, Kvyat has been fast-tracked by necessity rather than design. This is a real concern for his development and it will take all that mental resilience to meet the challenge.

Kvyat is largely a calm and collected character, but as he showed when he had a moment while needlessly gesticulating at the end of a qualifying session at Spa, there is still the potential for immature moments.

Kvyat's Toro Rosso assignment would ideally have lasted two or three years before moving to Red Bull. Vettel was promoted after just 18 months, but that was at a time when Red Bull was an upwardly mobile mid-pack team rather than an established frontunner.

It will be a very different scenario to Kvyat. But let's face it, is it really going to be harder than being pitched into F1 off the back of a stuttering pre-season test programme with no GP2 or Formula Renault 3.5 experience?

Kvyat passed that test with flying colours and that resilience should make it possible for him to make a good fist of it in 2015. Ideally, you'd want to give him another year or two in Toro Rosso. But the real world is rarely ideal.

He's also a very different driver to Ricciardo style-wise. He hasn't quite shown the same breathtaking qualifying speed that the Australian did on occasion at STR, but he has looked good.

Austria was probably his most eye-catching weekend in pace terms, qualifying seventh. Had he aced his Q3 lap, he would have been on the third row but had DRS troubles.

Vergne faces a difficult task trying to secure an F1 drive © LAT

Stylistically, you would say he's somewhere in between the very smooth Ricciardo and the more attacking Vergne. But you don't often see him making the same errors time and time again from trackside and he is rarely caught out by a Toro Rosso which, it's fair to say, is not a market-leader in terms of driveability and smoothness of power delivery.

Remember, Toro Rosso was confident enough to plan for him to be team leader next year, so it's clear that he's held in high regard by Red Bull's training team. Everyone has been pleasantly surprised by his maturity, progress and work ethic.

But what of Vergne? While it would seem logical for Red Bull to retain him alongside 17-year-old Max Verstappen next year to provide a benchmark and continuity, the decision to drop him could well prove to be irreversible.

It's unfortunate for the Frenchman, who has proved himself to be a very capable performer. In the times of plenty, he would comfortably merit a place among the 22 available seats. He deserves to be in F1 and the improvements he has made since last season prove that he is still getting better.

But given that so many of the seats that are available would hinge on financial backing, it's difficult to see Vergne finding a seat, much as he deserves to do so.

This means that his future could well lie elsewhere, perhaps in IndyCar, where there is no doubt he could excel given the right team, although such opportunities can also depend on being able to raise money.

But to say he has been unfairly treated is a stretch. Harsh? Maybe. But as he has said in the past, without Red Bull backing it's unlikely that he would ever have got near F1.

Red Bull has concluded that, while he's good, he's not destined to cut it among the gold standard drivers.

After all, the difference between the few true superstars and the merely very good is tiny in terms of skill set, but those minute differences can have a huge bearing on results.

Red Bull has access to all the comparative data it could possibly need about the relative merits of Kvyat, Ricciardo, Vergne and Vettel. Kvyat would not be making the step up if he did not compare well.

It's difficult to see Kvyat making quite the sustained impact Ricciardo has done immediately. But given time, there's every chance that he has what it takes to cut it at the sharp end.

Just as AUTOSPORT said when he got the seat for this year, he just needs to be given time.