Why Red Bull's Kvyat/Gasly choice was catch-22

Pierre Gasly has just learned the hard way how tough the business of Formula 1 can be sometimes.

Gasly is Red Bull's coming man on the junior single-seater scene - a champion of Formula Renault 2.0, runner-up to Carlos Sainz Jr in the 2014 Formula Renault 3.5 championship as a rookie, and a serious title contender in GP2 this season. But his most likely route into F1 next year has now been blocked off.

Toro Rosso's decision to re-sign Daniil Kvyat for 2017 means Gasly finds his ambitions to graduate to the big league suddenly frustrated.

This is a lucky break for Kvyat, who has endured a difficult season to say the least this year, yet has been handed a stay of execution. If you are currently looking for refuge in a lightning storm, you could do worse than huddle wherever this young Russian is standing.

How quickly things can turn around in this world. No one would have gone near Kvyat had a lightning storm struck in May.

After impressing Red Bull with his performances in a difficult car in 2015, there was a sudden loss of faith at the beginning of this campaign.

Kvyat couldn't get near Daniel Ricciardo in qualifying (though was steadily improving after a woeful start), and triggered a silly and messy accident with Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari at the start of his home race in Russia.

Red Bull motorsport boss Helmut Marko felt Kvyat had inexplicably gone AWOL, complaining about the brakes, moaning constantly on the radio, struggling to handle the pressure, failing to exert enough on Ricciardo.

"Kvyat was different to last year," Marko explained to Autosport. "Last year he was challenging Ricciardo; this year complaining about brakes and so on. It was not the same fast, straightforward driver."

So then came the bombshell. Demotion. Red Bull decided to ward off substantial interest in prize asset Max Verstappen by promoting him from Toro Rosso for the Spanish Grand Prix, and re-signing him to a long-term contract.

Kvyat found himself shunted back into the 'B-team', and his career subsequently seemed destined for a dive into freefall.

He scored a point in his first race back at STR, but team-mate Sainz was a season's best sixth, and unlapped. To make matters worse, Verstappen won the race - in Kvyat's car!

Kvyat cut a figure of frustration and fury afterwards, fighting to control his emotions, to process the perceived injustice of his demotion, just as his old team was on the brink of a breakthrough result.

After all, as Jenson Button pointed out, here was a driver who finished on the podium in China...

This spilled over into Monaco, where Kvyat encountered unfortunate technical problems on the grid, lost his cool, got involved in some needless battery with Kevin Magnussen's Renault. Kvyat looked like a driver who'd lost his head.

"I had a bit of a drop down of my own performance in the middle of the year - obviously for various reasons," Kvyat admits. "At that point, it looked like I wouldn't be in [F1 next year] really.

"But I managed to get everything together after the summer break. It was a very important few races. In Red Bull, if you have trust from them you can be sure it's only because you are a very good driver."

The turning point arguably came just before that, in July's German Grand Prix. Kvyat qualified poorly, but finished within three seconds of Sainz in the race.

At Spa and Monza he qualified within two tenths of Sainz. In Singapore he was faster until Q3, but still qualified sixth, and finished in the points after a spirited fight with Verstappen.

In Malaysia and Japan Kvyat outqualified Sainz narrowly. Previously, he'd only managed to give Sainz serious trouble on the streets of Monaco and Baku, where - as he put it - speed is less about the precise details of the car, and more about reactive driving.

But raw speed is not Kvyat's problem. The concern for Red Bull was that inability to handle pressure and take care of the details of going quickly on a consistent basis.

In fairness to Kvyat, he has calmed down, and worked diligently to rescue his Formula 1 career from the brink of collapse. His upturn in form has unfortunately coincided with a downturn in Toro Rosso's, so he has little in terms of hard results to show for it.

For most drivers this would probably have been too little too late, especially in the cutthroat world of the Red Bull junior programme. But Marko obviously regards Kvyat highly, and is clearly prepared to be unusually patient.

Still, a stay of execution didn't look guaranteed, until last Saturday's announcement in Austin.

"I knew that if I did a good job and got good results they were going to keep me," Kvyat says. "And that's what I did after the summer break, even if it was very difficult with the power unit issues and so on.

"The only real opportunity to shine was Singapore. To be honest there was quite a lot of pressure, because I knew that was the only place where there was going to be some good opportunities.

"Singapore everything came together, and it all felt good again - like my whole motivation, my whole spark, came back.

"I felt very comfortable again in what I was doing. I really started to enjoy it, and I said no matter what, I want to be here next year."

So Kvyat has shown some resilience in the end, and an ability to rise to the occasion. He has dealt with the pressure, not of racing for a top team, but of needing to drive for his life in F1.

Nevertheless, Kvyat is fortunate to keep his drive, really. He's been demoted from Red Bull in part for underperformance, and been underwhelming for much of the time since his return to Toro Rosso.

But Red Bull clearly feels prepared to show unusual mercy given the particular circumstances it has foisted upon him (an attack of conscience for harsh treatment perhaps?), and has clearly seen enough glimpses of the same driver that wowed during his rookie campaign in 2014 to consider him worth persevering with.

He is still only 22, and it's "too early to thrown in the towel on Daniil", according to Red Bull team boss Christian Horner.

Red Bull will have analysed Kvyat's performances, and probably accepted the argument that he will perform at a consistently high level again given sufficient time to order his current environment exactly as he wishes.

He is also fortunate that F1 is on the brink of massive regulation change, for which teams will generally prefer stability in their driver line-ups. As Williams's Pat Symonds puts it: "Stability is often underrated. It is vitally important at all times, ever more so if there is a change in regulations."

Kvyat is also fortunate that Gasly's GP2 season has not quite lived up to expectation. McLaren's Stoffel Vandoorne has reset the bar for what is expected of young stars in their second season in this category. Gasly needed to dominate to guarantee promotion to F1, and he hasn't done so.

He has been upstaged to a large extent by rookie team-mate Antonio Giovanazzi, the 2015 European Formula 3 runner-up, who leads Gasly by seven points with a round of the championship remaining.

Gasly says he doesn't understand the decision to overlook him for Kvyat's Toro Rosso seat, but that decision will undoubtedly have roots in Gasly's seeming inability to close out his GP2 title campaign. He has undoubtedly been fast, but has peppered that speed with a few too many costly mistakes as well.

Gasly describes his own situation as being "in the right place but in the wrong moment". He is unfortunate that Toro Rosso needs driver stability more than it usually would given the 2017 regulation changes, and unfortunate that his GP2 season has stuttered just as Kvyat has started to regain form.

For his part, Gasly still harbours ambitions to graduate to an F1 race seat next season, and has told Marko as much. A placement at somewhere like Manor would be a good way to square the circle, if Gasly delivers over the remaining GP2 races and Red Bull agrees to foot the bill.

"We lost one battle but we didn't lose the war," says Gasly. "Of course it's frustrating, but I've learned since a long time that in F1 things are a bit strange sometimes, but you need to deal with it.

"It will make me stronger mentally. I'm more motivated than ever to win the title in GP2 at the end of next month. All I can do now is look at the options, and find a good one for next year. But first of all finish my season on a high, and hopefully get the title."

The saving grace for Gasly is that Red Bull does not seem minded to overlook him completely, even though all four of its F1 seats are now full for next year.

"He will remain with the team," says Horner, who plans to retain Gasly as Red Bull's test and reserve driver, having recommended STR keep Kvyat.

"His priority is to try and win the GP2 championship. Again, he is very valued. He has been conducting very good work with us. He did the [2017 Pirelli] tyre test, which shows how highly we regard him. We are in a fortunate position that we've got talent around us."

Horner is right. Red Bull enjoys an embarrassment of riches on the driving strength right now.

His own team has arguably the best driver line-up of any squad on the grid in Ricciardo and Verstappen, locked in for another two seasons at least, plus it has one of the most impressive rising stars on the grid in Sainz waiting in the wings at Toro Rosso.

Red Bull is under less pressure than it might otherwise be to cater to the lower ranks of its driver programme.

It need only be concerned should Ricciardo or Verstappen decide to jump ship to another big team in the near future - paving the way for a Sainz promotion - or if Sainz gets impatient and decides to forge his own path.

He gave up several seasons of guaranteed employment at Renault to stick with Toro Rosso for one more year in 2017, and is bound to get more offers in the future if his present form keeps up.

That could be Gasly's best hope - take a reserve role with Red Bull, perhaps a drive with a smaller team to earn his spurs, and bide his time until Sainz decides the Red Bull dream is done for him.

But for now all he can do is try to process Red Bull's decision, and do his best to convince his employers that he should be considered the coming force of single-seater racing once again.

As Kvyat's journey from desolation to redemption proves, anything can happen in Formula 1.