Why two Red Bull rejects are finally feeling at home

The ruthless reality of Red Bull's junior programme isn't exactly new. But some of its members getting second chances is a relatively recent change.

In 2017, Brendon Hartley was brought back after a Le Mans-winning spell as part of Porsche's LMP1 sportscar team. At the end of the following year, Alexander Albon was plucked from a plum Formula E deal with Nissan e.dams to rejoin the Red Bull fold, and Daniil Kvyat, who had barely just been jettisoned when Hartley and Pierre Gasly were being brought through, returned to Toro Rosso.

Last year, Gasly was the latest driver to feel the sting of Red Bull demotion. Now, he's the latest to attempt Red Bull resurrection.

For the first time in his single seater career, Gasly is going into a new season feeling the benefits of staying with a team - even if it was one he found himself unceremoniously returned to ahead of last year's Belgian Grand Prix. That switch followed an underwhelming start to his first season with the Red Bull senior squad following Daniel Ricciardo's decision to fly the Red Bull nest (perhaps he'd drunk too much of the energy drink, or just really believed it can give you wings?).

Gasly was actually one of the stars of the second half of 2019, and it would have been some feat not to feel a swell of cheer at his second-place finish in the Brazilian Grand Prix. Looking back on his career so far, the 24-year-old has moved around an awful lot.

Although he joined the Red Bull programme back in 2014, his campaigns in French Formula 4, various Formula Renault championships, Formula Renault 3.5 and two years in GP2 were all completed with different squads. After triumphing in GP2 with Prema Racing in 2016, he was placed in Super Formula for 2017, where he narrowly missed the title as a rookie.

The Japanese series was his main programme that year, which is why his claim that "for the first time since my first year in single-seaters I see the same faces for more than one year" at the start of 2020 stacks up - despite him making five starts for Toro Rosso in 2017 before becoming a full F1 rookie with the team now known as AlphaTauri in 2018.

"It's actually a nice feeling,' he says.

"Over the winter, I didn't have to adapt to a new environment, or build a new relationship, which always takes time. I have the same people around me and I could just focus on myself as an athlete, as a driver, focused on the things I need to do to make myself better. It's a bit more stability than I had in the past."

"I won't change my approach. Of course I need to be careful - [crashing is] not something you want and going into testing I want to do all the tests clean" Pierre Gasly

Add to that training "quite hard and quite a lot" in the US over the off-season just gone means Gasly feels "more prepared physically, mentally, than I was in the previous seasons and just ready to get started".

That's important, because he needs to start 2020 as strongly as he finished last year - for his own peace of mind more than looking to the future at this stage. After all, in 2019, he vindicated those who felt he had been promoted to Red Bull that little bit too soon with two big crashes in testing. Plus, there was the big performance gap to Max Verstappen, that ultimately led to his seat swap with Albon when it cost Red Bull victory in Hungary to Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes.

Although he's no doubt aware of the need to maintain the momentum he rallied so well to find in the second half of 2019, Gasly maintains he won't change his approach to the tests at Barcelona that are taking place this week and next, despite his accidents last year.

"In a way I didn't crash many times I think last year - during the season - and testing in a way is also done for that - I'd rather crash in a test than during a race," he says.

"So, no, I won't change my approach. Of course I need to be careful - it's not something you want and going into testing I want to do all the tests clean.

"But also driving F1 cars with more than 1000bhp and going at crazy speeds, you know there is always a risk for things to happen. But, no, of course we know the target for the test is to do as many laps as we can, develop the car and I'll do everything on my side to have the best test possible."

On the other side of the garage to Gasly is Kvyat, who is in the middle of his own Red Bull redemption story. Before 2019, his two most recent F1 seasons - 2016 and 2017 - were blighted, first by being demoted from the senior squad, and then being dropped from Toro Rosso before 2017 had even ended.

At the Red Bull season launch in London in 2016, Kvyat sounded tense and defensive - a sign of things to come. But at last week's AlphaTauri unveiling at Red Bull's Hangar-7 exhibition space in Salzburg, he sounds confident and refreshed.

"I feel very good," he replies when asked how he feels about going into another season with the team. "First of all, my first year in Formula 1 was with them [in 2014], it felt like home. Then I came back [in 2016] and then things weren't very smooth at that time.

"So, the break [in 2018] was a very good thing for me and for the team. Then I obviously came back and last year felt like [I was] really at home, and I felt very good relationships with everyone in the team. I know everyone by name, everyone knows me, everyone can call me anytime they want. And these kind of things, they really make the work a pleasure."

Even if their new found homely feeling results in them producing their best, if Albon improves in his first full year with Red Bull then there is no movement upwards

Neither Gasly or Kvyat has any assurances that they will remain in F1 and with Red Bull beyond this campaign, but - barring sensational seasons from Juri Vips and Yuki Tsunoda - they are in the best position possible to carry on. Assuming of course that Albon continues to shine at Red Bull and both the AlphaTauri drivers satisfy Helmut Marko's requirements...

But the AlphaTauri duo are at least in a different situation to any other driver who has competed for Red Bull's junior F1 team. In AlphaTauri, they are finally representing something. When the former Minardi squad was Toro Rosso, its purpose was solely to evaluate Red Bull's young drivers for their ultimate potential. It will still do that, but it will also advertise the company's in-house fashion brand, which is quite a show of faith from Red Bull.

Both Gasly and Kvyat are adamant they're not looking over their shoulders at Vips and Tsunoda in 2020. But it is surely logical that they are both looking to return to the promised land alongside Verstappen at some point.

The problem for both is that even if their new found homely feeling results in them producing their best, if Albon improves in his first full year with Red Bull then there is no movement upwards. And if the two juniors closest to F1 take their time to produce in Super Formula and F2 - understandably in what are two very difficult categories to master as rookies - then Gasly and Kvyat remain in limbo, albeit a very stylish one.

But if the reverse happens in either of those scenarios, then expect the Red Bull ruthlessness to reappear.