How a harshly ejected Red Bull star has been hooked by racing again

A decade has now passed since Jaime Alguersuari’s world came tumbling down when he was dropped by the Toro Rosso Formula 1 team. He was once F1’s youngest ever driver, the reigning British Formula 3 champion who was plucked from Formula Renault 3.5 midway through the 2009 season aged 19 years and 125 days. But he was ruthlessly axed from the Red Bull scheme aged just 21 after a 2011 season in which he’d outscored his more experienced team-mate Sebastien Buemi and showed signs of maturing into one of F1’s coming men.

After two years as a Pirelli F1 tester, a season of ADAC GT Masters and Formula E, Alguersuari called it a day in 2015 aged 25, inviting critics to crow that he’d had ‘too much too soon’, with little consideration given to the mental impact of having your dream career advanced and abruptly curtailed ahead of time.

Now rebooted as a successful DJ, performing under the stage name Squire, Alguersuari is set to release a new album later this year. But the music industry has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic that has gripped the world over the past year, with no concerts or touring bringing his orbit to a shuddering halt. Seeking something else to keep him motivated, the Spaniard has come full circle and is now planning a racing comeback in the KZ shifter division of the world karting championship.

“I had many ideas of how I could be happy disconnecting from the music business for a while, because at the moment there’s not much we can do,” he says. “I’ve been testing go-karts and having sensations that I didn’t feel for a very long time.

“When I started racing, I was smiling inside the helmet and it was just driving for pure love. Now when I’m back on a go-kart, I have the same feelings and I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t I be back in a situation where I’m competitive and I feel like inspiration back to my life?’ For me it’s about closing an emotional circle which was not really closed, because the way I stopped racing was not what I wished for.”

Alguersuari admits that after losing his F1 drive he was “never motivated” by other series and “talked many times” to Virgin FE team-mate Sam Bird about his thoughts of quitting.

Jaime Alguersuari 2014 Punta Del Este

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“My passion was lost for racing – after what happened in 2011 I never got that back and my head was in another area of my life: music,” he explains. “I did not feel any series was really appealing [other] than obviously a competitive car in F1. I didn’t feel like there was a sense of racing because I was not really enjoying it.

“For me racing is not just about money, it’s to smile, for fun, giving the very best of you. It’s how I felt when I was in Toro Rosso and that’s the same mentality I had when I started to make music. If you don’t understand why you’re doing things, you’re not going to deliver.

“I have to take it step-by-step, do a couple of races and see where I am. I don’t know where this can lead into. I have a karting international licence and if that drives me into something else in the future, then why not?” Jaime Alguersuari

“I struggled a lot, after F1. After I retired, I did not want to hear a word of racing. I didn’t watch any F1 races because it was difficult for me to accept what happened. But now I’ve come through all of that. Time makes it easier.”

Now aged 30, Alguersuari has “a very different approach to racing now than when I was 20”, with fun the primary objective behind his return to competition.

“Of course you still always want to win and be competitive,” he says, “but I’ve been in the best pressure school possible with Helmut Marko, so I’ve learned a lot in there and how to deal with that. In the end, the only pressure that matters is the expectations that you put into yourself. I don’t have any goals – the only goal is to have fun.

“If I’m not at the level that I expect, to be in the top 10 of the best world go-karting drivers, I won’t do a proper comeback. I can feel I have the speed and have those feelings that drove me to perfect my driving. If I don’t have that feeling inside me, I would not even try at all.”

Alguersuari isn’t making any predictions over what will follow, insisting that it’s “very early days at the moment”. He currently has no plans of following sportscar ace Ben Hanley’s example of using karting as a springboard back into car racing, but isn’t writing off the idea altogether.

Jaime Alguersuari ADAC GT Masters 2014, Slovakiaring

Photo by: ADAC GT Masters

“I have to take it step-by-step, do a couple of races and see where I am,” he says. “I don’t know where this can lead into. I have a karting international licence and if that drives me into something else in the future, then why not?”

Even so, Alguersuari doesn’t anticipate that racing will once again replace music as his main activity: “Hopefully I don’t have time to continue the racing project because the pandemic is over and we can be back to normal activity.” Yet nothing in his racing journey has been straightforward.

“I never expected to enter F1 so young and I never expected to go out on my best ever moment of my technical and professional development,” he says. “You never know in life what can happen.”

Those who were quick to write Alguersuari off as a wasted talent may yet be proven wrong…

Jaime Alguersuari Toro Rosso, 2011 Japanese GP

Photo by: Motorsport Images