How Red Bull’s brutal junior program is nothing new

All eyes are on Red Bull Racing after the sudden demotion of Liam Lawson just two races into the F1 2025 season, with fans and pundits wondering what kind of precedent this move sets.

But the precedent has already been established — and it wasn’t established by Red Bull. In fact, we’ll have to dig further back into the history books to find our protagonist here: Enzo Ferrari.

The Enzo Ferrari example followed by Red Bull Racing

Enzo Ferrari is undoubtedly one of the most iconic team owners in motorsport history. Beyond Formula 1, he found success in sports car racing around the world and was the envy of racers around the world. If you were a driver with any skill, the highest praise you could receive was an invitation from Mr. Ferrari to race for his team.

That invitation could quickly turn into a nightmare.

One of Ferrari’s drivers, Tony Brooks, once said of his boss, “He thought that psychological pressure would produce better results for the drivers… You can drive to the maximum of your ability, but once you start psyching yourself up to do things that you don’t feel are within your ability it gets stupid.”

Ferrari liked drivers with guts, the ones who would push their cars beyond the limit of good sense. He wanted winners, champions, and fighters, and he’d sign a massive slate of drivers for any one season in order to swap them between his racing programs depending on how they’d performed.

Take 1958, for example. That year, Ferrari had signed Luigi Musso, Peter Collins, Mike Hawthorn, Wolfgang von Trips, Olivier Gendebien, Phil Hill, and Wolfgang Seidel — and he’d swap drivers in and out of his available Formula 1 seats depending on who pleased him and who had underperformed.

Phil Hill would go on to become World Champion with Ferrari in 1961, but that was only after Hill had spent years with the outfit, confined primarily to sports cars with the occasional F1 outing.

“I began to feel that perhaps I was not ever going to be a really first-rate driver, that something in my makeup prevented me from reaching the ultimate stage in motor racing,” Hill said of Formula 1.

“There are several drivers who do well in sports cars but can’t seem to do well with a grand prix machine. I was beginning to be haunted by the fear that maybe I’d be one of them. I had to find out.”

And, admittedly, the only reason the American got a shot in the team was because the Scuderia had been decimated by the deaths of Musso, Collins, and Hawthorn — three men that Ferrari pitted against one another in order to encourage them all to race beyond their limits. All three died (though Hawthorn admittedly did so in a road car accident after winning a championship).

Or consider a pre-race dinner ahead of the 1957 Mille Miglia, where Ferrari goaded Alfonso de Portago by telling him Gendebien would inevitably beat him, even though Gendebien was driving a less powerful car. As a result, de Portago ignored his mechanics’ warning that a tire was rubbing against the bodywork of his car, and that ultimately killed him.

Ferrari wanted his drivers desperate. He wanted them afraid. He wanted to transform a magnanimous, charismatic competitor into an unassured paranoiac.

More on Liam Lawson and Red Bull driver swaps:

👉 All the mid-season driver swaps Red Bull have made in their F1 history

👉 Red Bull’s seven shortest driver stints – and why they ended

Modern Formula 1 is far safer now than it ever was when Enzo Ferrari was running his team, so death is less of a haunting specter now for drivers pushing beyond their means.

But the sport is just as cutthroat as ever, and Red Bull’s Junior Program is a prime example of how that manifests.

Much like Ferrari did with his Scuderia, the Red Bull Junior program almost indiscriminately signs talented young drivers as young as 11 years old. Not all of those drivers make it to F1 — and not all of them last with the Red Bull program for more than a few years — but it creates an inherent competition that all Red Bull juniors must tackle.

If the conditions are right — if the team’s designers have built a competitive car, if the driver has been sufficiently dedicated — then Red Bull is happy.

If the conditions are wrong, those young drivers are pitted against one another as they battle for an F1 seat.

If those drivers don’t perform under intense pressure, then they’ll be demoted or fired — and both Christian Horner and Helmut Marko will likely have publicly talked about that driver’s weaknesses to such an extent that it crushes their confidence.

Ferrari’s mindset resulted in a unique kind of mental devastation in his drivers, and many pushed themselves into the grave trying to meet Il Commendatore’s high standards. Red Bull has pushed its drivers to a similar level.

Consider Jaime Alguersuari, a Spanish teenager who was promoted to Toro Rosso partway through 2009. Unable to meet the high standard that had been set by Sebastian Vettel, Alguersuari was fired in 2011 and opted to retire by age 25.

Speaking to Spanish outlet El Confidencial in 2022, Alguersuari said, “I have not been able to erase this. I have done therapy, when I retired several psychologists helped me.

“Now, even so, strange things come to my head. And sometimes wake up, like, crying, having dreamt of having done a great lap only to see the face of Mr. Marko, angry.”

He isn’t the only one. Jean-Eric Vergne starved himself to the point of hospitalization in hopes of finding a competitive edge, all while Marko called him “lazy” to the media.

Or there’s Daniil Kvyat, who was promoted from Toro Rosso to Red Bull, only to be demoted and later replaced by Pierre Gasly in 2017. Marko told Kvyat to outperform teammate Daniel Ricciardo, and when that didn’t happen, he was out.

Gasly was promoted to Red Bull for just a handful of races, then was demoted. Marko said Gasly “should concentrate on driving and not constantly tell Mr. Newey how to build the car for him.”

Alex Albon replaced Gasly, was promoted, then was demoted. Nyck de Vries was brought into AlphaTauri for half a year, then fired.

Helmut Marko called Isack Hadjar “embarrassing” for crying after his formation lap crash in Australia this year, and Liam Lawson only lasted two races for Red Bull before being demoted.

And as for Yuki Tsunoda, well — Marko has made it known for a long time that he feels the Japanese driver is “too inconsistent” and emotional to justify a move to the top team, even when Tsunoda was clearly the most experienced option for that seat.

The Red Bull Junior program has produced generational talents like Max Verstappen and Sebastian Vettel in much the same way that Scuderia Ferrari under Enzo brought enduring success to drivers like Alberto Ascari and Niki Lauda.

However, there have been just as many incredibly talented drivers left in the dust for failing to meet expectations designed to be impossible to meet.

Is that a good way to run a top-tier race team, or to format a junior program?

The answer will depend on who you ask, but one thing is certain: Glory has come, but it has required ruthlessly tearing through drivers to make it into the history books.

Read next: Is Liam Lawson a victim of F1’s restrictive testing regulations?