Red Bull Motorsports
F1
How the Red Bull Junior Team Has Nurtured Future Champions Since 2001
Since their formation in 2001, the Red Bull Junior Team has become the most successful program in developing the best young driving talent in the whole of motorsports.
If the ultimate dream from the outset of the Red Bull Junior Team was to mould and produce world Formula One champions, then it’s already job done. The first brilliant model in the shape of Sebastian Vettel long ago realised that ambition. Four times, actually!
And as Red Bull can already look back on a roll call of remarkable successes in different forms of car racing delivered by the young drivers forged in their Diagnostics & Training Center in Thalgau, near Salzburg, the promise is only for them to unearth more diamonds to polish.
Kvyat and Ricciardo in the 2010 Junior Team
© GEPA pictures/Hans Simonlehner
Kvyat, Ricciardo and Sainz were Red Bull Juniors in 2011
© GEPA pictures/Red Bull
Stars in the making: Red Bull Junior Team in 2010
© GEPA pictures/Hans Simonlehner
Vettel in 2007 as a Red Bull Junior Team driver
© GEPA pictures/ Franz Pammer
Naturally, Red Bull’s two F1 teams, Aston Martin Red Bull Racing and Scuderia Toro Rosso, have themselves been the main beneficiaries of the program, but the whole sport has profited richly too, particularly from the quality of the team’s most prodigious young graduates.
All Red Bull Junior Team drivers have to work hard under pressure from the outset at Thalgau as well as when learning their trade in the various racing series. Only those judged to be talented enough to sustain an F1 career are backed to make the grade.
Of course, not all do, but the cream invariably rises, with Red Bull Junior Team racers so far having won 23 titles since 2001 in different forms of racing, featuring 311 race victories and 311 pole positions as of April 2019.
Christian Klien
© GEPA/Andreas Pranter
Three years after the team began, Austrian Christian Klien was the first to enter the F1 ranks with Red Bull and five years later in 2008 in the Monza rain, the-then Scuderia Toro Rosso driver Sebastian Vettel produced a wet-weather masterclass to become their first to graduate to an F1 Grand Prix win at the age of just 21 years 73 days, then the youngest-ever driver to triumph.
Vettel's maiden win
© Clive Mason/Getty Images
The German went on to become the youngest-ever F1 World Drivers’ champion too for Red Bull in 2010, his first of four titles in successive years, but while it may have been a hard act to follow, other Red Bull Junior Team luminaries, Dutchman Max Verstappen and Australian Daniel Ricciardo, have since also gone on to join the Grand Prix winners’ circle.
3 min
Max Verstappen 2015 F1 Driver Interview
16-year-old Dutchman Max Verstappen talks about his Formula 1 debut with Toro Rosso in 2015.
Indeed, Verstappen, the most youthful racer ever in F1 ranks at the age of 17 back in 2015, even broke Vettel’s record as the youngest ever Grand Prix winner when triumphing in Spain the following year at 18 years 228 days. One Red Bull Junior Team prodigy beating another then!
