'The last thing F1 teams with a great driver need is another great driver'

So, although wise observers were never convinced by either rumour, and consequently felt sure that Alonso would remain at Aston Martin and Hamilton at Mercedes, most F1 fans, many F1 pundits and a fair number of F1 insiders remain critical of Red Bull’s driver selection policy, nonplussed as they are by the actuality that the principals of one of the most dominant teams in F1 history are content to retain a driver such as Perez, good but not great, in one of their world-beating cars.

I take a different view. If you have a car advantage, and a feistily brilliant number-one driver in whose direction your whole team is devoted to channelling the entirety of its race-winning efforts, as Red Bull has in excelsis, the last thing you need is another feistily brilliant driver alongside him, ready and eager to cause him trouble. The majority of fans and pundits will always disagree with that way of thinking, because it amounts to an unadventurous approach, but the fact is that drivers’ world championships are most reliably won by great number-one drivers supported by capable number-two drivers who are thankful for their opportunity to race a car better than, and earn money in excess of, what their talent would otherwise attract.

The likes of Eddie Irvine, Rubens Barrichello, Giancarlo Fisichella, Felipe Massa, Mark Webber, Valtteri Bottas and now Checo Perez – each of them very good but not truly great – all owe their decent win tallies and hefty bank balances to various teams’ adoption of and adherence to exactly that circumspect policy. You may cite Ayrton Senna/Alain Prost as a counterpoint to my perspective, but in fact Senna/Prost makes my point. Yes, both those geniuses won world championships together for McLaren, but in each case they benefited from a gargantuan car advantage, and in any case the whole house of cards came tumbling down spectacularly thereafter. Senna then won not one but two drivers’ world championships in less dominant McLarens, supported by a capable and compliant number-two driver, Gerhard Berger, again validating my point of view.

In my direct experience, as an F1 team member, the ideal driver line-up among all those I worked with was Lewis Hamilton/Heikki Kovalainen at McLaren in 2008. Kovalainen was proper-quick in quali, which meant that Hamilton had to dig deep to match or beat him, which in turn meant that we knew that they had got the best out of the car on Saturdays. But then on Sundays Lewis stepped up a gear, which meant that Heikki rarely got in his way and almost never nicked points off him. Massa very nearly won the drivers’ world championship for Ferrari that year, scoring 97 points to Hamilton’s 98. Kimi Räikkönen (Ferrari) was third, on 75. Kovalainen was seventh, on 53. You do not need to be a maths genius to see that Heikki nicked fewer points off Lewis than Kimi nicked off Felipe.

The alternative approach — i.e. the hire-the-two-best-drivers-available-and-let-them-race-each-other policy — has lost F1 world championships, plural, for generations, even if it has created drama and anecdote that have enthralled racing fans for just as long. In 1973 Lotus’s two superstars, reigning world champion Emerson Fittipaldi and his scintillatingly rapid team-mate Ronnie Peterson, scored 10 poles and seven wins from the season’s 15 grands prix; yet, despite the fact that Tyrrell’s drivers, Jackie Stewart and Francois Cevert, scored only three poles and five wins, Stewart won the drivers’ world championship because it was he who bagged each and every one of those poles and wins. By contrast, in Lotus’s case, although Peterson took nine of those 10 poles, the win distribution was much closer: four-three to Peterson. Poles do not score points. Wins do. The result? A drivers’ world championship squandered by Lotus’s two aces, gratefully scooped up by Tyrrell’s main man.

In 1982 Williams won just one grand prix. That victory was scored by Keke Rosberg, who delivered five further podium finishes. The season was an odd one, marred by two Ferrari catastrophes, for Gilles Villeneuve suffered a life-ending accident in May and Didier Pironi suffered a career-ending accident in August. One or other of them would have been world champion otherwise. But, the Scuderia’s two aces having been ruled out by tragedy, one or other of McLaren’s drivers might possibly have become world champion had the Woking team’s efforts been devoted to one of them rather than both of them. As things panned out, John Watson and Niki Lauda each won twice for McLaren, thereby scoring four times as many wins as did Williams, yet Watson finished third in the drivers’ world championship and Lauda fifth. But Rosberg was world champion.

Four years later a similar story unfolded, albeit the other way around. Williams’ two aces, Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet, scored nine wins between them. This time it was McLaren’s turn to luck in, perhaps more by good fortune than shrewd judgement, for when Ron Dennis hired Rosberg to partner Prost he probably thought he had ticked the hire-the-two-best-drivers-available-and-let-them-race-each-other box. But Rosberg appeared somewhat out of sorts that season and won no races at all, leaving Prost to pinch the drivers’ world championship from under Mansell’s and Piquet’s noses, with four wins: less than half the Williams drivers’ combined total.

So, yes, in my humble opinion, Red Bull’s head honchos have made the right decision. Despite his serial unruliness both on track and off, in pure performance terms Verstappen is about as quick and as complete an F1 driver as we have ever seen. As such, he is a world championship-winning machine. The Red Bull policy is clear: we will mess with him at our peril. It is how that team operates. It focuses on one driver, not two. It almost always has. It is how it won four consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ world championships with Sebastian Vettel (the bill topper) and Mark Webber (the support act) not so long ago.

Next season I expect the Red Bull RB20 to be seriously competitive. Verstappen will doubtless win a ton of races in it. Perez will win far fewer, thereby expediting his team leader’s opportunity to secure yet another drivers’ world championship. By contrast, although Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren may also produce race-winning cars, in none of those teams will any driver be prioritised in anything like the same way. History tells us that, if those three teams’ common ambition is to optimise their ultimate success over their mission to entertain, as they would doubtless claim it is, then, sadly, their cheerful and equitable treatment of their drivers is not as effective an approach as is Red Bull’s cheerless and unequitable policy.