Quote Originally Posted by Doc Austin View Post
Here, though, they invested at least four years in Vergne, and now he's gone. Red Bull got nothing out of it, so from a business standpoint it didn't pay off.
I guess that's inevitable if you have so many drivers on the books. Between Vettel and Ricciardo also Liuzzi, Buemi, Alguersuari, Vergne and others. Now Kvyat and Verstappen and Sainz are also coming up. Plus others in junior series. If you have so many drivers it is plain impossible for all of them to graduate to Red Bull and some of them inevitably have to "go to waste" in terms of investment.

But I guess this is the cost Red Bull has calculated to be reasonable. In any discipline - if you have a group of 10 sportsmen to train, and one of them wins the world championship, you can be happy that your investment has beared fruit. It is impossible to have 100% success rate, so you are doing well if you win anything. And with Red Bull having Vettel and Ricciardo as two excellent drivers, and potentially Kvyat being good, they have found good drivers to justify their investment.

That's great, but there's nowhere to go unless you have a bag full of cash.
Sadly that's the tough life of modern F1. Sauber - full of paydrivers, Lotus - Maldonado. Force India already has two good drivers, otherwise they could have been an option. After all, Pérez managed to continue his career after dropping out of McLaren. No such luck for Vergne after dropping out of STR.