Quote Originally Posted by jens View Post
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.
What is interesting is the effect RBR's policy is having on driver salaries.

IMO Alonso did not expect RBR to replace Vettel with yet another STR rookie almost immediately but they did. By doing so RBR saved $10s of millions by not hiring Alonso and also decimated his negotiating position with McLaren as he could not play Woking against Milton Keynes for his services. Alonso will likely be taking a substantial paycut for 2015 because of Kvyat, the alternative would have been hoping for a Caterham seat or sitting out of F1 for a year.

It will be interesting to see the effect of a constant influx of young, fast and talented but low paid F1 drivers will have on the market over the next few years, I reckon RBR is singlehandedly driving down driver salaries across the whole sport (for the talented group, paydrivers are another matter).