Once again, Scuderia Toro Rosso have made a bold (or maybe foolhardy) move among its ranks and thrown away several years of investment. The news that Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne will drive for the team in 2012 was not a complete surprise. As has happened before, Red Bull has too many drivers and not enough cars – the Toro Rosso team was created to solve just such a problem back in 2006.

Red Bull are notoriously fickle when it comes to young drivers – produce or you are gone. Just look at the list of cast offs they have so far:

Christian Klien
Michael Ammermuller
Neel Jani
Robert Doornbos
Scott Speed

…and now Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersauri.

This time, however, we see the first signs of the “Vettel Effect” taking place. When young Sebastian Vettel arrived and decimated CART star Sebastien Bourdais in 2008, he set a standard almost impossible to equal. The driver/car/regulation/weather/luck combination aligned at the perfect moment and the young German took advantage of it.

Buemi and Alguersauri were 21 and 19 respectively when they made their debut in 2009 and they did not have the same perfect alignment of circumstances. For two years Toro Rosso looked like the Minardi of old, tooling around at the back scrapping for a point or two but they kept at it and in 2011 both drivers put in solid, mature performances at every race. What did that earn them? A pink slip and a “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out” from Franz Tost.

Sadly, neither will get a drive of any significance in 2012. The Red Bull machine will keep on gobbling up and spitting out, searching for “The Next Vettel” but perhaps they need to start think that the likes of Vettel are the exception and not the rule. Throwing out the baby with the bathwater was never a good idea.

– MCF1