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Dear Team: We’re Sorry We Crashed Our $15 Million F1 Cars
After Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo drove into the back of teammate Max Verstappen’s car, both drivers had to deliver an apology to the team’s 800 engineers, mechanics and support staff
Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo drove into the back of teammate Max Verstappen’s car during a Formula One race in Baku, Azerbaijan, on Sunday. PHOTO: UE SYNDICATION/ZUMA PRESS
Sunday afternoon in Baku, Azerbaijan, was shaping up to be a decent day at the office for the Red Bull Formula One team. Its two drivers were sitting in fourth and fifth places midway through the race and set to take home a solid points haul.
That is, until they did the one thing that teammates are absolutely never, under no circumstance supposed to do in Formula One. They crashed into each other.
“It’s a pretty crappy situation,” said Red Bull driver Daniel Ricciardo, who drove into the back of Max Verstappen’s car. “We want to race. We are thankful that the team let us race. This is the worst scenario, so that’s the crappy part of it.”
Teammates in all sports let each other down all the time. But no one takes that crime more seriously than Formula One. Mess up in other sports and you might get benched. For graver offenses, from missing a curfew to losing your playbook, you might even get fined.
But crash one of your team’s $15 million cars into another of its $15 million cars? Red Bull is punishing that with the ultimate ignominy: a public shaming.
A video clip of the Red Bull crash in Azerbaijan.
The team announced on Monday that both drivers would be made to travel to its car factory in Milton Keynes, England, and deliver a heartfelt apology to the more than 800 Red Bull engineers, mechanics and support staff.
“They’re representing the team when they’re out on track. Obviously, there will be an apology to all the staff going back to all the staff in Milton Keynes,” Red Bull team principal Christian Horner said. “It shouldn’t happen...They have to show respect to the team, rather than just self-interest.”
How a teammate can even crash into a teammate—and why it’s such a disaster—is down to how Formula One has evolved in recent years. The sport has 10 teams, each with two drivers at the wheel of more or less identical cars. But the disparity between the top three teams and the rest is so great that much of the season is determined in the garages, long before any rubber meets the road.
Last season, for instance, only three teams posted victories on the 20-race calendar: Mercedes took 12, Ferrari earned five, and Red Bull swept up the other three. The 2016, 21-race campaign was even less dramatic on that front. The Mercedes pair of Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg shared 19 wins for the team while Red Bull settled for the other two. In fact, no team not named Mercedes, Ferrari or Red Bull has won a single Grand Prix since the 2013 season.
In other words, the sport has 20 cars at every event, but only six of them across three teams are doing any meaningful racing. So losing both cars on your team to a moment of madness between your drivers is a bad look, not to mention financially damaging. A top-end Formula One car costs upwards of $10 million to manufacture—and that’s without counting the $100 million that goes into research and development.
Totaling two in the same weekend is about equivalent to watching your newly signed, maximum-contract free agent blow out his knee.
To prevent situations that lead to risky passing moves, most teams impose clear hierarchies between their drivers, organizing pit stops and strategy around the one with the best shot at a championship. This is known in the sport as “team orders,” a term that has been tainted since at least 2002, when Ferrari’s Rubens Barrichello led into the final corner of a Grand Prix but moved aside to let his teammate Michael Schumacher take the victory and maximum points in the standings.
The sport has done its best to crack down on team orders and Red Bull explicitly rejects any kind of hierarchy between its drivers.
“That’s against our philosophy. We always let the drivers race,” Red Bull executive Helmut Marko said over the weekend. “We don’t have a No. 1 and we don’t have a No. 2.”
But it turns out that for a Formula One team, racing is the most inconvenient part.
Ricciardo is the more experienced of the two, a 28-year-old with 133 starts to his name dating back to 2011. Verstappen, meanwhile, is only 20 and came to F1 as the sport’s child prodigy. He won his first Grand Prix at 18 and has already made over 60 starts. But he has a reputation for being somewhat erratic on track. A popular website called crashstappen.com asks, “Has Max crashed yet?” and tracks the time since his last mishap with a live counter.
In Baku, the battle had been simmering all race. Three times, the pair flirted with taking each other out, even kissing wheels on one occasion.
On Lap 40, it all blew up in their faces. With Verstappen just in front of him, Ricciardo ducked right, then left, looking for a gap to exploit. Then, delaying his braking to make one more run at his teammate ahead of a left-hand curve, he ran into the back of his teammate. Both cars were done.
Red Bull Racing teammates Daniel Ricciardo, left, and Max Verstappen. PHOTO: XPB/ZUMA PRESS
There is some technical debate over who is precisely to blame. F1 rules designed to promote overtaking prohibit the car defending its position from making more than one defensive move and changing its line under braking, which may be what Verstappen did. But the race stewards meted out the blame equally.
“Both drivers contributed to the collision,” the sport’s governing body said in a statement. “It was obvious to the stewards that although the incident had its origins in the moves by car 33 [Verstappen], the driver of car 3 [Ricciardo] also contributed to the incident.”
The team says it will move past the incident. All that remains now for these men who make their careers at 200 miles per hour is to slowly trudge through the Red Bull factory and say they are sorry.
“Before the accident it was hard racing but fair, I think, and we gave each other space,” Verstappen said. “But what happened afterwards is not good.”
Write to Joshua Robinson at joshua.robinson@wsj.com
Appeared in the May 2, 2018, print edition as 'Sorry We Crashed Our $15 Million Cars.'
