Twenty years ago, the Austrian company Red Bull acquired the assets of the Jaguar factory team, and since 2005 Red Bull Racing has been participating in Formula 1, and a year later the same happened with the Italian Minardi, and in 2006 Toro Rosso made its debut in the championship.
The Faenza-based team has traditionally been regarded as a youth team, whose primary role was to prepare talented drivers for the move to Red Bull Racing, and many have passed through this school; just remember the two most prominent names: Sebastian Vettel and Max Verstappen.
But now that the status of the former Toro Rosso/AlphaTauri has changed, the Italian team is acting more independently and, under the new guise of Visa RB, must, like all other World Championship participants, first and foremost earn points, fight for higher places in the Constructors’ Championship, so that they ultimately receive good prize money.
Daniel Ricciardo, who raced for Toro Rosso more than ten years ago, believes that Visa RB should no longer be called ‘youth’.
“She has really changed,” Australian publication Speedcafe quotes him as saying. “It’s easy to give a new name and say we look different now and so on, but then action has to follow.
I think Laurent Mekis, Peter Bayer, Alan Permain and many other people who joined the team are taking such actions. At the same time, it cannot be said that everything that happened in the past under Franz Tost was something wrong, but sometimes change is useful because new people come with new ideas.
All the current leaders have worked with other teams before, and they just have a completely different approach to things. And now that they are realizing their intentions, our employees understand that this is no longer a youth team: “We make serious decisions, we are willing to take risks and set high goals for ourselves, believing that we can achieve them.”
It’s really nice to see this, it’s great. To be honest, I wouldn’t feel completely comfortable if Visa RB still had the atmosphere of a youth team. After all, I’m already 35 years old and I think I would feel out of place, but that feeling doesn’t exist, that’s for sure.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
