It has been announced this afternoon that Carlos Sainz Jr will test for Red Bull at Yas Marina following the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix as a reward for winning Formula Renault 3.5 series.
Sainz Jr who is only twenty years old is one of the team’s junior drivers in contention to replace Red Bull-bound Daniil Kvyat at Toro Rosso and will drive the RB10 on day one of the Abu Dhabi test on Tuesday 25th November.
Senior driver Daniel Ricciardo will take over on the Wednesday and this means that Kvyat will need to wait until 2015 for his first test as a Red Bull driver.
Despite being overlooked in favour of Max Verstappen for the other Toro Rosso seat earlier this year, Sainz Jr is highly rated by Red Bull and is the youngest Formula Renault 3.5 series champion. It will be his second Red Bull drive after the Young Driver Test at Silverstone in July 2013, where he drove an RB9.
All you can say overall is that the performance that Sainz Jr has put into Formula Renault 3.5 series has been fantastic and he deserves this test as a reward for all his hard work this season. Even though he is still in the running for the second Toro Rosso seat for 2015, this test will be all the more important for Sainz Jr to show what he can do in a Formula One car and put himself further more in contention for the remaining Toro Rosso seat.
With the spotlight on his shoulders in the next week or so, Sainz Jr will have to give it everything that he can in order to show why he was signed for the Red Bull Driver Programme in the first place and why he won the Formula Renault 3.5 championship in style this season and I believe that he will and will show some promise too. But let’s see how performs in the post Abu Dhabi GP test next week.
