There is great potential to be confused by today’s news that Daniil Kvyat will step aside for Pierre Gasly in Malaysia in what is expected to be a multi-race switch. The Frenchman had already been linked with a debut at the Malaysian Grand Prix, with the Renault team’s newest recruit Carlos Sainz Jr widely expected to fill Jolyon Palmer’s seat in Sepang. However, with Palmer stoic in his commitment to see out the season, it was expected that Gasly would have to wait for next season for his widely tipped F1 bow.
So why this drastic in-season switch? The next step of a pre-planned development programme for Gasly? An audition for a 2018 seat? Or a sign of Helmut Marko’s exasperation with Kvyat’s disappointing season?
The decision to put Pierre in the car is not confusing in of itself. Even though the Frenchman struggled to impose himself on the higher order in the early races of his GP2 career, his two-year campaign in the series ended with the title in Abu Dhabi last year.
However, he has arguably been even more impressive against experienced opponents on unfamiliar circuits in Japanese Super Formula this year, already eclipsing McLaren’s Stoffel Vandoorne’s efforts in the series a year before. Whilst Pierre struggled to make an impression in the early races, a pair of victories in recent races has put Gasly in the championship picture with only the doubleheader finale at Suzuka to go. A stellar start on course to victory in Autopolis is emblematic of Gasly’s momentum in recent races.
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P2. Start from last weekend in Autopolis.
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Gasly’s efforts with the Mugen-Honda team have also doubtlessly endeared him to Toro Rosso’s 2018 power unit supplier in an otherwise disappointing Super Formula season for Honda. But Gasly’s credentials were not in doubt – he may have failed to commandeer Kvyat’s seat for 2017, but as Red Bull’s most senior junior driver, a GP2 champion and having conducted extensive testing for Red Bull, he always was the eyes-shut choice for Sainz’s successor.
Sean Gelael may have competed in the Toro Rosso in FP1 in Singapore, but the young Indonesian’s junior results have not been strong enough to earn a superlicense. A Malaysian audition for a 2018 seat for which Gasly is the only candidate fails to add up; especially when the man he is so gratuitously replacing is having such an abysmal season.
In stark contrast to a promising rookie year, Kvyat’s second stint with Toro Rosso has been nothing short of a disaster. Across their 29-race partnership Sainz has scored 94 points, Kvyat only eight (a brief review of the pairing’s last stint as team-mates, in GP3, paints a very different picture, with Carlos markedly trailing eventual champion Kvyat); strikingly the Russian has scored more penalty points than world championship points thus far in 2017. Crashing out of a Singapore Grand Prix whilst team-mate Sainz collected a career-best finish of fourth appears to have been the final straw.
But F1 has almost certainly not seen the last of Kvyat: it is very likely that Red Bull will allow Gasly to sit out the United States Grand Prix so he can contest the title decider in Super Formula. However, the subtext is clear: Red Bull have lost patience with Kvyat and in order to resist the challenge from a Renault squad with upward momentum, Helmut Marko and Franz Tost have chosen to energise the team with a fresh hopeful.
Whilst subtly phrased (indicative of the rhetorical tightrope the team will be walking having stood down Kvyat, but likely still reliant on his services for Austin), the implications of the team’s press release are evident: this is no single race cameo, but more profound loss of belief in Kvyat’s ability to resist Renault’s constructors’ championship advances.
It will no doubt be widely expected that having stood Kvyat down, such a public rebuke spells the unofficial end of Daniil’s F1 career. Certainly, it would be a perplexing move to stand down a driver out of understandable exasperation only to welcome him back the following season.
And yet who is available to replace Kvyat? Nobuharu Matsushita? A Honda protégé, yes, but unlikely to accrue enough points for a superlicense and reportedly underwhelming in his test for Sauber. Toro Rosso could consider running a subsidised Ferrari or Mercedes junior driver, with Charles Leclerc, Antonio Giovinazzi and Pascal Wehrlein all seemingly squabbling over a single Sauber seat alongside Marcus Ericsson.
These three drivers would be the obvious candidates for any other team, but Toro Rosso has historically been solely fed by Red Bull’s junior ranks and there are none, other than Gasly, ready for an F1 promotion.
Equally, it is valid to argue that with Kvyat, Toro Rosso would have both continuity and a known yardstick to measure Gasly against. Whilst it would be an uncharacteristically lenient move from Marko to retain Kvyat it would nonetheless retain the structure that has shaped the team’s driver line-ups since it was purchased by the soft drinks giant in 2005.
To replace Kvyat in 2018 with a more ‘conventional’ choice might mark a symbolic erosion on Red Bull’s grip on the Faenza-based squad, amid wider paddock speculation about a longer-term, phased withdrawal from F1 by an alienated Dietrich Mateschitz.
But in the immediate future, Toro Rosso have found themselves in a dilemma that few in the paddock were predicting. Not only must the team delicately sound out its reasoning for the switch whilst remaining loyal to an ousted driver they will likely need again in Austin, but they also need to think about 2018.
Ostensibly, Kvyat has had his chances – for a team with no reputation for handing out second chances, Daniil has enjoyed better grace than most. For any other team, his retention would be unthinkable. It will be telling to see just how much flexibility the team’s Austrian overlords allow as Toro Rosso looks to a new era with Honda.
