5 Times F1 Drivers Shocked The World By Switching Teams

The news that Daniel Ricciardo has chosen to leave Red Bull, a team that has nailed down a solid third place or better in the championship for the last four seasons in favour of one of the outfits scrapping for a distant fourth was totally unexpected. It’s pretty rare for a top driver to leave a race-winning team for a mid-table outfit by choice.

From some angles the move makes sense; he’ll be a number one driver at Renault, whoever he partners, and he’s banking on Renault’s growth and potential outstripping the apparent stagnation at Red Bull – as well as escaping that team’s fairly obvious preference for its highly-paid young star Max Verstappen. But which other driver switches left us speechless?

The big one of recent times was, without a doubt, the 2008 World Champion’s decision to move from the team with which he won his title (and narrowly missed out on a couple more), McLaren, to the reborn – and fairly hopeless – Mercedes outfit that couldn’t hope, people said, to match the front-running McLarens and Red Bulls.

The apparent step backwards was temporary. In his third race for Mercedes he stuck the car on pole position, but then struggled for a few races and the vultures of punditry began to circle, criticising the Stevenage-born man’s decision to leave McLaren. He did win in Hungary that year, though, before beginning the new 1.6-litre, turbocharged era in by far the best car and sweeping to two consecutive world titles. McLaren, meanwhile… well, the less said about them, the better.

Actually, what the hell. Let’s go there. Fernando Alonso’s move from the just-not-quite-competitive Ferrari at the end of the 2014 season took everyone by surprise and ended a relationship with the team that had gone sour over Alonso’s refusal to stop criticising the car’s lack of pace. Annoyingly for the Spaniard, his departure seemed to galvanise the Italian team, which improved its next car and started picking up better results the following season.

Alonso’s move to McLaren was pivotal for the then-new McLaren-Honda partnership, bringing a crucial star name to the table with salary demands to match. But McLaren had been sliding down the field ever since Lewis Hamilton left and the hugely risky move was a surprise to most casual observers. Unlike Hamilton’s, it didn’t pay off. It still hasn’t.

Sebastian Vettel to Ferrari

Sebastian Vettel had won four driver’s world championships on the bounce from 2010 to 2013, and was an absolute beast in the final years of the 2.4-litre V8 era. Although two of those championships had ultimately been closely contested, the Red Bull was clearly the fastest car.

That made his decision to jump ship after just one year of disappointment in 2014, where new teammate Daniel Ricciardo outscored him by some 71 points and two championship positions, even more surprising. Although he hadn’t made this ambition public while at Red Bull, he went to Ferrari to fulfil his childhood dream of driving for Ferrari and emulating his hero Michael Schumacher.

Red Bull has a policy of promoting drivers with actual F1 experience, gained as part of the Toro Rosso team, to the flagship Red Bull Racing outfit. Daniil Kvyat was one such lucky pup, brought in to replace Sebastian Vettel after the German moved to Ferrari for the 2015 season in the wake of the departed Alonso.

But it was his shocking and horribly embarrassing demotion back to Toro Rosso in 2016, ironically after a run of poor drives and mistakes culminated in him crashing into Vettel’s Ferrari (twice) on the opening lap of the Russian Grand Prix and putting the German out of the race. Back to the junior team he went, and you could almost feel the entire F1 world cringing. Kvyat never recovered and was replaced even at Toro Rosso, although he’s now a behind-the-scenes development driver… at Ferrari.

Max Verstappen’s promotion to the senior Red Bull team had come too soon, everyone said at the time. When Kvyat was bumped down to Toro Rosso it was a straight switch, with Verstappen going the other way after four races of the season had already passed. He was just 18 at the time and had spent a single – albeit promising – season at Toro Rosso in 2015.

The move to promote such a youngster raised a lot of eyebrows around the paddock. Would he be able to adapt to the faster car? Would has relative lack of experience tell? Would he be just as volatile and crash-prone as Kvyat had been? The doubters were quickly silenced, although to this day Verstappen still maintains a reputation for taking one risk too many, much like a young Lewis Hamilton at McLaren. It’s probably why they’re both so popular.