During the offseason one of the series I will be doing here on RaceWeek is F1’s Failed Talents, where I am going to be posting about drivers in recent years who had obvious speed when they arrived on the Formula One scene, but for certain reasons, some being out of their control, things did not work out for them and they ended up disappearing from the sport before their talent could really be realised. The first driver I am going to be talking about is Stoffel Vandoorne.
A career retrospective
Stoffel Vandoorne had a promising junior career. The Belgian driver won his first season of car racing in 2010 in the F4 Eurocup 1.6 series, before following that up with the Formula Renault Eurocup title in 2012. He also finished in the top 3 in the majority of junior championships he competed in. The 2015 season proved to be where he really made his mark. In his second season of what was then the GP2 Series having finished runner up the previous year, Stoffel Vandoorne would dominate the season, taking 7 victories and securing the title with a round to spare.
By then he had been snapped up by the McLaren team as a junior driver. Unfortunately a seat at the team did not become available in 2016 and he spent the season in Japan competing in the Super Formula series, finishing in a respectable fourth. However he would get an opportunity at the 2016 Bahrain Grand Prix, replacing Fernando Alonso after the Spaniard was forced to sit out the race as a result of minor injuries sustained in his horrific Australian GP crash. Stoffel would make the most of his opportunity, in a hectic race on a track he knew well he kept his nose clean and finished in tenth place, scoring a point on his Formula One debut.
A full time seat at McLaren finally belonged the Belgian driver in 2017, as he replaced the outgoing Jenson Button. By now he had built up quite a reputation and many predicted great things from him. However the 2017 season did not work out the way he had hoped at all. McLaren had had a rocky start to their latest tie up with Honda, with an underpowered and unreliable power unit. But throughout 2016, there had been signs of progress. But then came 2017 and the relationship took a massive step backwards. Multiple breakdowns throughout preseason, and entering the season severely on the back foot with not much running in testing and an underpowered and unreliable car. This obviously hampered his season, and he suffered a lot of mechanical failures. One of them resulted in him being unable to take the start in Bahrain. The other issue he had was that without a car that could regularly compete for points, you could only compare him against his team-mate, who was of course the mighty Fernando Alonso, one of the masters of handling difficult machinery. In the early part of the season he struggled to keep up with Fernando, which led many to question if he was as good as everyone was saying he is. However his results improved in the second half of the season, consistently fighting on the outskirts of the points. He finally scored his first point of the year in Hungary, and then followed that up with two seventh place finishes in Singapore and Malaysia. He finished the season in sixteenth in the standings, 4 points behind his team-mate Alonso, who finished in fifteenth.
McLaren had run out of patience with Honda, and they switched to a Renault engine for the 2018 season. The team had high hopes going into the season having ditched what they believed to be the source of the problem. The season started well for them, taking a double points finish in three of the first five races. Stoffel scored a ninth place in Australia, an eighth in Bahrain and a second ninth place in Azerbaijan. But as the development race progressed, the team fell backwards. The power unit change brought to light many issues with the chassis and the car proved to be difficult, perhaps more tricky to drive than last season. By the midpoint of the season, the team was regularly among the slowest on the grid and qualifying on the back rows. As mentioned before Fernando Alonso is extremely skilled at getting to grips with a difficult car, and he was able to drag it to the points on a few occasions. However Stoffel Vandoorne really struggled with the car and his form dropped. He was regularly qualifying at the back of the grid, struggling to compare favourably to Fernando, with a tightly packed midfield exasperating the deficit between the two drivers. The results simply were not coming. After Azerbaijan, he would only score points on one more occasion, with an eighth place in Mexico, finishing the season in sixteenth overall. In a crazy silly season with multiple drivers linked to the McLaren seat in particular, and results not being good enough, his seat was coming increasingly under threat and sure enough he was not retained by McLaren for the following season. With no other seat available, the Belgian found himself out of a drive for the 2019 season.
After losing his Formula One seat, Stoffel Vandoorne immediately found a new home in Formula E. He would drive for the HWA Racelab team for the 2018-19 season, who would morph into a factory Mercedes team for the 2019-20 season. The 2019-20 season saw him seemingly rediscover the form that he had that resulted in many regarding him as a star of the future. He ended the season runner up, winning the final race of the season in Berlin from pole.
What went wrong?
Whilst his results in the second half of 2018 were simply not good enough, which was why he lost his seat for 2019, I don’t believe Formula One not working out for him was 100% his fault. His average gap to Fernando Alonso in qualifying, which was on average around 3-4 tenths of a second, was comparable to many more experienced drivers who have driven alongside the Spaniard. But in a tightly packed midfield, the gap looked a lot bigger than it was and a 3-4 tenth gap was very significant. And many of his performances were simply the level the car was at at that point. I honestly think Stoffel was a prime case of wrong place wrong time. He happened to join McLaren during one of the most difficult periods in their history, and his only legitimate comparison was a driver who is known for outperforming difficult machinery. This made him look weak. His subsequent performances in Formula E for me show that had he got his hands on machinery that was capable of results in Formula One, his career may have panned out quite differently to how it did. But Formula One is a brutal world and there are no excuses for failing to deliver, whether they are legitimate or not. If you don’t deliver the likelihood is you will be shown the door no matter the circumstances. For me Stoffel Vandoorne is a victim of this.
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