Max Verstappen may be the most successful Dutchman in Red Bull’s Formula 1 history, but he isn’t its first driver heralding from the Netherlands. That honour is bestowed to Robert Doornbos, who stepped up from his third driver role to replace Christian Klien for the final three grands prix of 2006.
Mark Webber’s impending arrival at the fast-growing team for 2007 meant Doornbos only had a narrow window in which to impress, but it didn’t help that development on the RB2 had long since ceased. Nor had the car which David Coulthard took to the team's maiden podium in Monaco been a regular challenger at the sharp end.
Red Bull admitted to being overoptimistic on its Ferrari V8’s cooling properties, which took too long to sort and had knock-on effects on aero efficiency. A corner hadn’t truly been turned when, following the French Grand Prix in July, the pragmatic decision was taken to focus attention on the first Adrian Newey-designed Red Bull that would begin its eventually successful affiliation with Renault.
The team’s only Ferrari-powered car began a slide down the pecking order that meant it ended up behind Toyota, BMW Sauber and Williams in eighth overall on a basis of supertimes – although it actually outscored the latter.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Doornbos didn’t manage to crack the points, though in the same span neither did team-mate Coulthard – who had only managed two Q3 appearances after the development taps were turned off. But while they were only paired up for a short time, the 13-time grand prix winner left a big impression on a driver who had made his F1 debut with Minardi in the final eight races of 2005.
He had never previously worked with a driver of Coulthard’s status, having raced alongside fellow rookie Christijan Albers in 2005, and so Doornbos sought to soak up as much insight as he could from a driver that “ticks all the boxes” to be his favourite team-mate: “fun, fast and someone with experience”.
“I was really able to learn from his experience in F1, how you present yourself to the sponsors until squeezing out the fast lap in qualifying, basically the whole package,” reflects Doornbos, who found that Coulthard “was very relaxed to be around straight away”.
Doornbos was a late starter in motorsport by modern standards: his interest only perked at age 16 by attending the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix with his father as a guest of Williams. What he witnessed that weekend prompted him to give up what had been a serious tennis career and switch codes with Coulthard, one of the leading lights of the age, naturally among the drivers he aspired to emulate.
A race winner in Formula 3000 for Christian Horner’s Arden team in 2004, when as a rookie alongside championship-winning team-mate Vitantonio Liuzzi he finished third in the standings, Doornbos was reunited with Red Bull boss Horner for 2006 as a tester and driver of its third car on grand prix Fridays. That meant linking up with Coulthard, who had joined to race what amounted to a re-liveried Jaguar in 2005 after nine years at McLaren, and Doornbos found “I had to be cautious that I wasn't fanboying initially!”
"It wasn't like he would be destroyed if you would be faster than him in quali, because then he would have worked on the race set-up and he had a better race" Robert Doornbos
“When I met David for the first time, I saw him as the big McLaren star who was now leading the Red Bull team through their first years in Formula 1,” remembers Doornbos. “He was very open and friendly; he said to me straight away at the first test, ‘You want to jump on the plane with me?' So I thought, ‘OK, I really made it now!’”
The expectations that came with being a Red Bull driver in 2006 were vastly different than those facing the team in 2024. But Doornbos immediately recognised that “they had a vision, they had big pockets and they were not messing around”. As such, the donkey work now done by simulator drivers thousands of miles away from the track was taken seriously.
“Being a third driver/reserve driver in those days was very different than what it is now, where you're almost more like a PR function during the weekend than active role on-track,” he explains. “My technical understanding of a Formula 1 car, it was great, because I was able to learn a lot doing Michelin tyre testing; you would test 30 sets of tyres in less than 36 hours, so it was quite intense.”
It was a very different scenario to what he’d faced at Minardi, which Doornbos says survived under Paul Stoddart on a week-to-week basis thanks to “pure passion”. At Faenza, which was bought out by Dietrich Mateschitz for 2006 and rebranded as Toro Rosso to afford Liuzzi and Scott Speed a chance to prove themselves in F1’s final V10-powered racer, Doornbos recalls being told the team only had one more power steering unit left which was available to the highest bidder.
As he became immersed in the role awkwardly shared between Liuzzi and Klien in 2005, with the Austrian getting the lion’s share of racing opportunities, Doornbos credits Coulthard with opening his eyes to the importance of giving accurate feedback. Having heard stories of how the monosyllabic Kimi Raikkonen in his early career would offer minimal feedback and rely on his talent to sort things out, Doornbos modelled his approach on the Scot. “I tried to explain it properly,” he says, and soon noticed that Coulthard began to respect his input into debriefs on Fridays as a result.
Completing 21 days of testing in an RB2 alongside 15 Fridays meant Doornbos had plenty of seat time in the RB2 and already “felt truly a part of the team” before his race call-up - foreshadowing the chopping and changing that would become a feature of Red Bull-run teams in years to follow.
Qualifying on a damp track for the Chinese Grand Prix, where his first F1 run had come with Jordan in 2004, would prove the highlight of his brief tenure as he immediately outpaced Coulthard and reached Q3 in 10th. But their fortunes reversed immediately after the start of a race immortalised as Michael Schumacher’s final victory when first-corner contact with Robert Kubica’s BMW Sauber damaged the Red Bull’s front wing. His recovery to 12th, with a fastest lap seven tenths quicker than Coulthard, was a tale of what might have been.
“That could have been a game changer,” he reflects. Yet the performance stuck in Horner’s mind, Doornbos chuckles. It was even mentioned on stage during the 20 years of Red Bull celebration at Goodwood in July.
“We had a laugh about it,” says Doornbos. “[DC] was competitive, but it wasn't like he would be destroyed if you would be faster than him in quali, because then he would have worked on the race set-up and he had a better race.”
Doornbos says he felt compelled “to step up my game” once directly compared against Coulthard. But the following races were uninspired. He lined up right behind Coulthard at Suzuka in 18th, but a poor start consigned Doornbos to an ultimately lonely race to 13th. A 10-place grid penalty for an engine change left him 22nd on the grid at Interlagos, but with difficult handling, he struggled to finish 12th.
“It wasn't magical, but the team wasn't winning races either that time,” Doornbos reflects. “I don't think there was a big difference race-pace-wise but strategy, I think he had the upper hand then.
“When you get into F1, there are more drivers that can produce a fast lap, but to execute the perfect weekend, that's a different ball game. You need a bit more time and I think to be honest, three weekends isn't enough for a team to say, 'OK, he's totally useless or he's mega'.”
While Doornbos headed for Champ Car, winning twice and finishing third in the standings in 2007, Coulthard remained at Red Bull until the end of 2008, when he retired from F1 and was replaced by the team’s first world champion Sebastian Vettel. He still remains on the books today for demo events and is a paddock regular as a TV pundit, a role Doornbos also holds in the Netherlands. The two remain on friendly terms today.
Reflecting on his lengthy career, which later took in a stint with Mercedes in the DTM, Doornbos says Coulthard was “just the best man you can have in the team”.
“All the sponsors were happy for him to stay for so long, it was very impressive what he did,” concludes Doornbos. “He's been really fast and he won 13 grands prix, so total hats off to him.”
