Stoffel Vandoorne is a case study in bouncing back. In the early 2010s he famously had all before him it seemed, rising up the junior single-seater ranks as a McLaren protege. His CV was close to immaculate, and concluded with a crushing and record-breaking 2015 GP2 championship-winning year, where he totalled almost double the points of the guy in the runner-up spot.
A stellar career in Formula 1 looked inevitable, indeed he even outqualified team-mate Jenson Button and scored a point on his F1 debut in 2016, in a one-off McLaren appearance in Bahrain filling in for the injured Fernando Alonso.
But when he got his full-time race ride with the team during the following two years things got a lot more difficult. In a pair of desperately underperforming McLarens he rarely did justice to his talent and almost never got on terms with team-mate Alonso.
Perhaps the latest tale of someone who excelled on the way up but couldn’t cut it at the top, a la Stefano Modena?
Not a bit of it. Vandoorne when his sad F1 sojourn ended was almost immediately back on his feet with a tie-up with Mercedes, both as an F1 support driver and moreover as a Formula E racer. Literally three weeks after his final F1 race Vandoorne competed in his first
