The Wilderness
What the years between the exit and the reinvention actually cost
This essay is part 2 of Beyond Formula One.
Picture Monaco on a Formula E race weekend. The harbour glittering, the yachts stacked three deep, the city doing what it has always done — performing its own mythology back at the world. Somewhere in this backdrop, after crashing out of a race he needed to finish, Jean-Eric Vergne is at a party. He is hunched over his drink. He would rather be anywhere else on earth.
This was 2017. Two and a half years since Toro Rosso. Two and a half years of Formula E races that kept producing poles and producing retirements and producing nothing that resembled the result his pace deserved. He had not won a race since GP2. He was twenty-six years old, in the most glamorous city in motorsport, at a party full of people celebrating a sport he loved, and he was hollowed out.
Nobody photographed that moment. It does not exist in the record. It exists only because Vergne talked about it later, when he had enough distance to describe it without flinching. And it matters — not because it is dramatic, but because it is specific. Specific in a way that the public narrative of post-F1 careers almost never is.
This piece is about what the years between the exit and the reinvention actually look like from inside them. Between the highlight reel that begins with the humiliation and ends with the trophy. The middle part. The part that takes longest and gets told least.
I. The Identity Problem
Sports psychology has a name for what happens to elite athletes when their primary identity is suddenly removed. It is called athletic identity foreclosure — the process by which a person who has built their entire self-concept around a single pursuit finds, when that pursuit ends, that there is not much self left underneath. The research on it is extensive. The sporting world’s willingness to acknowledge it, particularly in motorsport, is considerably less so.
Formula 1 is an unusually extreme environment for this to occur. The drivers who reach it have typically been racing since childhood — karts at seven or eight, junior formulas through their teens, GP2 or F3 in their early twenties or even earlier. The sport organises their identity, their relationships, their geography, their daily schedule, and their sense of worth. When it ends, the question is who am I without this.
The six drivers in this series lost their Formula 1 seats at ages ranging from twenty-one to twenty-eight. All of them had spent the majority of their conscious lives working toward those seats. None of them were given meaningful time to prepare for losing them. Each of them, in their own way and at their own pace, had to answer that question from scratch.
The question is not just what do I do next. It is who am I without this.
What makes their cases worth examining closely is that they answered it differently. Vergne fell visibly and processed loudly. Vandoorne was eroded quietly and rebuilt privately. Ericsson treated the whole chapter with a pragmatism that looked, from outside, almost like indifference — until you understand what it was covering. Alguersuari, youngest of them all, didn’t just lose his seat. He lost something more fundamental, and needed professional help to find it again.
II. Four Experiences of the Same Abyss
Jean-Eric Vergne: The Loud Fall
Vergne described the period after his Toro Rosso exit as a road down to hell for at least one year and a half. Sounds theatrical, but it was accurate.
He had been dropped for reasons that had nothing to do with his ability — the Vettel timing, the Marko decision, the political nature of a programme that had simply moved on. He knew this. Understanding the injustice did not make it hurt less. There was nothing to fix. The decision had been made above his head and the only thing he could have changed was asking the right question at the wrong moment — and not asking it would not have saved him either.
The confidence that had carried him through GP2, through three seasons of Toro Rosso, through qualifying sessions where he consistently extracted more from the car than the results showed — that confidence broke. He has said that after F1, he was on the bottom of the floor. The GP2 version of himself, the one who felt super confident, everything going his way, felt like it belonged to someone else.
What followed had a specific shape. He joined Andretti for Formula E’s inaugural season and was immediately quick — pole position on his debut in Uruguay — and immediately star-crossed, retiring from the lead. That pattern, speed without reward, repeated itself across two full seasons. DS Virgin brought more poles and zero wins. The series was raw, the cars unreliable, the regulations still finding their shape. None of that made losing easier.
Understanding the injustice did not make it hurt less. There was nothing to fix.
During this period he was also serving as Ferrari’s reserve driver — technically keeping one foot inside the world that had rejected him. Whether that was rational career management or an inability to fully let go is a question only he can answer. What it meant practically was that he spent two years building a new life in Formula E while remaining available for a Formula 1 call that was never going to come. That is not a clean psychological position to occupy.
The Monaco after-party in 2017 is the image that crystallises the wilderness period most precisely. Two and a half years in. A crash-out. A party in the most pointed possible location. Hunched over a drink, wanting to be anywhere else. Not broken yet — he kept showing up, kept qualifying on the front row, kept doing the work. But somewhere behind the professionalism, something was running out.
The turn finally came. He moved to Techeetah — a team built from the ruins of the Aguri operation, chaotic and under-resourced — and brought Andre Lotterer with him. What Lotterer offered was a philosophy Vergne had never encountered in his racing life: your teammate is not your enemy. What you give him comes back to you. In Formula 1, that idea would have been laughed out of the debrief room. In this context, at this moment, it landed. Something about the Techeetah chaos and the Lotterer partnership created the conditions for Vergne to race differently — like a man simply trying to go fast.
The first win came at the Montreal finale of the 2016/17 season. He called it emotional. After three years of poles that became retirements, of speed that never arrived at the right moment, of being the driver who was clearly quick and somehow still winless, something finally converted. The wilderness did not end that day. But it began, for the first time, to look like it had an exit.
Stoffel Vandoorne: The Quiet Erosion
The thing about Stoffel Vandoorne’s wilderness is that it happened almost entirely in public, in front of cameras, across two Formula 1 seasons, and almost nobody noticed it happening.
He arrived at McLaren having won GP2 with one of the most dominant campaigns the series had seen. He was, by every measurable indicator, ready. What he found at McLaren was a car that didn’t work, a team in institutional crisis, and a teammate who was extracting performances from that car that had no right to exist given what the car was.
Fernando Alonso in the 2017 and 2018 McLarens was doing something very few drivers in the history of the sport could have done — making a fundamentally broken machine look, on its best days, like it belonged somewhere it didn’t. The price of that performance was paid partly by Vandoorne. When your teammate performs at that level and you are not matching it, the public conclusion is not that your teammate is exceptional but that you are insufficient.
Twenty-five to four. That qualifying record followed him everywhere. It was cited as evidence of a talent gap that was real and damning. What it actually measured was the gap between a driver with two decades of experience and preferential equipment, and a driver in his first season making do with what was left.
When your teammate performs at that level, the public conclusion is not that he is exceptional. The conclusion is that you are insufficient.
Zak Brown’s later acknowledgement that the equipment was unequal was too late to change the narrative that had already formed. By the time those admissions were made, Vandoorne had already been defined. The coverage had been filed. The conclusion had been reached.
Through all of it, he maintained a composure that is either a testament to his character or evidence of how thoroughly he had internalised the expectation that he should not complain. He did not go to the media. He did not point at the equipment gap while it was happening. He absorbed it. In interviews he said he felt sure of himself. He said the gap was not as large as it appeared. He said the right things in the right tone.
What that cost him privately is largely reconstructed from inference, because Vandoorne does not offer his private life easily. What we know is that he left McLaren at the end of 2018 and joined HWA Racelab in Formula E — and finished twelfth. A GP2 champion, two Formula 1 seasons behind him, twelfth in his first Formula E season. He processed it without drama, which does not mean he processed it without difficulty.
The Maserati move in 2024 — which came after his Formula E championship — was described by him as a chance to hit the reset button, to work with a new group of people. A driver who had just won a world championship feeling the need to reset suggests something from the McLaren years had not fully resolved. The need for fresh starts kept returning. The quiet erosion had gone somewhere that occasional victories did not completely reach.
Marcus Ericsson: The Weight of Futility
Marcus Ericsson’s wilderness is different in character from the others because he never quite acknowledged it as one. Which is not the same as saying it wasn’t there.
He spent five Formula 1 seasons — 97 grands prix — in cars that were almost never capable of points. The Caterham collapsed mid-2014. The Sauber years that followed were more stable but rarely more rewarding. He has described the experience as mentally challenging, which in the context of what those years actually involved deserves unpacking.
Going to work every race weekend knowing your car cannot show what you can do is a specific kind of psychological endurance test. The grinding, sustained, low-level futility — the experience of being a professional at something while being systematically denied the conditions that would allow you to prove it. Sustained across five years, that experience tends to do one of two things: it hardens a person into pragmatism that looks like acceptance, or it quietly convinces them the limitations are theirs rather than the car’s.
Ericsson landed firmly in the first category. He kept showing up, kept giving everything, and reframed the F1 years not as failure but as achieved goal — the fifteen-year-old’s ambition completed, regardless of what the results column said. That reframing is either psychologically healthy or the most effective possible defence mechanism. Possibly both.
Five seasons of going to work knowing your car cannot show what you can do. That tends to do things to a person.
The Leclerc arrival at Sauber in 2018 accelerated the end in a way that had a particular sting. Ericsson has been gracious about it publicly — Charles is super quick, I gave everything — but the dynamic of being made to look ordinary by a driver arriving with Ferrari’s full institutional weight mirrors what Vandoorne experienced with Alonso. The established driver, defined suddenly by a comparison that was never quite fair.
The move to IndyCar was not, on the face of it, obviously liberating. He was going to a series the European racing establishment views as peripheral, starting again in a discipline — oval tracks, different aerodynamic philosophy, superspeedways that have killed drivers — that required him to learn things Formula 1 had never asked of him. The first three IndyCar seasons were solid rather than spectacular. The Detroit win in 2020 was his first single-seater victory in seven years. The wilderness, for Ericsson, was quieter than Vergne’s and less visible than Vandoorne’s. From outside, it looked like a sensible career transition managed professionally. From inside — five years of futility, then starting again, then slowly rebuilding the evidence that the speed had always been there — it was something more than that.
Jaime Alguersuari: The Deepest Cut
Jaime Alguersuari was twenty-one years old when Franz Tost called him.
He had just attended a Cepsa sponsor event. Tost reached him afterward. The call lasted approximately one minute. It contained the information that his Toro Rosso career was over. He had, days earlier, turned down a Lotus race seat to stay loyal to Red Bull. The loyalty was not returned.
What followed was not the strategic pivot to Formula E that Vergne made, or the quiet professional regrouping that Vandoorne undertook, or the pragmatic career rebuild that Ericsson managed — but, by Alguersuari’s own account, something that required therapy to process.
The loyalty was not returned. The call lasted approximately one minute.
He has said that racing pressure broke him mentally. He has said that F1 still gives him strange dreams, years later, after the therapy and the music and the distance. The psychological residue of what the Red Bull system and the Formula 1 environment did to him did not dissolve when the career ended. It persisted. Professional help was part of how he dealt with it — not a footnote to the story, but a central part of how he found his way through.
The racing attempts in the years that followed had a half-hearted quality that reflects where he was mentally. World Series by Renault in 2012 — going back down the ladder, winning races, no F1 doors opening. DTM tests in 2014. Le Mans considered and not committed to. He was neither in nor out, neither a racing driver nor whatever came next, circling the edges of a sport that had damaged him without being able to fully walk away from it.
Music had been present from around 2013. A few tracks released, club gigs, confidence returning through something that had no politics and no teammate comparison and no Big Boss deciding whether his face still fitted the programme. By 2015, at twenty-five, he retired from motorsport formally. Not because no opportunities existed but because he had found a version of himself that was entirely his own.
What is striking about Alguersuari in the interviews he has given as an adult, with distance on all of it, is the absence of performed bitterness. He has described the exit as blindsiding, the system as brutal, the experience as genuinely traumatic. And then he has moved past it by building something elsewhere that made the wound less central to his identity. The therapy helped. The music helped more.
III. What the Wilderness Does
Four drivers. Four different experiences of the same essential rupture. What can be said about them collectively?
The damage is real and it is specific. These are not drivers who failed and felt bad about it. They are drivers who operated in a system that produced outcomes unrelated to their ability, and who then had to carry those outcomes — the results, the comparisons, the reputations built on unfair foundations — into whatever came next. The psychological weight of that is not the same as the weight of genuine failure. It has a quality of injustice that makes it, in some ways, harder to metabolise. You cannot fix what wasn’t your fault. You can only wait for enough time and enough distance to make it matter less.
None of them resolved it quickly. Vergne’s wilderness lasted three years before Montreal. Vandoorne’s began during his F1 career and arguably continued through his Formula E years in ways he has never fully explained. Ericsson’s was five seasons long before it ended at Abu Dhabi and then continued through three quiet IndyCar seasons before Detroit. Alguersuari’s lasted four years and required professional intervention. The public narrative of sporting reinvention tends to compress these timelines — the fall, then the comeback, clean and legible. The actual experience is messier and slower and less narrative than that.
You cannot fix what wasn’t your fault. You can only wait for enough time and enough distance to make it matter less.
None of them were given any support in navigating it. Formula 1 does not have a structured programme for drivers leaving the sport. There is no transition support, no psychological resource, no acknowledgement that losing a Formula 1 seat at twenty-one or twenty-four or twenty-eight, after a lifetime of working toward it, might require more than a press release and a new manager. Anyone who has been handed a redundancy letter after years inside a company, told their role no longer exists, their expertise no longer required, here is your notice period, will recognise the shape of it. The sport extracts what it needs from its drivers and moves on. What it leaves behind is someone else’s problem.
Alguersuari sought therapy. Vergne found his anchor in a chaotic new team and a teammate with a different philosophy. Vandoorne rebuilt quietly and privately. Ericsson reframed the narrative around a completed goal and kept working. Four different coping strategies, arrived at individually, without a framework, in the middle of careers that were still technically ongoing.
What they all share, on the other side of it, is a perspective on Formula 1 that is more honest than the sport tends to allow its current drivers to offer. They have nothing left to protect. No seat to keep, no programme to satisfy, no Helmut Marko to impress. What they say from that position, about what the sport costs and what it gives and what it takes that it doesn’t give back, is more valuable than almost anything said from inside the paddock.
Part Three — The Reinvention — asks the question this piece has been building toward. What does winning mean when the dream changes shape? Four drivers found their answers in different series, on different continents, in different kinds of cars. One of them found his answer somewhere else entirely.