F1 star got fired for telling his boss to ‘f*** off’

Franz Tost, generic, 2023, Abu Dhabi — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 Stories

F1 star got fired for telling his boss to ‘f*** off’

Franz Tost was at Toro Rosso until 2023

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Thursday 2 April 2026 10:58

A former Red Bull F1 junior racer has revealed what ultimately caused his axe from the sport after just 28 races.

Red Bull's early forays into the sport involved trying out lots of different young drivers in their seats, particularly at sister team Toro Rosso, attempting to find a future world champion.

While the main team first competed in 2005, they bought their sister team - more commonly known these days as Racing Bulls - back in 2006, taking over Minardi and calling it Toro Rosso.

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Their first driver lineup at the junior team featured Vitantonio Liuzzi and American racer Scott Speed.

While neither driver went on to have particularly successful F1 careers, Speed did not pick up a single point in the 28 grands prix in which he participated, which involved the full 2006 season and part of the 2007 season.

Following the 2007 European Grand Prix in which he crashed out on lap three, Speed was replaced by Sebastian Vettel, the Red Bull youngster who would go on to become a four-time world champion.

For Speed, his F1 career was over 10 races into the 2007 season, and he was later seen in NASCAR. Now, he has revealed exactly when it was that his F1 career ended, revealing a heated conversation with then Toro Rosso team principal Franz Tost after crashing at the European GP, in an incident which saw six other drivers including Lewis Hamilton also aquaplaning off the track into the barriers.

"I come in, and I'm actually in a pretty good mood because it was pretty awesome," Speed told the Dale Jr. Download podcast. "It didn't work out, but it was an awesome first lap. I'm talking to my engineer, and Franz, comes up and says 'what's happened in Turn 1?' And I was like, 'what do you mean?' There were eight cars parked out there - Lewis Hamilton, Jenson Button. I said 'well the same thing that happened to everybody else. We hydroplaned into the corner.' And he says, 'no, not everybody, just the wankers.'

"And I told him to F-off and I walked away. I guess I thought I could tell the team owner that he can F-off and then everything was going to be okay. It was not. The next weekend, Sebastian Vettel was in the car and that was it."

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Who is Franz Tost?

Tost looked after Red Bull's junior team between 2006-2023, and oversaw some of the best talent in the sport including Vettel, Max Verstappen and Daniel Ricciardo.

He retired at the end of the 2023 season and received a lovely send off by then AlphaTauri driver Yuki Tsunoda, one of the team's more recent success stories.

The 70-year-old Austrian has taken a backstep from racing, but his altercation with Speed is one of the most remembered incidents of his long tenure as team boss.

In the immediate aftermath of the 2007 European GP, it was also alleged that Tost had struck Speed, although he always denied this. Speed stated after that race that he would never drive for Tost again.

F1 Racing Bulls Toro Rosso Franz Tost