With the rest of the 2012 line-up now slowly gliding into place, and the remaining issues centring around whether Williams opt for Boobens or Adrian Sutil, and which rich Spaniard the HRT team opt to put in their second seat, the Toro Rosso situation is proving to be the main source of entertainment during the off-season.
For 2012, the Italian squad have no less than four drivers jostling for their two race seats, with current drivers Sebastien Buemi and Jaime Alguersuari facing severe pressure from Red Bull young guns Daniel Ricciardo and Jean-Eric Vergne. The STR squad themselves have always insisted that they will run whomever Red Bull tell them to, but that decision from Caffeine HQ is proving a tricky one to make.
Earlier this year, Red Bull's plan would probably have been to replace the worst of Algie and Buemi with Ricciardo for 2012, promoting Vergne to a reserve driver role and throwing the slower of their 2011 race drivers into the dumpster out the back where the likes of Scott Speed, Christian Klien and Tonio Liuzzi ended up.
But since then, the team's decision has been made more difficult for three reasons. Firstly, neither Alguersuari or Buemi have significantly singled themselves out as being the faster driver. Buemi has qualified ahead of Algie at 13 of the 19 races this year, but the Spaniard has outscored him by 26 points to 15.
Both drivers are also able to whittle off a list of excuses as to their relative poor performances in either qualifying or the race itself. Buemi could point to his five retirements throughout the season, of which none were really his fault, while Alguersuari might suggest that his qualifying results actually helped more than hindered him, given the scale of some of his comebacks on fresh Pirellis - having started from the pit lane in Canada, he finished 8th, while he went from 18th to 7th in Italy.
The second issue came from Vergne's superb performance at the Young Driver Test. Granted, any driver could probably have topped all three days of the Abu Dhabi test given a full run in an RB7, but the extent of the Frenchman's domination was the key issue. He finished the final day of the test nearly two seconds clear of the rest of the field, and with performances like that, there is now a suggestion that simply placating him with a Friday reserve drive role in 2012 might be a waste of resources.
And then there's Ricciardo himself, who has enjoyed an up-and-down half a season at the back of the grid with HRT, ostensibly in preparation for promotion to bigger and better things next season. A final score of 6-4 to Liuzzi in qualifying, and 4-1 to Ricciardo in races that they both finished is not completely conclusive, but arguably as positive a result as the Australian could have hoped for after being thrown into the seat midway through the year.
So, none of the drivers on STR's shortlist have made a conclusive case to be dumped, but nor have they made a conclusive case to be a shoe-in for one of the seats. No wonder the Red Bull bosses are taking their time to finalise their plans. Still, assuming that nobody is definitely out, there are a number of obvious scenarios that could play out.
Scenario A. Try to keep everybody happy.
According to the rumour mill, Red Bull have already enquired as to the possibility of slotting Ricciardo in at Team Lotus for 2012, likely in place of magnificent OAP Jarno Trulli. If the freshly-renamed Caterham team are amenable, and assuming HRT are happy to drop their 'all-Spanish' plan for another wedge of cash and Vergne, Buemi and Algie could stay where they are for another year.
Scenario B. Keep Vergne on the established ladder.
It might take quite a bit of persuasion for Daddy Red Bull to immediately promote Vergne into a race seat, and so the Frenchman might have to make do with the well-trod path Ricciardo followed, taking a Friday practice role for next year as expected. Then, Ricciardo will get a year to prove himself alongside whichever of Buemi or Algie they choose to give one last chance to. And let's face it, that will probably be Buemi.
Scenario C. Juggle their pack.
Pretty much the same as scenario B, except rather than drop Buemi, the team could shuffle Algie out to the HRT seat using his nationality as a selling point, and put Ricciardo in next to Buemi. That would give them a neat spread of head-to-head comparisons to try and figure out who is worth keeping/promoting for 2013, with Algie against the measure of averageness that is Pedro de la Rosa, and Buemi and Ricciardo squaring off at STR.
Scenario D. The nuclear option.
After plenty of seasons of trying to fathom precisely how useful Buemi and Algie are, the team could finally decide to cut their losses, dump the pair of them for next season, thereby allowing the far more exciting and untapped potential of Ricciardo and Vergne to prove themselves head-to-head in the same car, in what would likely be a shootout for a 2013 Red Bull seat assuming that 2012 proves to be Mark Webber's final season.
There are other options open to them as well, of course. They could ignore Ricciardo and promote Vergne to STR if they really think he is that good, they could utilise possible loan seats at Caterham and HRT to fiddle their drivers around all season long in a full-season effort to get as complete an evaluation of each driver, or they could drop the whole lot and sign up Narain Karthikeyan and Nicolas Kiesa instead.
Of all of those, this writer would personally suggest that Scenario B is the most likely, with Buemi having had long enough to prove himself a cut above a status of 'midfield filler'. But as time ticks on, clearly the team are thinking long and hard about all of their options.
Still, the reassuring thing for Red Bull themselves is that whatever you can say about their junior team line-up for 2012, they certainly can't say that they're not spoilt for choice.
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