F1 folk: A journey from Alonso's kart mechanic to Verstappen's F1 tutor

In more than 20 years in Formula 1, Xevi Pujolar has worked with some of the finest drivers of this century, including race winners Juan Pablo Montoya, Ralf Schumacher, Mark Webber and Charles Leclerc. But he's also witnessed a few of the very best at the start of their careers, working with a 12-year-old Fernando Alonso in karting and introducing a 16-year-old Max Verstappen to the world of F1 as his first Toro Rosso race engineer. This is his story in his own words.

Updated Nov 12, 2023, 2:28 PM

Adria, a very small track in northern Italy, just about a hundred kilometres from Faenza, and we are testing one of the old Toro Rosso cars, with the Ferrari engine, with a kid that Helmut Marko has been talking about since early summer: "There's this guy, Max Verstappen, who's doing his first year in single-seaters, let's do a test with him."

When I first heard about this idea, I said: "Huh, from a go-kart to F1?" You know, easy, Helmut, easy... But here we are, testing with a 16-year-old who hasn't even got his driving licence.

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Author Oleg Karpov

After attempting to study engineering, Oleg was thrown out of his Moscow university for spending more time at the racetrack as a junior press officer for the national Lada racing series than attending lectures. His first job as a journalist was at the Soviet Sport newspaper, and in 2011 he moved to Berlin to pursue a freelance career in Formula 1. He joined Motorsport.com in 2015 and became a contributor to GP Racing magazine in 2021. When it's not race week, he plays squash every Wednesday and Sunday and likes to procrastinate by playing chess, with his Elo peaking at 2069 on one of the biggest online chess platforms.