The contrasting temperaments that could prove key in F1 2022's title fight

“We were young, crazy – and, yeah, we hated each other at that moment…”

Charles Leclerc is reflecting on one of many historic karting battles with Max Verstappen – one which has surfaced again as their intertwined careers have brought them back to face each other at the pinnacle of motorsport.

Max’s fast-track trajectory to Formula 1 took him out of sync with Charles on the junior single-seater ladder, and Ferrari’s wayward form has restricted the opportunities for them to lay claim to the same stretch of track again since Leclerc joined the F1 grid. But historic rancour has a habit of bobbing back to the surface in an age when nothing can be forgotten, merely consigned to some distant cloud-based server waiting to be rediscovered.

When Verstappen ushered Leclerc off-track while fighting for the lead of the 2019 Austrian Grand Prix – robbing Charles of what would have been his maiden F1 win after an engine issue denied him victory in Bahrain – a rough-and-ready video from their karting days surfaced online and, as the saying goes, ‘went viral’. It began to do the rounds again after the opening rounds of the 2022 season when it became clear one of these two drivers would likely be the champion.

There is a pleasing symmetry to the proceedings, for the video hails from 2012, the last time Ferrari meaningfully faced off against Red Bull in a battle for world championship honours. The rivalry between Leclerc and Verstappen was nothing new even then, for the prodigious Max had established himself as the guy to beat in 2010 before Leclerc found his feet at international level the following year. The video charts the aftermath of a relatively inconsequential heat during the second round of the 2012 WSK Euro Series at the Circuit du Val d’Argenton, during which the two 14-year-olds repeatedly clashed before Charles biffed Max off-track into the mud after the finishing line. This is unseen; the video only exists because the journalists raced to the scene, expecting Max’s notoriously combustible father Jos to kick off. What delights modern viewers is that the youngsters’ more recent roles are reversed: it’s Max who rages “it’s not fair” while Charles adopts a cherubic poker face as he writes the incident off as “nothing, just an incident in the race”.

It’s incredible to think that Max was just two and a half years away from his first F1 test with Toro Rosso at this point, while Charles faced a longer route to the top – even with the support of Nicolas Todt’s All Road Management and its allied ART Grand Prix organisation.

Verstappen and Leclerc collide at the 2019 Austrian GP - robbing the latter of what would have been his maiden F1 win

Photo by: Lorenzo Bellanca / Motorsport Images

“In karting we had a lot of conflicts,” recalls Leclerc. “Yeah, really a lot. We’d been racing together for four or five years, every race we would be fighting for wins, and obviously loads of things happened.

“But we’ve grown, we’ve more experience, and we’ve also both realised our dream to be fighting for the F1 championship, so the relationship has changed since then. Now I think we both look back to these years with smiles on our faces.”

This amicable situation may not prevail for long. It’s about to get spicy – and not just between these two drivers.

Ferrari vs Red Bull – it’s real  

Not since 2012, when Leclerc and Verstappen were figuratively coming to blows on the karting scene, have Ferrari and Red Bull engaged in a genuine season-long scrap for the world championship. Although Fernando Alonso was again runner-up to Sebastian Vettel in 2013 the Red Bull was quantifiably the superior car, especially after Pirelli was forced to revert to its previous tyre construction mid-season.

Since then it’s been a case of revolving doors as each team has undergone periodic renaissances in which they have occasionally challenged Mercedes’ dominance, but seldom at the same time. Only in 2019 was synchronicity achieved, and then in a battle for the runner-up position behind Mercedes as Lewis Hamilton clinched the title (from his team-mate) with two rounds to go.

Not since 2012, when Leclerc and Verstappen were figuratively coming to blows on the karting scene, have Ferrari and Red Bull engaged in a genuine season-long scrap for the world championship

Both teams underachieved in the early years of the hybrid era, publicly blaming power unit deficiencies for their problems while also carrying significant shortcomings on the aerodynamics and chassis side. Only in acknowledging and addressing these wider issues have they got to where they are now.

Ferrari’s restructured technical team delivered a strong car and engine for the widebody era – perhaps too strong, since the team’s power unit was the subject of a mysterious investigation and “confidential settlement” with the FIA which paved the way for its 2020 slump. There were problems with management, too, solved by firing the abrasive team principal Maurizio Arrivabene in favour of former technical chief Mattia Binotto.

Ferrari's former technical chief Mattia Binotto took the reins in 2019 - a transformative move for the team

Photo by: Ferrari

The transformative effect of Binotto – with support from further up the Ferrari food chain – cannot be underestimated. Shielded from the worst effects of the impatience of fans and the Italian national media, Ferrari’s technical team – restructured again, but on sensible lines rather than an orgy of hiring and firing – has been able to reconcile itself to two relatively uncompetitive years while focusing all its efforts on building a better car for the new regulations brought in this season.

Trackside operations have been bolstered too through internal promotions, enabling Binotto to step back from his race weekend role several times last year to superintend work on the F1-75. The result has been Ferrari’s best start to a season since 2018.

Red Bull’s challenge was to break out of a pattern in which it would start the year with a sub-optimal car, then be forced to throw resources at in-season development – thereby starving the next season’s car of attention and perpetuating the loop. As recently as 2020 the team’s technical package hadn’t really hit its stride until the final races of the year.

Part of that is down to the team leadership’s policy of allowing tech guru Adrian Newey to step away and engage in side projects (most recently the Red Bull-Aston Martin Valkyrie supercar) during his occasional periods of disenchantment with F1. Some can be accounted for by the reliability of the increasingly powerful, but still often fragile, Honda powertrain. 

But Red Bull’s key weakness in recent years has been a loss of correlation between simulation and real-life car behaviour. New parts weren’t delivering the performance characteristics suggested by the windtunnel and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tools, forcing Red Bull to troubleshoot trackside (10 years ago, similar issues forced Ferrari to hire Toyota’s facility in Cologne while it rebuilt its own windtunnel). After winning the 2020 season finale in Abu Dhabi, Verstappen said, “We have to find a way of making sure that what comes out of the windtunnel works straight away on the car, and it’s immediate, and puts us in the right direction.”

When the COVID pandemic enforced a delayed start to the new technical regulations, Red Bull gained a year’s grace in which it could identify its windtunnel issues, finesse the troubled 2020 car into a championship-winning B-spec, and target a flying start to 2022. Thanks to this, plus a fully focused Adrian Newey, and Honda’s best hybrid power unit yet, it has accomplished all three.

The position as we complete the first quarter of the season is one of delicate balance on the technical front. Ferrari has targeted cornering performance and driveability, and the F1-75 chassis and new power unit appear to have met all the required benchmarks. But Honda and Red Bull have found greater straightline speed through a less draggy car and a power unit which offers more electrical deployment at the top end. At the Miami GP weekend Binotto estimated the RB18 was perhaps 0.2s a lap quicker on average.

The RB18 has held an advantage at high speed tracks, with the form reverting to the F1-75 at tight and twisty circuits

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

The politics have begun already

Back in 2012 seven different drivers won the first seven rounds and Ferrari had to resort to skulduggery as Vettel overhauled Alonso in the points late on, such as deliberately breaking a seal on Felipe Massa’s gearbox to promote Alonso – who had underperformed in qualifying – to the grippier side of the grid for the US GP. Conflict between the two teams escalated off-track as well as Ferrari (and others) lobbied the FIA to close off engine-mapping loopholes Red Bull and Renault were exploiting to boost aero performance, improve traction during starts, and boost driveability in low-grip conditions.

F1’s new era of cost controls and an engineering-led, more rigorously thought-out set of technical regulations means we are unlikely to witness scenes similar to the worst excesses of a decade ago. Ferrari’s previous title battle with Red Bull was punctuated by wrangles about tyres, engine mapping, exhaust siting and the spec of cars used in tyre tests and ‘filming days’. But even the present period of relative harmony between the competitors can provide grounds for rancour, as evinced by the animosity between Red Bull team principal Christian Horner and his Mercedes counterpart Toto Wolff in recent seasons.

“Mattia is a nice guy,” responds Horner pointedly when GP Racing asks him if fighting Ferrari rather than Mercedes will entail a different dynamic.

It’s a measure of how the paranoia levels are growing, though, that so much excitement and intrigue greeted reports from Italy that Ferrari used two different floor designs during the post-Imola tyre test

“It’s just a different sort of competition… Last year there was a lot of needle, a lot going on off-track, whereas this season seems more focused about what’s going on on-track. And I think the racing has been great between Charles and Max.

“And if that continues through the season, inevitably it’s going to boil over at some point.”

The key battleground for this season will be performance upgrades and how they fit into the budget cap. Already suspicions are forming.

Aside from a new floor in pre-season testing, and a ‘depowered’ low-drag rear wing evaluated in Miami, Ferrari held back on upgrading the F1-75 until Barcelona. The official reasoning has been budget, and a focus on understanding the base package – hence in Melbourne Leclerc evaluated a different diffuser configuration which required only a temporary change (but has now been permanently enshrined in the new, lighter floor introduced in Spain). It’s a measure of how the paranoia levels are growing, though, that so much excitement and intrigue greeted reports from Italy that Ferrari used two different floor designs during the post-Imola tyre test. The FIA investigated and accepted Ferrari’s rationale that the floor had been damaged by a kerb strike in the morning and replaced with a launch-spec item.

Red Bull has delivered far more upgrades so far this season, with focus on the budget cap now under scrutiny

Photo by: Erik Junius

By contrast, Red Bull seems to have followed a programme of continuous development: new sidepod and floor during Bahrain testing, new rear beam wing in Saudi Arabia, new front-wing endplates in Australia, another new floor for Imola, and a host of weight-saving modifications for Miami and Barcelona. This has led to speculation about how it can spend so much on upgrades while remaining within the budget cap.

“I hope at some stage Red Bull will stop developing,” says Binotto. “Otherwise I would not understand how they can do that…”

While Binotto has a point, much of the work – such as the floor revisions – has been structural to prioritise weight saving, and concerned items such as carbonfibre lay-up patterns and metal strengthening components. While these come with a cost attached for materials and labour, this isn’t as expensive as windtunnel research.

It’s understood the RB18 was at least 10kgs over the 798kg minimum weight limit at the start of the season, hence the urgency. The F1-75 is also believed to be slightly overweight; insiders say a new-spec paint used from Spain onwards saves nearly a kilo. Likewise Red Bull is drilling out metal components to reduce bulk where it can.

Red Bull’s defence has been to claim Ferrari has been unable to spend money on development because of costs associated with accident damage. All teams need to set aside money within the budget cap to pay for new components. Asked by GP Racing’s sister publication Autosport about reports Red Bull had already spent 75% of its development budget for the season, the team’s ‘driver advisor’ Dr Helmut Marko harrumphed: “The numbers are nonsense.

“I don’t think we’re in a significantly different position than Ferrari in this regard. Especially since I wonder what effect it has on them that Carlos Sainz has already crashed the car several times. That can’t be cheap.”

Sainz crashed into Perez's stricken Red Bull during qualifying in Monaco, the latest expensive shunt for Ferrari

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Max vs Charles – who will win? 

Both Leclerc and Verstappen are blindingly quick – arguably the most talented drivers of the generation born in the late 1990s – but they have very different temperaments. While it’s often claimed Max is the more focused and industrious of the two, Charles slightly inclined to coast on talent – and that working with the meticulous Carlos Sainz has enabled him to improve in key technical areas – those who have worked with both of them have a more nuanced view.

“Both of them, they are very competitive with themselves – they’re fighting against themselves before they fight anyone else,” says Xevi Pujolar, who was Max’s first race engineer in F1 (at Toro Rosso) and worked with Charles at Alfa Romeo.

“It wasn’t just after the race or qualifying, it was after every session. Max wanted to dig in to all the details to find what he needed to take the car to the next level – tyre, chassis, engine. And then his ability to push everyone in the team, because he’s very competitive and he wants everyone to be as competitive as him. Charles is also like this, but they do it in very different styles – and I won’t say if either one is better or worse, it’s just different.

“Max is pushing everything to the limit in quite a raw way, and sometimes you’ve probably seen this from outside. For some people Max is more difficult to accept because sometimes he’s too much. Charles is a bit… smoother.

“They are very different characters, almost opposite. Charles is very calm, Max almost wild.”

"In the perfect conditions, Charles can be close to Max. But Max will be there anyway – because he’s a warrior, an animal. I don’t see anyone able to compete with him" Xevi Pujolar

It is this difference in temperament which may tell in the months to come. Leclerc is a driver who requires a support network around him to deliver of his best. Verstappen is very much a product of his somewhat peculiar upbringing.

Max has spoken frankly about the tough-love process which shaped him into a world champion. In one instance his father was so furious at him crashing in a kart race – aged 14 – that he abandoned him at a service station on the way home and then, having returned to collect Max, spent the remainder of the 17-hour journey in an unspeaking funk.

Call it child abuse if you will, it has made Max the uniquely single-minded winning machine he is.

“I’m sure the product you have now is a result of what he went through when he was karting,” says Pujolar. “For me he is the best out there. He’s the most robust, strong driver I’ve ever met. Charles is very competitive but at some point I can see him getting a bit more… intimidated…

“Let’s put it this way. In the perfect conditions, Charles can be close to Max. But Max will be there anyway – because he’s a warrior, an animal. I don’t see anyone able to compete with him. The guy has no limits – it’s either him or nothing.”

Verstappen and Leclerc are embroiled in an intense title fight this season - but will it reach the intensity of Verstappen's battle with Hamilton from last year?

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images