Verstappen exclusive: How Red Bull’s ace has become F1 champion material

Even after six-and-a half-years in F1, it was something Max Verstappen had never experienced. Out of the British Grand Prix after a first-lap, 51G crash, he wasn’t even able to watch the remainder of the race, won by his title rival, a 32-point lead shrunk to just eight.

“I was flown to the hospital and then basically when I got to the hospital I had to go straight in,” Verstappen recalls – in an interview with GP Racing – of his trip to a Coventry hospital on the day of the British Grand Prix. “Then you get to like the trauma division…

“I have never really been a big fan of going to hospitals, because you see people who are hurt. So it wasn’t a really nice environment, of course, but I had to be there. You get check-ups, but there were a lot of people who need check-ups and scans and stuff. So you’re waiting as well a lot. So yeah, it was a very long day… evening, before I was out of the hospital.”

If there was anything that could’ve cheered him up that evening, it was the team’s reaction to what happened. Red Bull team principal Christian Horner was flat-out when talking to TV crews, accusing Lewis Hamilton of “dirty driving”, while Horner’s Austrian colleague, Red Bull motorsport advisor Helmut Marko, demanded the Mercedes driver be disqualified.

“Everyone is allowed to share their opinion about how they think the situation is,” Verstappen smiles, talking of his bosses’ reaction. “We have a very close relationship all together. We are a team. And we fight as a team. We do everything together.”

They went further still. The week after the race, Alex Albon was gathering data at Copse at the wheel of a 2019-spec RB15 for an appeal to the FIA, and though in the end those findings did no more to convince the stewards to change course than Ferrari submitting Karun Chandhok’s analysis back in 2019 after Sebastian Vettel was penalised in the Canadian GP, Red Bull hadn’t done the filming day just to give everyone a laugh.

Verstappen's Silverstone impact and Hamilton's subsequent victory trimmed the Dutchman's points lead and stirred an injustice in Red Bull that he believes brought them closer together

Photo by: Sutton Images

If Verstappen ever needed more proof that his team will always fight his corner, he has it now. Call them musketeers or a posse, but ‘one for all and all for one’ is definitely the best way to describe Red Bull’s approach in the last few years. Whatever happens, be it a pitstop mistake or a crash on a reconnaissance lap on a damp track – as Verstappen points out, there is almost no need to waste time apologising, and no room for accusations.

“Like I said, we win and we lose together,” he says, when asked if he felt after last year in Hungary, where he crashed en route to the grid, that he owed his crew a round of drinks. “And at the end of the day, we actually had still a good result.

“You know, I always try to do the best I can to get a good result. And the mechanics always try to do the best they can to get the car ready or repaired, all this kind of stuff. You need to fight for each other. And that’s what we definitely do.

“They also know I always give 100%. That’s why we have such a strong and good relationship.”

"I think it’s very important to be able to say to each other when things are done correctly or wrong. Because that’s how you solve things very quick. If you keep on going around the problem and not being straight to the point, I don’t think that’s a good thing for the team in general" Max Verstappen

Having each other’s back, after all, is also the only option. Red Bull wouldn’t be fighting for the title this year without Verstappen. And it’s probably true the other way around too, given the lack of alternative competitive seats in F1.

But Verstappen is not only the best chance for the team to win the championship again. He’s also custom-made for Red Bull. Young, cocky and straightforward, he fits perfectly the environment created by Horner and Marko.

“I mean, for me, that really works very well,” he says of the relationships within the team. “Because I think it’s very important to be able to say to each other when things are done correctly or wrong. Because that’s how you solve things very quick.

“If you keep on going around the problem and not being straight to the point, I don’t think that’s a good thing for the team in general. So, yeah, it works really well, to be honest.”

Verstappen and Marko (left) share a no-nonsense mentality

Photo by: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images

For sure it wouldn’t work well if Verstappen himself wasn’t prepared to be on the receiving end of blunt messages. Not only from Marko or Horner, but also from his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, whose calm and almost indifferent “understood, Max” replies over team radio seemingly always discourage Verstappen from engaging in any kind of heated debate.

“I have a lot of respect of sometimes how calm he stays,” says Verstappen of Lambiase, who’s best known in the paddock as ‘GP’. “When you are in the car your heart rate goes up, you’re under pressure.

“Sometimes you have your moments where you speak up or raise your voice, but then if you also have from the other side someone raising their voice, you can end up in a massive argument on the radio while driving, which I don’t think is good.

“We always talk about things. Also, when we have disagreements or whatever, we very easily get over it again, because at the end of the day, we have the same goal – we both want to win every single weekend, we want to try and have the best possible result. Yeah, sometimes, of course, that can get a bit emotional, but I think that is a part of racing.”

Lambiase joined Red Bull ahead of the 2015 season, having switched from Force India, where he’d most recently worked with Sergio Perez. ‘GP’ was supposed to replace Guillaume Rocquelin as Sebastian Vettel’s race engineer, but the German left for Ferrari, and so for the first year and a half of his time at Red Bull, Lambiase worked with Daniil Kvyat – right up to the point when, from the Spanish GP onwards in 2016, the Russian was swapped out for Verstappen.

“GP and I now have been working together for a few years,” says Verstappen. “We have a very good and honest relationship, I think. He really understands what I need from the car, and also how I can feed back things to him.

“Of course, we have moments where we don’t agree. But I think that’s also wanted, because at the end of the day you want to make each other better, and you want to make the car faster. It’s good to be able to have discussions and come [up] with the best solution for it. We [are] also very honest to each other, like I am to Helmut and Christian. And I think that makes it so good.”

Verstappen has a "very good and honest relationship" with engineer Lambiase

Photo by: Mark Thompson/Getty Images

When a driver and a team win their first race together, there’s arguably not too much room for improvement – but Verstappen is ready to admit that in 2016 he probably wasn’t as prepared for a title fight as he is now.

“You still learn,” he says, honestly. “I mean, maybe the speed was there straight away, but it’s like, the little details and understanding of tyres, how you set up a car, [how to adapt to] changing conditions throughout the whole weekend, how you build up a weekend. All these kinds of things, you know, they influence the performance as well.

“I know for myself that from 2018 onwards I also as a driver made steps just purely from experience – knowing what you want from the car, but also the working relationship between my engineers towards me. We really understand each other very well in what we need from a car. And that naturally then also gives you more lap time.

"You have to try and be as perfect as you can be in every single department, especially when you are fighting for the championship, you need to have that sorted" Max Verstappen

“The key is that you should be able to adapt to what the car needs,” Verstappen continues, warming to his theme. “So, if the car is understeering, you cannot fix it, then you have to adjust your driving to it. If the car is always oversteery, I have to adapt, because if I just keep saying ‘no, but this is what I do’, but the car doesn’t like that, then you will not perform, right?

“So, I think what is important is that you should be able to adapt to every single situation. I try to always adapt, like every single weekend. I mean, the car never feels the same, right? Every track it’s different. So, you have to adapt.”

From 2019, Verstappen became the undisputed number one at Red Bull, whose ultra-prestigious junior programme is yet to find, post-Daniel Ricciardo, a driver who can even get close to him. Pierre Gasly and then Albon both lost their drives after being completely outperformed by Verstappen. Even the experienced Perez is struggling to be as competitive against the Dutchman as Ricciardo was.

But has the Australian’s departure changed anything? Does Verstappen feel his ties with Red Bull have become closer since, given he’s now clearly the main man in the garage? The man himself isn’t convinced that’s the case, and hints it wouldn’t be that easy for Ricciardo to still be matching his current level had the Australian opted to stay.

Ricciardo's departure at the end of 2018 confirmed Verstappen as the undisputed team leader, a position he's held ever since

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“I think I also got better eventually, because I have more and more experience,” Verstappen explains. “So, I find it also difficult to really compare fairly, you know. I find it a bit unfair to say that he was maybe more close, and I think there are a lot of things to it.

“For sure, at the time, Daniel is, you know… he’s still quite a bit older and more experienced, but I think I gained a lot of experience in the last few years, while in the beginning of course I was still quite new and I didn’t really have a lot of car racing experience, because I had one year in F3, basically one year in Toro Rosso and then moved to Red Bull. And I definitely think there the big jump started to happen, which I think is a natural process in the first five years of your F1 career.”

In the last couple of years, there was only one thing missing – a competitive car. And Verstappen finally got it this season. Now it’s time to prove he’s able not only to win races, but to be a genuine title contender until the end of the season.

“It’s a different mindset as well,” says Verstappen of what’s changed since the beginning of the year. “Sometimes you were just going for like an individual race weekend where you knew that you had a chance of winning, whereas now that opportunity is more or less there every single weekend. So your approach to the race is, of course, a little bit different.

“You learn from your mistakes you’ve made, and for sure, in a season like this that helps you a lot to try and of course prevent it from happening. You have to try and be as perfect as you can be in every single department, especially when you are fighting for the championship, you need to have that sorted.

“But I think from our side overall, operationally, we are definitely one of the best out there. That’s, of course, very important. And of course, also, it gives you a lot of confidence as the driver, heading into a race.

“It’s been really, really enjoyable to us. It’s a great group of people to work with. Everyone, I think, wants the same thing, they want to win and they are very motivated and driven. And I’m very happy to be part of that.”

Verstappen took arguably the year's most dominant win in the Styrian GP by over 30 seconds

Photo by: Erik Junius

Last but not least among the factors behind this year’s Red Bull title challenge is Honda. The Japanese manufacturer announced last year that it would be closing its Formula 1 programme at the end of 2021. It would have been logical for Honda to stop developing its power unit, but...

“…they absolutely didn’t!” says Verstappen. “I would say it’s exactly the same. I mean, like before, they’re super committed, they are pushing flat out until the end, new bits arriving, you know, upgrades... Yeah, it’s flat-out.

“They already said that, you know, ‘we are not going to clamp down on development until the last race, we keep on pushing the whole season’. And that’s, of course, amazing. Also because of that, you know, we are where we are right now in the championship. So yeah, it’s really amazing to see that.”

"I have to focus on myself. And I think that’s going very well. And then of course when things happen, it’s easy to judge and say things afterwards. But I think my approach has been very good" Max Verstappen

Of course, there’s pressure. Verstappen is fighting for the title against a seven-time world champion, the most successful F1 driver in history, who knows exactly what it takes to win the title. But to be fair to Verstappen, he’s been almost faultless through the first two-thirds of the season. After retirements in Baku and Silverstone and scoring just two points in Budapest, Verstappen managed to wrest back the lead of the championship going into the autumn and has a six-point advantage heading into this weekend's United States Grand Prix.

PLUS: The six critical factors that could hand F1 2021 glory to Hamilton or Verstappen

Luck hasn’t always been on his side, and one could argue it was Hamilton who’s been getting the rub of the green more often this season. Thanks to red flags at Imola, the Brit got the chance to make amends for his error there, while in the aforementioned Budapest race he escaped the first-corner melee, as his championship rival was left to race with a “half-car” after the restart.

And while you can also add the magic button misfortune in Baku and a pitlane crash during Sochi qualifying to the list of Hamilton’s mistakes, there aren’t many on Verstappen’s card. Does going off-track in Bahrain while passing Hamilton make the cut? What about other track limits infringements, which cost Verstappen pole and a point for the fastest lap in Portugal? When things have gone well, he’s never finished lower than second in the first 15 rounds of the championship.

“It’s still very close and a lot of things can change very quickly,” Verstappen says of the title fight. “I think we’re looking quite good. But every single race weekend it can look a bit different. Sometimes we’re ahead, sometimes behind. It depends on the track layout as well. So I expect a very tight battle till the end.”

Fine margins look set to decide the 2021 title battle between Verstappen and Hamilton

Photo by: Andy Hone - Pool/Getty Images

There is a good chance this year’s title fight will go right down to the wire. Verstappen has already proven he can be consistent, but also aggressive when necessary. His clash with Hamilton at Monza is a prime example – that he’s not going to leave his main rival an extra inch in wheel-to-wheel combat.

Some will say that at Silverstone he could’ve backed off, keeping in mind his lead in the championship. But settling for points in the middle of the summer, with more than half the season left to play out, might also not be the best idea. He may, though, need to think more about it towards the end of the year.

“You know, people can say what they want,” Verstappen says of his critics. “I have to focus on myself. And I think that’s going very well. And then of course when things happen, it’s easy to judge and say things afterwards. But I think my approach has been very good. And I had a lot of also unlucky moments this year where I lost a lot of points.

“So yeah, we race hard, for sure, both of us to each other, but we’re also fighting for a championship, so I think this is a very normal thing. For me, I don’t think a lot has to change. We just have to make sure that we stop losing points. We also have to maximise our own potential. And then, I’m pretty sure we’ll do a good job.”

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Photo by: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images