du du du du max verstappen
Jan. 26th, 2026 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositehighlight reel of quotes from unstoppable: the ultimate biography of max verstappen - mark hughes.
Introduction
Talk to him today and there’s no apparent damage; he’s relaxed and sociable, with a ready smile. The most special part of his personality, the most critical part, is that he is not cowed by anything. He fears no one and reputations mean nothing to him and never have. He’s straight-talking and on track he’s always the dominant one in any tango. But there’s been zero rebellion. Not as far as anyone knows. Just wide-eyed, straightforward, matter-of-fact openness, very characteristically Dutch in that way, taking forward the life and career Jos helped to shape.
//
Sensitive enough to engender a good atmosphere around him but not particularly reflective, Max doesn’t give the impression of devoting much time to contemplation. So the deep psychological questions about his childhood relationship with his father just wouldn’t resonate.
//
He’s a nice guy, a caring guy, a reasonable guy, but not one seemingly troubled by things beyond his immediate orbit. There is always this pull towards equilibrium. Not in the car, obviously.
//
But he is defined within the terms of the sport, and is not the sort of character who will transcend it in the way Lewis Hamilton has or Ayrton Senna did. He’s too straightforward for that, too uninterested in the world outside of racing. Because it’s a world in which he’s never lived. But within the bubble in which he has spent his entire existence, very few in history have ever flown so high.
Chapter 1: Monaco
Two things about Max Verstappen: his competitive zeal is extraordinarily intense, even by the standards of an F1 driver, and he tends to be binary in his assessment of situations—black or white, not grey.
Chapter 2: Father and Son
That Max is every bit as tough as Jos, however, is beyond question, and his aggression can flare, Jos-like, when provoked, both in the car and out. He has better control of his temper than his dad ever did, though. He can usually decouple the instinct from the action.
Chapter 3: The Making of a Champion
It is easy to see how, having reached the pinnacle of the real-life sport, Max found a new obsession where he could strive for excellence, assimilate afresh the requirements needed to dominate. This gives us perhaps more clarity on just where the urge to race in the first place came from. It wasn’t from Jos. There was no rebellion from Max against Jos’ dictates because it was Max who was pushing for it and Max who always wanted more. Max soaked up the knowledge and skill like a sponge as fast as Jos could pour it in, until he had surpassed his father.
‘Some people probably cannot deal with that kind of behaviour,’ said Max in 2021, ‘but I needed it. I was that type of character, probably, who needed this kind of treatment.’
When he’s racing, Max is entirely devoted to the task at hand. When he’s not, he relaxes.
//
He races because that’s what he does, that’s pretty much all of him… Just as reaching the goal of F1 was almost a routine matter; just as winning a grand prix on his debut with Red Bull was too.
Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
[Max’s] recovery drive to victory is a beautiful demonstration of how he can decouple, in an instant, his natural ‘elegant’ driving style from the competitive necessities of the moment when overtaking sometimes demands a more brutal approach. Some of his out-brakes of rivals are far from elegant, but still require incredibly finely-honed skills to be made to work. It’s not only his super-precise sense of where the last possible braking point is (which is very different to the best braking point in terms of the ultimate lap time), but also the subsequent control which invariably rescues the wild moments his manoeuvres have given him. So he can drive with all the flamboyance and apparent wildness in the world when he needs to, but the default is the elegance which enables him to extract the ultimate lap time from a kart or car. And even at 12 years old—and almost certainly from well before then—he can effortlessly, unthinkingly, switch between the two at will.
//
Max clearly had that sublimely sensitive feel almost from the start, incredibly attuned to the messages the car and tyres were giving him in a way that few have ever matched. He didn’t know as much about the technicalities of karts as Jos and never sought to.
Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Max intuitively understands the dynamics and how to make the car go faster, even if not always the technical reasons behind that.
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
But Max had never been overly concerned with others defining for him the realms of the possible.
Chapter 8: Tensions Running High
But when attack and verve were the order of the day, [Max] was truly formidable.
Chapter 9: Heroes and Villains
That’s how it is with Max. Things happen, then it’s in the past. There’s little or no reflection. It’s a quality which takes the poison out of potentially vitriolic situations as he doesn’t seem to hold grudges. Winning is all there is and everything else is subservient to that.
Chapter 13: Irritations vs Rewards
Late in the race, he asked Lambiase what the fastest lap time had been. ‘We’re not concerned about that,’ replied the engineer. ‘Yeah, but I am,’ said Max.
//
As the marketing-led direction of the sport ramps up, it seems Max increasingly struggles to shut off that inbuilt Verstappen impulse to dismiss what he sees as stupid and irrelevant, and it eats into the energy reserves that keep him doing F1. There was a revealing moment in the official press conference that preceded the Miami Grand Prix weekend, after Max was asked a particularly vacuous question, when a look of irritated exasperation flashed across his face, before he then composed himself to give a suitably bland answer. These giveaway micro-expressions seem all of a piece with his growing disenchantment with the sport he has come to dominate. How big those reserves are and how much they are replenished by the rewards are racing are something only he could know—and even he probably doesn’t.
Chapter 1: Monaco
The events of Monaco 2022 are quite illuminating in this regard. They tell us about the complex, delicate relationship between Red Bull and Max and how even though they rely on each other totally for their combined success, in some respects it’s still not a full marriage. They have been partners for many years and enjoyed good times. But there’s still a distance—and it’s put in place by the Verstappens. It’s about control.
//
Verstappen is central to Red Bull: it all revolves around him at an operational and support level, he’s very happy in that role and that brings its own spiralling benefits… But even now that Max and Red Bull were contractually aligned for the foreseeable, it still wasn’t the Ferrari/Schumacher love-in where the joins were almost invisible and not a raised eyebrow of public criticism ever crossed Schumacher’s face. It wasn’t even the slightly less serene but still very close relationship of Mercedes and Hamilton.
//
It just works, [Horner] says. ‘Max feels very comfortable in the environment. There is a belief and a passion and a shared philosophy of how we go racing and I think he enjoys that. He is very loyal and protective of the team.’
//
Red Bull, much more than any corporate automotive team, can wear a little bit of controversy quite comfortably. The Verstappens fit into this ethos well—it’s even possible that Max derives some performance from it. This boy was always going to go racing if he wanted to and had the talent. It’s led to a certain free-spiritedness in his approach, answering only to himself.
//
Perhaps more than any driver on the grid, maybe even more than Fernando Alonso, Verstappen is racing on his own terms. Red Bull’s only intolerance—and it’s a severe one—is lack of performance, which is not something Max has ever had to worry about. He oozes performance, it’s locked into his own DNA, allowing him to be supremely relaxed in doing what he does—which only adds to the performance.
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
It’s tempting to imagine Max awakened the spirit of the rebellious young Marko. The Verstappens were the beneficiaries of his enthusiastic crusade, probably way more than they had anticipated. It made Max’s position far stronger than it would have been at, say, Mercedes or Ferrari. He was much more than just another driver in the Red Bull programme. He was Marko’s pet project.
//
‘He motivates everyone in the team,’ Xevi Pujolar told De Telegraaf. ‘Everyone sees his talent. But also his way of racing. Max is an attacker and that is something that captivates your mind.’
//
Christian Horner: ‘Max can be very demanding and very sharp when emotions are running high. He’s a thoroughbred, very strong-willed, and there’s many an engineer who will wilt under that pressure because Max’s expectation is incredibly high. GP is able to handle that and they each can give as good as they get, so much so that sometimes you forget which is the driver and which is the engineer.’
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
‘Max is a very difficult teammate,’ says Christian Horner, ‘because it must be soul destroying that you are looking at a piece of data and he’s three quarters of a second up the road and you are thinking how the hell has he done that? And it’s not just at one race, it’s at every race. Yet he doesn’t demand number one status, he doesn’t have anything in his contract that stipulates he has to have all the best bits, the newest bits, the developments; he is very fair in that respect, but the team will always gravitate around the driver that has the best chance at the end of the day.’
Chapter 12: Unbeatable
‘Can we do this for many, many, years?’ were Max’s words to his Red Bull teammates as he rode the high of his slow-down victory lap in Abu Dhabi 2021.
Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
Both were disqualified, Max for deliberately forcing Leclerc off the track in retaliation for earlier contact when Leclerc had relieved Max of the lead. Leclerc’s disqualification was for driving Max off the track after the end of the race in a fit of pique.
Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Frits van Amersfoort: ‘An average race driver, normally gets better where he was always good, but forgets where he was weak. And it was the opposite for Max. He knew where he was weak and what he had to work on, and that’s the talent, that’s something you can’t teach. Charles [Leclerc] was exactly the same; from day one they knew what to do.’
//
Atze Kerkhof: ‘With a textbook driving style—aggressive on the brake and very smooth coming off, turning at the right time, you can get within five-tenths [over a lap]. But that last five-tenths is dancing on a very thin line, balancing the car and stepping away from the textbook braking style—it’s still there in the basics but it needs to be adjusted intermittently in millimetres to have a positive effect on the balance. And that’s what [Max] and Charles Leclerc can do better than others.’
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
Max’s old karting adversary Charles Leclerc, now at Ferrari, was setting the tracks alight, especially in qualifying.
//
At Silverstone, the Verstappen-Leclerc dice continued where it had left off in Austria, albeit only for third position this time as Mercedes dominated. Their wheel-to-wheel dice had the crowd cheering wildly and this time it was Leclerc who emerged on top.
Chapter 12: Unbeatable
The Mercedes, driven by Verstappen’s 2021 rival Lewis Hamilton and Hamilton’s new teammate George Russell, were badly afflicted and would no longer be Red Bull’s main competitors. That turned out to be the Ferrari driven by Verstappen’s old karting rival Charles Leclerc.
//
Max’s on-track problem was now Leclerc, who in Bahrain qualified on pole, 0.1 seconds faster, and proceeded to lead the race, with Max in chase… After the first pit stops, Leclerc calmly repelled Max’s three out-braking moves on the Ferrari.
//
In Saudi Arabia, Max at his tenacious best won a brilliant race-long dice with Leclerc…
//
What was noticeable about his thrillingly close dices with Leclerc in both Bahrain and Saudi was that there were none of the ruthless, zero-compromise moves he'd so often used against Hamilton. He denied there was any difference, but others saw it.
Chapter 1: Monaco
Team boss Christian Horner is a skilled operator and understands the delicate dynamic well. His first experience of walking that line came in Red Bull’s first era of title success with Sebastian Vettel who didn’t always react well to any challenge from teammate Mark Webber.
//
‘[Max] can be very sharp and cutting,’ says Horner, ‘when emotions are running high and a lot of engineers would wilt under that strain. He is demanding. The fuse is a little shorter than it was with Seb.’
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
Horner: ‘It’s a quite different relationship to that between Rocky and Seb. Rocky really got into the mind management of how to get Sebastian in the right mental frame whether it was writing things on his balaclava, naming his car, all these little things. It’s a lot less touchy-feely with Max and GP. They are just brutally honest with each other, no holds barred, and in that respect, I think it’s a very pure, very honest, relationship.’
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
Horner: ‘Sebastian was a very deep-thinking person that needed to feel very secure; he was studious in his attention to detail. That’s where he got his security and confidence from. Max in many respects is much more binary, more straightforward. You bolt him in, you know you’re going to get 110 per cent. You know if he feels he isn’t getting 110 per cent back that pisses him off and he is going to voice it. But that is it. He doesn’t carry it out of the car. But then, he is not going to be the guy that is going to be in a debrief for two and a half hours. He is very specific about what he needs from the car in order to go quicker, he has a very good feel for what he does need, for where the limitations are, but he is not going to take 25 minutes talking about a formation lap and the clutch-biting points and temperatures and so on that Sebastian would do even before he got to the debrief. Max is just very focused on this is what I need to go faster, give me that and I will sort the rest out.’
Chapter 11: Long Live the King
Waiting for him by his motorhome was Sebastian Vettel, who said he just wanted to check that Max was okay. It meant a lot.
Chapter 3: The Making of a Champion
[Max is] the ultimate insider. When Lewis Hamilton, maybe the ultimate outsider, made his F1 debut in Australia 2007, as he climbed from the car he caught his father’s eye and they celebrated. ‘We’ve done it! We’ve bloody done it!’ they said as they hugged and laughed, having pulled off something that had seemed so extraordinarily remote when they started, so impossible. It’s not a scene which would probably have much resonated with the Verstappens. Max is a way less complex character than rival Hamilton. But then he’s bound to be. He’s had a way less complex set of circumstances to grow up in and a far more certain path to achieving his ambitions.
Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
Giancarlo Tinini: ‘Also, he has the same competitive instinct as another of our old drivers, Lewis Hamilton, someone who had to be first in everything, even if it was going down the stairs or drinking a hot chocolate!’
Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Jenson Button: ‘Lewis [Hamilton] can drive with pretty much any balance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He can seem to be struggling but when the moment comes he can just pull the big lap out of the bag regardless of the balance. But Max does seem to be at his absolute fastest with a very unstable car. I think he can get even more from such a car than Lewis. but maybe Lewis’ spread is wider, I don’t know. It’s very close.’
Chapter 6: Fast Track to Formula 3
Tony Shaw: ‘But [Lewis] just took the thing by the scruff of the neck in a very limited around of time. He didn’t mess around, Lewis. He just went hell-for-leather straightaway. Whereas the test with Max, it felt a lot calmer… What they had in common as young teenagers is that they were both bloody quick and totally unfazed to be in a racing car.’
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
[Max] was asked there [at Austin] if he considered Lewis Hamilton—on the verge of sealing his third world championship—the best driver in F1 and replied, ‘I don’t know. Give me his car and I will tell you.’
Chapter 8: Tensions Running High
As they started for the third time, Max was immediately stalking his prey Rosberg…
Ahead now was Hamilton, who was displaying much the same virtuosity as Max but in a faster car.
//
‘I could have closed that door, obviously,’ said Hamilton to Max in the cool-down room before the podium celebrations.
‘But you were fighting for a championship,’ Max finished off.
‘Yeah, I didn’t want to risk it,’ said Hamilton.
That conversation summarised the basic dynamics of the race but the bold way Verstappen had made his move clearly registered with Hamilton, as he referred to it a week later after winning the Japanese Grand Prix with Max right on his tail…. It sounded for all the world like Max had got into his head.
Chapter 9: Heroes and Villains
Verstappen had pricked [Lewis’] attention in Malaysia the previous year and the tension was only building. Max was surely fully aware of the significance of how he chose to race Hamilton.
//
It was a brilliant win by Ricciardo but perhaps more significantly, an extraordinary little vignette of the pride of the pack and the young challenger whose thrusting energy had been de-railed by a cynical slap down. Was Hamilton surprised that Max had tried there? ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not ever seen anyone pass anyone there, certainly not a top driver. I’m surprised he tried it.’ Leaving unsaid that Lewis himself had invited it.
//
Verstappen refused to surrender and the wheel-to-wheel dive lasted for the next few corners until Hamilton used the run-off on the exit of Turn 18, effectively surrendering rather than risk contact and a non-finish.
‘I thought you gave me a lot of room,’ said an amused Verstappen later. ‘Yeah,’ said Hamilton, ‘I never know with you. I didn’t want a coming together…’
//
Hamilton seemed to be offering advice, saying, ‘Yeah, but he had nothing to lose. You did.’ It was an expression of the different stages they were at in their careers, Hamilton talking from the perspective of someone who’d been annealed by years of success and was able to take a strategic view, Max still with it all to do and bursting with unfulfilled ambition.
But Max’s charging, uncompromising style continued to make Hamilton wary of him on track.
//
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
‘I braked into Turn 1 and all of a sudden Max is alongside me. If you’ve seen races before, I always leave Max a lot of space—it’s the smartest thing you can do. But there wasn’t a lot of space for me to give him…’
Max was still clearly very much in Hamilton’s head. Whenever he was around, Hamilton was not racing naturally.
Chapter 11: Long Live the King
The principle of entropy always prevails, though, as the energy dissipates and the names made by success are coaxed away by rivals; a steady erosion of the advantage over the team in the ascendant, in this case Red Bull. If we’re lucky, there will be a season or two of overlap where the titans go at it; if we’re really lucky, the generational shift of the teams will play out between the king and the pretender in the cockpits. So it was in 2021…
//
It was a season which cast the two combatants in elemental roles, accentuating the contrasts in their make-up. Hamilton is more emotionally driven, has worked hard through his racing life to put a lid on the cauldron and to direct his feelings. His competitive self—the intimidating warrior—is quite separate from his persona outside the car, which is a sometimes vulnerable, questing one, wrestling with the big questions. Then there’s the showman within him, the guy who will crowd-surf at Silverstone or do smoking burnouts on his motorbike in the car park for the fans at Monza, the fashionista, the musician. He’s all these things and more. The social justice and race equality campaigner, the LA scene face who mixes in Hollywood circles, and still, sometimes, in off-guard moments, the boy from the Stevenage council.
In Hamilton, you can sense the immense pride at having achieved against the odds. There’s a keen antenna for criticism, which he’s had to work hard at concealing. When the pride is pricked, he’ll fire back with steely conviction, the underlying intensity of his self-belief seeming to ooze from his being. There’s also a need for recognition, though, for external validation. This is someone who still carries the scars of having forced his way into a sport that looked unattainable for reasons of both finance and race, and who hasn’t forgotten what it felt like to be fearful that it could all be taken away.
For Max – someone who was injected direct into the veins of F1 – it's much simpler. He's a lighter, sunnier, less complex personality. Neither criticism nor praise appears to make the slightest impression. He really isn't interested in validation and has what appears to be almost a disdain for his success, like it has always been, for him, his destiny. It isn't so much carried with arrogance as just matter-of-fact realism, hardly something even worth pondering. There are just the realities of what he is facing at any given race weekend.
//
Although Verstappen and Hamilton are near-neighbours in Monaco, the chances of them hanging out are close to zero, not because of any animosity—they are neither of them poisonous characters—but simply because their wavelengths do not resonate in either frequency or amplitude. The only time that happens is on the track.
//
In 2021, Hamilton and Verstappen were the two greatest racing drivers on the planet. One of them had been around long enough for that reality to be converted into career numbers and had almost forgotten what it was like to lose, even though he knew it would come one day. The other had been stared of that winning feeling for too long, had been waiting years for this opportunity of racing where he knew he belonged—at the very front, all the time, fearless and ready to battle all-comers, but especially the man with all the titles and plaudits.
//
The bigger point had been made at the first corner by Verstappen: he would continue to race in the same merciless way he’d always done, and Hamilton would have to tailor his approach accordingly. Hamilton, who had several times over the previous three years admitted that he didn’t really know how to handle Verstappen’s aggressive style wheel-to-wheel and would instead just give him room, had evidently realised that was a policy he could no longer afford.
//
It was an unsettling thing for Hamilton: the spotlight was now on how he, with the pride of being multiple world champion, was going to handle this seemingly unstoppable force. It was all part of the Max effect.
//
Verstappen raced that corner exactly as he’s always raced. What was different was Hamilton’s refusal to accept that.
//
On being asked if he thought he made Hamilton nervous, [Max] replied, ‘He would never admit that. At least I’m not afraid of him. Yeah, I think I’ll make him nervous if he sees me in his mirrors. He’s a different driver than me, less aggressive. He doesn’t know how to race like I do.’
Chapter 12: Unbeatable
Giedo van der Garde: ‘I think now Lewis has a lot of respect for Max and Max now has more respect for Lewis. When they are together there is a bit of a tension, the energy between them is sometimes too high and I think that is why they crash.’
//
‘It wouldn’t have mattered anything for my race, because we were just way too slow. But it’s just a shame, I thought we could race quite well together, but clearly the intention was not there to race.’
‘You know how it is with Max,’ countered Hamilton. Clearly, their uncompromising attitude towards each other when their cars were competitive was still there, one year on.
MAX INTERIORITY STUDIES
Introduction
Talk to him today and there’s no apparent damage; he’s relaxed and sociable, with a ready smile. The most special part of his personality, the most critical part, is that he is not cowed by anything. He fears no one and reputations mean nothing to him and never have. He’s straight-talking and on track he’s always the dominant one in any tango. But there’s been zero rebellion. Not as far as anyone knows. Just wide-eyed, straightforward, matter-of-fact openness, very characteristically Dutch in that way, taking forward the life and career Jos helped to shape.
//
Sensitive enough to engender a good atmosphere around him but not particularly reflective, Max doesn’t give the impression of devoting much time to contemplation. So the deep psychological questions about his childhood relationship with his father just wouldn’t resonate.
//
He’s a nice guy, a caring guy, a reasonable guy, but not one seemingly troubled by things beyond his immediate orbit. There is always this pull towards equilibrium. Not in the car, obviously.
//
But he is defined within the terms of the sport, and is not the sort of character who will transcend it in the way Lewis Hamilton has or Ayrton Senna did. He’s too straightforward for that, too uninterested in the world outside of racing. Because it’s a world in which he’s never lived. But within the bubble in which he has spent his entire existence, very few in history have ever flown so high.
Chapter 1: Monaco
Two things about Max Verstappen: his competitive zeal is extraordinarily intense, even by the standards of an F1 driver, and he tends to be binary in his assessment of situations—black or white, not grey.
Chapter 2: Father and Son
That Max is every bit as tough as Jos, however, is beyond question, and his aggression can flare, Jos-like, when provoked, both in the car and out. He has better control of his temper than his dad ever did, though. He can usually decouple the instinct from the action.
Chapter 3: The Making of a Champion
It is easy to see how, having reached the pinnacle of the real-life sport, Max found a new obsession where he could strive for excellence, assimilate afresh the requirements needed to dominate. This gives us perhaps more clarity on just where the urge to race in the first place came from. It wasn’t from Jos. There was no rebellion from Max against Jos’ dictates because it was Max who was pushing for it and Max who always wanted more. Max soaked up the knowledge and skill like a sponge as fast as Jos could pour it in, until he had surpassed his father.
- i reckon a bit of a nature/nurture chicken-egg situation here tbh
‘Some people probably cannot deal with that kind of behaviour,’ said Max in 2021, ‘but I needed it. I was that type of character, probably, who needed this kind of treatment.’
- macks……………………………………………. me in hell: Where is jos verstappen
When he’s racing, Max is entirely devoted to the task at hand. When he’s not, he relaxes.
//
He races because that’s what he does, that’s pretty much all of him… Just as reaching the goal of F1 was almost a routine matter; just as winning a grand prix on his debut with Red Bull was too.
Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
[Max’s] recovery drive to victory is a beautiful demonstration of how he can decouple, in an instant, his natural ‘elegant’ driving style from the competitive necessities of the moment when overtaking sometimes demands a more brutal approach. Some of his out-brakes of rivals are far from elegant, but still require incredibly finely-honed skills to be made to work. It’s not only his super-precise sense of where the last possible braking point is (which is very different to the best braking point in terms of the ultimate lap time), but also the subsequent control which invariably rescues the wild moments his manoeuvres have given him. So he can drive with all the flamboyance and apparent wildness in the world when he needs to, but the default is the elegance which enables him to extract the ultimate lap time from a kart or car. And even at 12 years old—and almost certainly from well before then—he can effortlessly, unthinkingly, switch between the two at will.
//
Max clearly had that sublimely sensitive feel almost from the start, incredibly attuned to the messages the car and tyres were giving him in a way that few have ever matched. He didn’t know as much about the technicalities of karts as Jos and never sought to.
Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Max intuitively understands the dynamics and how to make the car go faster, even if not always the technical reasons behind that.
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
But Max had never been overly concerned with others defining for him the realms of the possible.
Chapter 8: Tensions Running High
But when attack and verve were the order of the day, [Max] was truly formidable.
Chapter 9: Heroes and Villains
That’s how it is with Max. Things happen, then it’s in the past. There’s little or no reflection. It’s a quality which takes the poison out of potentially vitriolic situations as he doesn’t seem to hold grudges. Winning is all there is and everything else is subservient to that.
Chapter 13: Irritations vs Rewards
Late in the race, he asked Lambiase what the fastest lap time had been. ‘We’re not concerned about that,’ replied the engineer. ‘Yeah, but I am,’ said Max.
//
As the marketing-led direction of the sport ramps up, it seems Max increasingly struggles to shut off that inbuilt Verstappen impulse to dismiss what he sees as stupid and irrelevant, and it eats into the energy reserves that keep him doing F1. There was a revealing moment in the official press conference that preceded the Miami Grand Prix weekend, after Max was asked a particularly vacuous question, when a look of irritated exasperation flashed across his face, before he then composed himself to give a suitably bland answer. These giveaway micro-expressions seem all of a piece with his growing disenchantment with the sport he has come to dominate. How big those reserves are and how much they are replenished by the rewards are racing are something only he could know—and even he probably doesn’t.
RED BULL’S GOLDEN CHILD SOLDIER
Chapter 1: Monaco
The events of Monaco 2022 are quite illuminating in this regard. They tell us about the complex, delicate relationship between Red Bull and Max and how even though they rely on each other totally for their combined success, in some respects it’s still not a full marriage. They have been partners for many years and enjoyed good times. But there’s still a distance—and it’s put in place by the Verstappens. It’s about control.
//
Verstappen is central to Red Bull: it all revolves around him at an operational and support level, he’s very happy in that role and that brings its own spiralling benefits… But even now that Max and Red Bull were contractually aligned for the foreseeable, it still wasn’t the Ferrari/Schumacher love-in where the joins were almost invisible and not a raised eyebrow of public criticism ever crossed Schumacher’s face. It wasn’t even the slightly less serene but still very close relationship of Mercedes and Hamilton.
//
It just works, [Horner] says. ‘Max feels very comfortable in the environment. There is a belief and a passion and a shared philosophy of how we go racing and I think he enjoys that. He is very loyal and protective of the team.’
//
Red Bull, much more than any corporate automotive team, can wear a little bit of controversy quite comfortably. The Verstappens fit into this ethos well—it’s even possible that Max derives some performance from it. This boy was always going to go racing if he wanted to and had the talent. It’s led to a certain free-spiritedness in his approach, answering only to himself.
//
Perhaps more than any driver on the grid, maybe even more than Fernando Alonso, Verstappen is racing on his own terms. Red Bull’s only intolerance—and it’s a severe one—is lack of performance, which is not something Max has ever had to worry about. He oozes performance, it’s locked into his own DNA, allowing him to be supremely relaxed in doing what he does—which only adds to the performance.
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
It’s tempting to imagine Max awakened the spirit of the rebellious young Marko. The Verstappens were the beneficiaries of his enthusiastic crusade, probably way more than they had anticipated. It made Max’s position far stronger than it would have been at, say, Mercedes or Ferrari. He was much more than just another driver in the Red Bull programme. He was Marko’s pet project.
//
‘He motivates everyone in the team,’ Xevi Pujolar told De Telegraaf. ‘Everyone sees his talent. But also his way of racing. Max is an attacker and that is something that captivates your mind.’
//
Christian Horner: ‘Max can be very demanding and very sharp when emotions are running high. He’s a thoroughbred, very strong-willed, and there’s many an engineer who will wilt under that pressure because Max’s expectation is incredibly high. GP is able to handle that and they each can give as good as they get, so much so that sometimes you forget which is the driver and which is the engineer.’
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
‘Max is a very difficult teammate,’ says Christian Horner, ‘because it must be soul destroying that you are looking at a piece of data and he’s three quarters of a second up the road and you are thinking how the hell has he done that? And it’s not just at one race, it’s at every race. Yet he doesn’t demand number one status, he doesn’t have anything in his contract that stipulates he has to have all the best bits, the newest bits, the developments; he is very fair in that respect, but the team will always gravitate around the driver that has the best chance at the end of the day.’
Chapter 12: Unbeatable
‘Can we do this for many, many, years?’ were Max’s words to his Red Bull teammates as he rode the high of his slow-down victory lap in Abu Dhabi 2021.
DRAGON & PHOENIX
sure i'm just visually doing ctrl-f to leclerc but why else am i reading sports nonfiction if not to improve my yaoi scholarship.Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
Both were disqualified, Max for deliberately forcing Leclerc off the track in retaliation for earlier contact when Leclerc had relieved Max of the lead. Leclerc’s disqualification was for driving Max off the track after the end of the race in a fit of pique.
- “a fit of pique” is soooooo cute
Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Frits van Amersfoort: ‘An average race driver, normally gets better where he was always good, but forgets where he was weak. And it was the opposite for Max. He knew where he was weak and what he had to work on, and that’s the talent, that’s something you can’t teach. Charles [Leclerc] was exactly the same; from day one they knew what to do.’
//
Atze Kerkhof: ‘With a textbook driving style—aggressive on the brake and very smooth coming off, turning at the right time, you can get within five-tenths [over a lap]. But that last five-tenths is dancing on a very thin line, balancing the car and stepping away from the textbook braking style—it’s still there in the basics but it needs to be adjusted intermittently in millimetres to have a positive effect on the balance. And that’s what [Max] and Charles Leclerc can do better than others.’
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
Max’s old karting adversary Charles Leclerc, now at Ferrari, was setting the tracks alight, especially in qualifying.
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At Silverstone, the Verstappen-Leclerc dice continued where it had left off in Austria, albeit only for third position this time as Mercedes dominated. Their wheel-to-wheel dice had the crowd cheering wildly and this time it was Leclerc who emerged on top.
Chapter 12: Unbeatable
The Mercedes, driven by Verstappen’s 2021 rival Lewis Hamilton and Hamilton’s new teammate George Russell, were badly afflicted and would no longer be Red Bull’s main competitors. That turned out to be the Ferrari driven by Verstappen’s old karting rival Charles Leclerc.
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Max’s on-track problem was now Leclerc, who in Bahrain qualified on pole, 0.1 seconds faster, and proceeded to lead the race, with Max in chase… After the first pit stops, Leclerc calmly repelled Max’s three out-braking moves on the Ferrari.
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In Saudi Arabia, Max at his tenacious best won a brilliant race-long dice with Leclerc…
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What was noticeable about his thrillingly close dices with Leclerc in both Bahrain and Saudi was that there were none of the ruthless, zero-compromise moves he'd so often used against Hamilton. He denied there was any difference, but others saw it.
- WHO ELSE SMILEDDDDD... max races charles more respectfully than he races other people it's trueeee
THE TWO BULLS IN THE RED BULL LOGO IN QUESTION
Chapter 1: Monaco
Team boss Christian Horner is a skilled operator and understands the delicate dynamic well. His first experience of walking that line came in Red Bull’s first era of title success with Sebastian Vettel who didn’t always react well to any challenge from teammate Mark Webber.
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‘[Max] can be very sharp and cutting,’ says Horner, ‘when emotions are running high and a lot of engineers would wilt under that strain. He is demanding. The fuse is a little shorter than it was with Seb.’
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
Horner: ‘It’s a quite different relationship to that between Rocky and Seb. Rocky really got into the mind management of how to get Sebastian in the right mental frame whether it was writing things on his balaclava, naming his car, all these little things. It’s a lot less touchy-feely with Max and GP. They are just brutally honest with each other, no holds barred, and in that respect, I think it’s a very pure, very honest, relationship.’
Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
Horner: ‘Sebastian was a very deep-thinking person that needed to feel very secure; he was studious in his attention to detail. That’s where he got his security and confidence from. Max in many respects is much more binary, more straightforward. You bolt him in, you know you’re going to get 110 per cent. You know if he feels he isn’t getting 110 per cent back that pisses him off and he is going to voice it. But that is it. He doesn’t carry it out of the car. But then, he is not going to be the guy that is going to be in a debrief for two and a half hours. He is very specific about what he needs from the car in order to go quicker, he has a very good feel for what he does need, for where the limitations are, but he is not going to take 25 minutes talking about a formation lap and the clutch-biting points and temperatures and so on that Sebastian would do even before he got to the debrief. Max is just very focused on this is what I need to go faster, give me that and I will sort the rest out.’
Chapter 11: Long Live the King
Waiting for him by his motorhome was Sebastian Vettel, who said he just wanted to check that Max was okay. It meant a lot.
GOAT4GOAT
Chapter 3: The Making of a Champion
[Max is] the ultimate insider. When Lewis Hamilton, maybe the ultimate outsider, made his F1 debut in Australia 2007, as he climbed from the car he caught his father’s eye and they celebrated. ‘We’ve done it! We’ve bloody done it!’ they said as they hugged and laughed, having pulled off something that had seemed so extraordinarily remote when they started, so impossible. It’s not a scene which would probably have much resonated with the Verstappens. Max is a way less complex character than rival Hamilton. But then he’s bound to be. He’s had a way less complex set of circumstances to grow up in and a far more certain path to achieving his ambitions.
Chapter 4: Disrupting the Hierarchy
Giancarlo Tinini: ‘Also, he has the same competitive instinct as another of our old drivers, Lewis Hamilton, someone who had to be first in everything, even if it was going down the stairs or drinking a hot chocolate!’
Chapter 5: Man and Machine
Jenson Button: ‘Lewis [Hamilton] can drive with pretty much any balance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He can seem to be struggling but when the moment comes he can just pull the big lap out of the bag regardless of the balance. But Max does seem to be at his absolute fastest with a very unstable car. I think he can get even more from such a car than Lewis. but maybe Lewis’ spread is wider, I don’t know. It’s very close.’
Chapter 6: Fast Track to Formula 3
Tony Shaw: ‘But [Lewis] just took the thing by the scruff of the neck in a very limited around of time. He didn’t mess around, Lewis. He just went hell-for-leather straightaway. Whereas the test with Max, it felt a lot calmer… What they had in common as young teenagers is that they were both bloody quick and totally unfazed to be in a racing car.’
Chapter 7: From Rookie to Record Breaker
[Max] was asked there [at Austin] if he considered Lewis Hamilton—on the verge of sealing his third world championship—the best driver in F1 and replied, ‘I don’t know. Give me his car and I will tell you.’
Chapter 8: Tensions Running High
As they started for the third time, Max was immediately stalking his prey Rosberg…
- re Brazil 2016, didn’t want to create a whole new section for 336 but enjoyed how this was phrased lol
Ahead now was Hamilton, who was displaying much the same virtuosity as Max but in a faster car.
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‘I could have closed that door, obviously,’ said Hamilton to Max in the cool-down room before the podium celebrations.
‘But you were fighting for a championship,’ Max finished off.
‘Yeah, I didn’t want to risk it,’ said Hamilton.
That conversation summarised the basic dynamics of the race but the bold way Verstappen had made his move clearly registered with Hamilton, as he referred to it a week later after winning the Japanese Grand Prix with Max right on his tail…. It sounded for all the world like Max had got into his head.
Chapter 9: Heroes and Villains
Verstappen had pricked [Lewis’] attention in Malaysia the previous year and the tension was only building. Max was surely fully aware of the significance of how he chose to race Hamilton.
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It was a brilliant win by Ricciardo but perhaps more significantly, an extraordinary little vignette of the pride of the pack and the young challenger whose thrusting energy had been de-railed by a cynical slap down. Was Hamilton surprised that Max had tried there? ‘Yeah,’ he replied. ‘I’ve not ever seen anyone pass anyone there, certainly not a top driver. I’m surprised he tried it.’ Leaving unsaid that Lewis himself had invited it.
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Verstappen refused to surrender and the wheel-to-wheel dive lasted for the next few corners until Hamilton used the run-off on the exit of Turn 18, effectively surrendering rather than risk contact and a non-finish.
‘I thought you gave me a lot of room,’ said an amused Verstappen later. ‘Yeah,’ said Hamilton, ‘I never know with you. I didn’t want a coming together…’
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Hamilton seemed to be offering advice, saying, ‘Yeah, but he had nothing to lose. You did.’ It was an expression of the different stages they were at in their careers, Hamilton talking from the perspective of someone who’d been annealed by years of success and was able to take a strategic view, Max still with it all to do and bursting with unfulfilled ambition.
But Max’s charging, uncompromising style continued to make Hamilton wary of him on track.
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Chapter 10: All that was Needed was the Car
‘I braked into Turn 1 and all of a sudden Max is alongside me. If you’ve seen races before, I always leave Max a lot of space—it’s the smartest thing you can do. But there wasn’t a lot of space for me to give him…’
Max was still clearly very much in Hamilton’s head. Whenever he was around, Hamilton was not racing naturally.
Chapter 11: Long Live the King
The principle of entropy always prevails, though, as the energy dissipates and the names made by success are coaxed away by rivals; a steady erosion of the advantage over the team in the ascendant, in this case Red Bull. If we’re lucky, there will be a season or two of overlap where the titans go at it; if we’re really lucky, the generational shift of the teams will play out between the king and the pretender in the cockpits. So it was in 2021…
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It was a season which cast the two combatants in elemental roles, accentuating the contrasts in their make-up. Hamilton is more emotionally driven, has worked hard through his racing life to put a lid on the cauldron and to direct his feelings. His competitive self—the intimidating warrior—is quite separate from his persona outside the car, which is a sometimes vulnerable, questing one, wrestling with the big questions. Then there’s the showman within him, the guy who will crowd-surf at Silverstone or do smoking burnouts on his motorbike in the car park for the fans at Monza, the fashionista, the musician. He’s all these things and more. The social justice and race equality campaigner, the LA scene face who mixes in Hollywood circles, and still, sometimes, in off-guard moments, the boy from the Stevenage council.
In Hamilton, you can sense the immense pride at having achieved against the odds. There’s a keen antenna for criticism, which he’s had to work hard at concealing. When the pride is pricked, he’ll fire back with steely conviction, the underlying intensity of his self-belief seeming to ooze from his being. There’s also a need for recognition, though, for external validation. This is someone who still carries the scars of having forced his way into a sport that looked unattainable for reasons of both finance and race, and who hasn’t forgotten what it felt like to be fearful that it could all be taken away.
For Max – someone who was injected direct into the veins of F1 – it's much simpler. He's a lighter, sunnier, less complex personality. Neither criticism nor praise appears to make the slightest impression. He really isn't interested in validation and has what appears to be almost a disdain for his success, like it has always been, for him, his destiny. It isn't so much carried with arrogance as just matter-of-fact realism, hardly something even worth pondering. There are just the realities of what he is facing at any given race weekend.
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Although Verstappen and Hamilton are near-neighbours in Monaco, the chances of them hanging out are close to zero, not because of any animosity—they are neither of them poisonous characters—but simply because their wavelengths do not resonate in either frequency or amplitude. The only time that happens is on the track.
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In 2021, Hamilton and Verstappen were the two greatest racing drivers on the planet. One of them had been around long enough for that reality to be converted into career numbers and had almost forgotten what it was like to lose, even though he knew it would come one day. The other had been stared of that winning feeling for too long, had been waiting years for this opportunity of racing where he knew he belonged—at the very front, all the time, fearless and ready to battle all-comers, but especially the man with all the titles and plaudits.
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The bigger point had been made at the first corner by Verstappen: he would continue to race in the same merciless way he’d always done, and Hamilton would have to tailor his approach accordingly. Hamilton, who had several times over the previous three years admitted that he didn’t really know how to handle Verstappen’s aggressive style wheel-to-wheel and would instead just give him room, had evidently realised that was a policy he could no longer afford.
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It was an unsettling thing for Hamilton: the spotlight was now on how he, with the pride of being multiple world champion, was going to handle this seemingly unstoppable force. It was all part of the Max effect.
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Verstappen raced that corner exactly as he’s always raced. What was different was Hamilton’s refusal to accept that.
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On being asked if he thought he made Hamilton nervous, [Max] replied, ‘He would never admit that. At least I’m not afraid of him. Yeah, I think I’ll make him nervous if he sees me in his mirrors. He’s a different driver than me, less aggressive. He doesn’t know how to race like I do.’
Chapter 12: Unbeatable
Giedo van der Garde: ‘I think now Lewis has a lot of respect for Max and Max now has more respect for Lewis. When they are together there is a bit of a tension, the energy between them is sometimes too high and I think that is why they crash.’
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‘It wouldn’t have mattered anything for my race, because we were just way too slow. But it’s just a shame, I thought we could race quite well together, but clearly the intention was not there to race.’
‘You know how it is with Max,’ countered Hamilton. Clearly, their uncompromising attitude towards each other when their cars were competitive was still there, one year on.
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Date: 2026-01-27 02:48 am (UTC)