It’s just like buses. We wait forever it seems for an truly memorable happening in an F1 race, then two come along in the same afternoon.
You’ll be well aware of Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton and their contretemps in the Spanish Grand Prix just passed. As at least one person mused during the race, whatever happens next the image of the two broken and beached Mercedes buried in the Barcelona sand trap will likely become a defining image of the intra-Merc rivalry and perhaps of the season as a whole too. But even so the other seismic occurrence we got in the Spanish race will likely have much longer lingering reverberations.
You’ll also by now be well used to eulogies of the eventual winner Max Verstappen. As well as will have heard that he’s 18 years old.
And in his Montmelo triumph he didn’t so much shave the record for F1’s youngest winner as bore a large excavation underneath it. Previous record-holder Sebastian Vettel was just past his 21st birthday when he won in Monza’s rain back in 2008; Verstappen has beaten that by around two and a half years, or to put it another way he’s taken some 10% plus off the mark. It’s a record likely to stand forever too given that in an amusing vignette the FIA decided to set a minimum age requirement in response to Max’s F1 bow. Somehow only the FIA could be inactive on scores of pressing matters but successfully get a rule through forbidding one of the few very good things recently about F1…
We knew already about Verstappen’s extreme speed, skill and willingness to race. But, highly diverting though those are, what really impresses is that in addition he’s good at things that 18 year olds really shouldn’t be good at. Things like brain power, poise, adaptability… Ironically indeed his Dad Jos never got beyond the fast but brainless state; Max I’m told says he takes after his mother instead.
What really impresses [about Verstappen] is that he’s good at things that 18 year olds really shouldn’t be good at. Things like brain power, poise, adaptability…
We saw most of his repertoire in his Montmelo win. Not the slightest hint of error while under threat and having to eke out tyre life for a marathon 32 laps. His team was particularly impressed with him showing the characteristic all the truly great seem to have, of bags of spare mental capacity with which to strategise even when piloting an F1 car. His calm in the late laps, asking on the radio for the team to remind Charlie Whiting of the importance of blue flags, was extraordinary. “There was no agitation in his voice, no panic, no tension” said his admiring boss Christian Horner. “It was a young man who was completely in control of what he’s doing.”
Yes you can point to that he qualified a clear four tenths off his team mate. That the cards of race strategy fell his way, to the point that some murmured that his Red Bull team might have, um, loaded the deck in his personal favour.
But still his performance was magnificent and perhaps its greatest attribute is that it somehow felt unsurprising, just the latest level of challenge he’s swept aside on his seemingly inexorable upward trajectory.
Remember too the fuss and attention around his getting the Red Bull A team gig in the first place. Remember too how we used to say in the modern age of testing restrictions drivers hopping into an unfamiliar machine mid-season were on a hiding to nothing. See Giancarlo Fisichella in 2009. On neither count would you have known it from Max’s demeanour or his driving.
He clearly learns and quickly. Last year in his freshman campaign there were occasional signs of his inexperience – inevitable for one with just a year of car racing to draw on – particularly early in the year. He didn’t always prepare his tyres well for a qualifying lap; there was some race-to-race inconsistency. There were some maddening errors also, such as throwing it off at Silverstone and ignoring yellows in Abu Dhabi. Yet those seem almost entirely gone now. We can point to a scrappy run in Melbourne this year where he argued with his team about pit strategy and getting past his team mate Carlos Sainz (which in turn followed from him refusing team orders in Singapore last year), and he managed to collide with his team mate later on too. But that sort of race hasn’t been repeated. As for the arguments? Well, ultimately no one’s going to object to a determined and self-assertive racer. Not really anyway.
[Verstappen's] performance was magnificent and perhaps its greatest attribute is that it somehow felt unsurprising, just the latest level of challenge he’s swept aside on his seemingly inexorable upward trajectory.
In an under-rated skill he’s versatile with him undertaking many strong stints on unfavoured tyre compounds (indeed his strong pace on medium tyres went a long way to setting up his Barcelona win). He even seems to have taken the sport’s technical aspect in his stride.
Out of the car too Max has always looked just the ticket. Never has there been the tiniest trace of a gauche and uncertain youth, instead he was utterly unfazed right from his debut Thursday press conference in Melbourne. He maintained this as a few rounds later he faced the inevitable attempt in F1 to bring bright young talent down a peg or two after his collision with Romain Grosjean in Monaco. His response to those seeking (unfairly) to round on him could not have been more resolute, including in the Montreal official drivers’ press conference fixing his eyes firmly ahead and reminding us that the fellow pilot in the room who was leading the critical charge isn’t averse to crashing himself. There clearly is steel with the talent. His actions in and out of the car in Barcelona last time out again seemed mere continuation, that whatever is the ever-higher barrier before him he responds superbly to it.
Of course many have looked ahead, wondered what lays next for him. Most things seem possible. I’ve even stumbled across the odd suggestion that Michael Schumacher’s totemic marks may be under threat. Such thoughts are way premature though. If nothing else, without intending any disrespect to the great man, Schumi’s success was an outlying occurrence in which lots of things came together in his favour, not all of which was within his direct control. There’s not near a guarantee that Max will get similar.
A certain Fernando Alonso, a man who knows more than most about how early statistical momentum can be checked, reminded us of this in recent weeks in an interview with Pino Allievi in Gazzetta dello Sport. “Certainly I could have signed for Red Bull when it was just an energy drink” he said looking back at the infamous forks in his career road. “No-one has a crystal ball. Since I left them Renault hasn’t won again, I left McLaren and apart from the success of Hamilton the following year they haven’t won again either. And Ferrari hasn’t won a title yet.
“There are cycles in sport and today if you want to win you need to be driving a Mercedes.”
Allievi described the Spaniard as a ‘prisoner of his choices’, and to an extent it’s true. After all as has been pointed out had he managed his relationship with McLaren in 2007 a little better then four consecutive titles could have been his. But as Alonso outlines after that the main matters stopping him adding to his title count have been outside of his control – Red Bull dominating for years then Mercedes doing the same. Granted as he acknowledges he did have an opportunity to join the Bulls “when it was just an energy drink” (for 2008, for what it’s worth) and had he done so it would have required positive effort not to win more titles, but as he noted too he would have needed to have been a clairvoyant to know then the success that awaited the team. Let us not forget too that in late 2012 when Lewis announced he was off to Merc most of us thought he’d flipped his lid. The general point is being in the right place at the right time isn’t always easy, and none of us knows what lays ahead for Max or anyone else. So in terms of what Max ends up achieving we may as well just sit back and enjoy it.
In F1 history we have never had anyone this good this young as is the case with Max now, what might happen next quite simply is uncharted.
But it’s also undeniable that given in F1 history we have never had anyone this good this young as is the case with Max now (or at the very least, if they were this good they weren’t yet in F1 in order to prove as much) what might happen next quite simply is uncharted. While of course too, he has time on his side.
And he seems in a good place to get his success, with the team he’s just committed himself to until 2019. I like a lot of people had assumed that Red Bull would be a Benetton for the new age. A company not in F1 as its raison d'être, who’d have a lot of success but only in a short period and would not be in the sport for the long haul. More specifically just like Benetton post 1995 it would unravel after losing its key figures. Losing interest, finding after titles won a law of diminishing returns from its big investment. For Brawn, Byrne, Schumacher et al then, see Newey, Prodromou, Vettel and others for the Bulls more recently. Remember more generally how we used to assert that Red Bull was little more than an Adrian Newey front operation. Heck even Ferrari suffered when that Benetton crowd among others left the Scuderia in the mid noughties. Arguably it’s never recovered.
But with Red Bull, not a bit of it. Somehow with a few of the heads from the phoenix cut off the phoenix has continued to rise. Somehow the DNA lives on. As, perhaps most remarkably of all, does the motivation.
It lives on more than we might think too. An Autosport analysis published after the Spanish race, combining trackside views with GPS data, had the RB12 as “definitely the best chassis on the grid now…peerless under braking, super-stable at high-speed and particularly strong at entering and transitioning through the slow stuff.”
It’s worth reflecting too that were we in some parallel universe where Renault had done about as good a job as Mercedes on the power unit the probability is that Red Bull would have continued to fight for regular wins and championships, aside that is from the early part of last season when it fell away even on the chassis, in part due to struggle to adapt to revised nose and skid block regulations which meant it couldn’t run its famous rake of before. Astonishing to think, all told.
With Red Bull, somehow with a few of the heads from the phoenix cut off the phoenix has continued to rise. Somehow the DNA lives on. As, perhaps most remarkably of all, does the motivation.
And there’s been a distinct sense of a pulse at Red Bull recently. The team’s aero head Dan Fallows had this to say at the car’s 2016 launch: “I’ve been incredibly surprised by how much we’ve been able to get out of what is a fairly stable set of regulations. I think we’ve made some fairly big steps forward with RB12.” Indeed it might go back even further, as the team’s chief engineer Paul Monaghan spoke of a “fundamental reappraisal” of the car after last year’s Spanish race. Many of these learning points aided the team’s mid-year improvement then but equally, given such is the way of these things, some had to be held off until this year’s car.
The question for Red Bull remains the same therefore, that of whither the Renault power unit. That the French concern is back as a constructor can only be positive for its level of commitment and even Horner (formerly Renault bête noire of choice) made positive noises in the close season to this effect. “It’s very difficult to make predictions but Renault have focused on what appears to be the right areas over the winter” said the Red Bull team principal. “There’s a confidence from them we haven’t seen for some time…They appear to have made the right moves within their technical structure. They’ve got competent people in the right positions. They’ve brought in expertise through contractors and they appear to be moving in the right direction. The biggest problem for them is time. And engine development does take an awful lot of time.”
The talk in pre-season was of a 50bhp gain, and now a further upgrade is on tap to be debuted in Monaco and which Daniel Ricciardo among others is speaking positively about.
While in the immediate term with Monaco next up as noted many reckon the Red Bull has the best low speed grip out there, which of course bodes well for Principality pace.
The Red Bull team has for the most part struggled to get praise. We can understand this too in some senses. Its arriviste image. Its cockiness which isn’t always to everyone’s taste. Combined it’s leant the team an image of rather the upstart disrupting a genteel cocktail party. Last year in a coup de grace we had its antics with Renault and repeated threats to walk from the sport. But it’s always been a remarkable organisation. And if it is indeed to affect a comeback probably it’ll be its most remarkable and maybe even its most memorable achievement of all, that classic sporting paradigm of the old champion surprising us all with an unlikely resurgence, a la Jack Nicklaus’s final and most enduring golf major win, surging to victory at the age of 46 in the 1986 Masters. After all of our time of struggling to lend the squad praise, maybe now at last we’ll give what’s due to Red Bull.
