What makes F1s Max Verstappen so fast? An extremely rare natural talent

Publish date: 2024-06-05

The ominously strong showing from Red Bull in testing last week only served to dial up expectations for Max Verstappen going into the 2023 Formula One season.

Right now, no one is operating on Verstappen’s level. A third straight championship would cement this as being F1’s “Verstappen era,” years where grandstands of orange-clad Dutch fans revel in the success of a generational talent.

And at 25 years old, Verstappen may not even be near his peak.

It’s no secret that the car at a driver’s disposal defines their chance of success. Yet the fashion in which Verstappen swept to last year’s championship — winning a record 15 races to teammate Sergio Pérez’s two — and the delivery of performances like the Belgian Grand Prix, where he went from 14th place to first in 12 laps and won the race by 18 seconds, make clear that he’s not just the beneficiary of strong engineers.

To understand what makes Verstappen just so fast requires looking beyond the numbers.

‘An extremely rare natural talent’

Verstappen has always stood out as a gifted driver. He was a star of the European go-karting scene before moving into cars for 2014, racing in Formula 3. Red Bull was so impressed by what it saw from Verstappen that it fast-tracked him to F1 for the following year. At 17, he was the youngest driver in the history of the sport. He didn’t even have a regular drivers’ license.

Concerns across F1 about Verstappen’s readiness pushed the sport’s governing body, the FIA, to introduce a minimum age limit of 18 the following year. But Verstappen quickly displayed a level of car control and composure that belied his youth and proved he belonged on the grid.

“Max Verstappen is one of the highest skilled drivers I’ve ever worked with,” said Franz Tost, who was the driver’s first F1 team boss at Toro Rosso, now known as AlphaTauri. The only other driver Tost puts in the same conversation is Sebastian Vettel, Red Bull’s first junior star, who won four world championships between 2010 and 2013.

Tost saw signs of Verstappen’s natural talent in go-karting, when Red Bull was tracking his progress. “Some of the kart races, mamma mia,” Tost said. “How he drove, how he overtook, and how he had everything under control, was just fantastic.”

Tost only got to work with Verstappen for around 18 months. In that time, Verstappen became F1’s youngest point scorer in only his second race, and recorded a best finish of fourth in Hungary and the United States — a big result for one of the smallest teams on the grid.

Four races into his second F1 season, Verstappen was promoted to Red Bull’s senior team, replacing the struggling Daniil Kvyat. It was a shock move. Teams rarely change drivers mid-season, let alone so early. But Red Bull wanted to get Kvyat out of the spotlight — and, more importantly, Verstappen into it.

His natural talent was again evident from the moment he got his hands on a car capable of fighting for victory. On debut for Red Bull at the Spanish Grand Prix, Verstappen fended off Vettel, Kimi Raikkonen and Daniel Ricciardo, a trio with five world titles and hundreds of race starts between them, to become F1’s youngest race winner at just 18 years old. It’s a record that is unlikely to ever be beaten.

And it showed off the instinctive ability that’s at the center of Verstappen’s success. Daring overtakes, perfect pole laps and recoveries from sideways slides — keeping the car out of the wall at Brazil in 2016 was an early iconic Verstappen moment — all seem to come so easily.

Verstappen’s long-serving race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, identifies that ability as the key factor that makes him so quick. Lambiase is essentially in charge of looking after Verstappen when he’s out on-track. His voice is the one heard talking to Verstappen on the radio, relaying information about the car and his strategy during a race.

“He has an extremely rare natural talent,” Lambiase told The Athletic. “An innate feeling for the connection between himself, the car and the road.”

A unique driving style

That connection allows Verstappen to get more out of his car than most. All drivers work with their engineers to tune the car to their liking. Most want a car that can be turned into corners aggressively, but sacrifice some of that quality to stop the back of the car from stepping out and causing a spin.

What sets Verstappen apart is his ability to deal with a very loose rear end, to feel when the rear of the car is at the limit before bringing it under control. That allows him the extra “pointy” front end that lets him chuck into corners faster and harder than his opponents, getting the most out of a Red Bull car that is already the class of the field.

“We both want a good front end. It’s just a question of how stable the rear end can be,” teammate Pérez explained in Bahrain last week when asked about Verstappen’s driving style. “Max has been able to cope with a looser rear end.”

Pérez is not the first Red Bull driver to struggle more with that. Alex Albon spent a season and a half racing alongside Verstappen, but struggled to get close to his level of performance, leading to his exit in favor of Perez.

“Everything looks natural for him when he’s driving,” Albon said. “It’s a very clean driving style, but I know he’s on the limit.”

Apparently, this comes so easily to Verstappen that he considers it natural. “I never experienced a fast car which has understeer (turning less sharply than desired) in my life, in any category,” he said. “I feel like if people ask me what is your driving style, I cannot tell you, because I always adapt to what I get in the best way possible.”

Unwavering consistency

It’s hard to think of many races where Verstappen seemed off the pace or did not maximize the ability of his car in recent years. Take 2022, when he won 15 of the 22 races. The seven races he did not win were:

Bahrain GP: Retired due to a fuel pump issue after battling for the lead.

Australian GP: Retired due to another fuel pump issue, was set to finish second.

Monaco GP: Finished third after a red flag cost him a shot at pole in qualifying, on a street circuit where it is hard to overtake.

British GP: Finished seventh after debris damaged the floor of his car.

Austrian GP: Finished second after high tire degradation left him unable to fight Charles Leclerc and Ferrari.

Singapore GP: Seventh because a team mistake in qualifying meant he started eighth, on a circuit where overtaking is difficult.

Brazilian GP: Sixth when a clash with Lewis Hamilton forced an extra pit stop.

None of these results can be put down to Verstappen underperforming. His tendency for aggressive moves, particularly when battling Hamilton — see also Italy and Saudi Arabia in 2021 — has been the only thing in his championship years that has made Verstappen slip from peak performance.

“He’s just very complete, he very hardly makes mistakes,” Pérez told The Athletic. “He’s able to be at the limit for a very long time during a weekend.”

The ability to get everything out of the car has been there from the start of Verstappen’s F1 career. When he raced for Toro Rosso, a team in F1’s midfield for which regular points was the target, knowing Verstappen would always be at the max was a useful gauge of what the car was really capable of.

“These drivers always find a way to bring the car to the best possible success,” said Tost. “Max was there, he was simply within the first six, seven, eight cars. They get the real potential out of the car. If they’re there, you know, OK, this is the potential, and more is not possible.”

Mental capacity

F1 drivers do so much more than drive the car. They have myriad switches, dials and buttons on their steering wheels to adjust things like engine modes or brake bias throughout the race. They think about tire wear, strategy options and changing weather conditions, as well as the rival drivers around them, all of it at speeds of up to 220 mph.

You need a big mental capacity, but that comes to some drivers easier than others. In Verstappen’s case, that ability is one that has been evident from the early days.

Jody Egginton, who was Toro Rosso’s head of vehicle performance when Verstappen came up (and is now AlphaTauri’s technical director), looks for young drivers’ ability to identify how they car feels through certain corners, even if a lack of experience means they don’t understand the why of it.

“That’s been a good trait with Max and other young drivers,” Egginton said. “To be able to highlight something, even if it’s just a comment whilst driving … That’s a big standout.”

That’s because such feedback is critical to unlocking car performance. Teams will make use of the practice sessions on a Friday to get their car in a rough setup window, tailoring the settings to make the driver comfortable. But it’s up to the driver to work with the team to finetune all the small elements that can be decisive. A tweak worth half a tenth of a second could be the difference between pole position and fourth place.

Total dedication

As with all elite sportspeople, F1 drivers need to be incredibly committed to their craft if they want to be the best.

Tost again names Verstappen and Vettel as being the two standout drivers he has worked with in this regard. “It’s their passion, they live for Formula 1,” he said. “That’s very, very important. People underestimate it. They want to know everything. They live for it.”

It’s something that has been ingrained in Verstappen from a very young age by his father, Jos Verstappen, who raced in F1 in the 1990s and early 2000s. Father and son toured Europe together, dominating the go-kart scene, always working toward F1.

For a driver who has been in the spotlight from his mid-teens, Verstappen hasn’t let the trappings of life in F1 go to his head. He’s not been caught up in any off-track controversies, nor has he seemed to change a huge amount as a person. To him, his focus has always been on simply becoming a better driver.

When Verstappen isn’t at a race or preparing with the team for a grand prix weekend or undertaking his own personal training, he’s likely to be sim racing. He has a rig at home that he uses to digitally compete with many of the best sim racers in the world, and while it may not replicate the physical movement of an F1 car, it does help to hone skills such as car control or set-up.

Verstappen revealed earlier this month he even plans to install a simulator in a new motorhome he will use to travel around the races in Europe. “That way, I just can keep on driving when I’m back in the evening,” he said. “I like it, it’s my hobby in a way, and it just keeps you sharp as well.”

Even after a day in a real F1 car, Verstappen is thinking about driving a virtual one — and looking to win.