F1 Rewind: How his Dad's F1 failure made Max Verstappen an F1 great

The Athletic Rewind to the 28th of September 1993 - Portugal. At the Estaril Circuit, a young Dutch driver is preparing to test an F1 car for the first time for midfielders' footwork. There's excitement in the air. This is a driver with a big talent and a growing reputation, so much so that his every move is trailed by a TV crew. Luckily for them, he doesn't disappoint. By the end of the day, he's posted a time that would have earned intent from the grid for the Grand Cree that took place at the same circuit two days earlier. With teams clamoring for his signature, F1 Stardom looks certain, but in the end, a career that had promised so much fizzles out a decade later after 107 starts in largely uncompetitive machinery, with only a pair of podiums to his name. By now, however, Yoss Verstappen has a son, and in Max, he sees the chance to sculpt a more complete racing driver, one who will avoid the pitfalls of his own career and realise his potential. Welcome to the race, F1, rewind, I'm Ed Straw, and with me, as always, is Mark Hughes. We're going to talk about Yoss Verstappen and the impact he had on Max Verstappen's F1 career. You've taken this so seriously that you've written a whole book in preparation for this podcast, which I'm very much admire. Yeah, I was thinking ahead. In 2023, I think it was I wrote the book Unstoppable, which ostensibly it's about Max Verstappen, but obviously you can't tell that story without getting very involved in the Yoss Verstappen story as well. Exactly, and a very good reader as well. I would recommend it to everyone, and not just because Mark is in the room, he's a pretty good writer as well and always. Always quite interesting. Only quite interesting. Only quite, yeah. When it's next reassured, you can put that on the cover, quite interesting. Yeah, you can put some little quote marks, Ed Straw. Exactly. Glowing endorsement. Max Verstappen in the context of Yoss Verstappen, we've seen sons of Formula One drivers before, sons of World Champions before Damon Hill, son of Graham Hill being a classic example, Jack Villeneuve, son of Gile Villeneuve. Max Verstappen's a really interesting case, and it's not just a story of a driver who has the same name who's got to F1 through some process of nepotism, is it? No, it's almost all one project, really, because Yoss had immense potential and didn't realise it. Part of his reflection afterwards was the mistakes that he'd made, and when his son insisted he wanted to go car racing, and the impetus did seem very much to come from Max, but everyone concerns, says everybody around them at that time. So this wasn't a Yoss project, this was Max, absolutely pushing, pushing, pushing to be involved. And he'd lived in that world, he lived in the Carding World, because Yoss wasn't just a race driver, he was also, even when he was in F1, he was still involved in the Carding industry, prepared engines for the gear of Undergod, when the World Championship in 2002, with Yoss Verstappen engine, he was still involved in the nuts and bolts of that. So he'd Max grew up in that environment, and so obviously he wanted to be out there on the track, and he really didn't want to hang about watching. So when Yoss understood just how much he wanted to do it, he said okay, we're going to do it properly, we're not going to play it, one, and two, he was able to incorporate the lessons from his own career in the guiding Max's career, particularly with regards to controlling your own destiny, and that's where it had really fallen down for Yoss, and that's where he really did a fantastic job with Max. And I think it's really important when you're talking about something like this and say a parental influence from the same environment, the idea of nepotism or nepo babies as they tend to be called, now there's a difference between somebody who is in an environment and has access to that knowledge and a certain level of opportunity, and that is an opportunity a lot wouldn't have had, but there's a difference between that and just being given an opportunity because of who you are. I guess the classic example would be, I don't know, the boss's kid getting a job they're not qualified for. So I think it's important to differentiate between those things, but what we are going to talk about in the first part is Yoss for Stappen's F1 career, because that is so important in terms of the preparatory work for what happened with Max, and I've done interviews with Yoss where he talks about how important it was to apply the lessons of everything he did wrong, everything he didn't know, and give Max the value of that learning. And that support and also that pressure, and we will probably talk a little bit more about the positives and negatives of that later on. But let's go to that test for footwork in 1993, footwork, then very much a middling F1 scene, they were running Derek Warwick in a guise of Zuki at the time, had a few decent qualifying performances that year, not that many results, grabbed a fourth place on one occasion, but you have this test, Yoss for Stappen's driving, also Gilda Faran had a drive on that test as well, and he makes this phenomenal impact, and I can illustrate that impact in fact by this, the cover of Autosport Magazine from after that test. Now everyone's hottest new boy was the headline that Autosport had, and it's very important to stress how unusual it is to have something like that on the cover, in that that didn't really happen, doubly so given it's not a British driver and you might expect a British magazine to get behind more Johnny Herbert or someone like that from a few years earlier. But the reason I showed that is that shows how profound an impact that test Yoss for Stappen had. I think it's easy to underestimate if you look at Yoss for Stappen's career record and didn't experience it, live through it, it's really easy to underestimate how big an impact this test really made. Yeah, I mean he was seriously hot property. At that time he came straight in from Carding and won championship immediately in GM Lotus, and the Ben looks championship. He had won off-guest appearance in the bigger league GM Lotus, but Stappen was sensational in that. He moved straight to Formula 3 when the German championship dominated it. And he looked set to set the F1 track's light, you know, other teams, fallen over themselves, trying to get him along to him contract, he was the hot property of that time. If you're looking for where the next Michael Schu-Maker, I'll make a hack and it might be that's where you were looking. There's no question. Yeah, everybody was talking to him basically, McLaren, especially McLaren, to give him a test at one stage. Obviously Benaton, who he eventually signed for, there was a little bit of Ferrari. It was an absolute clamor because this was the next megastar also because of how rapid his ascent was. I mean, one of those lines on the old sport cover was from Carding to F1 in two years, and we get a little bit more used to in more recent years, really fast ascent. Max Stappen's being the latest example, but that was really, really rare at this point. So you've not only got this driver who is considered to be incredible, but he's on this rocket ship to F1 as well. And if in late 1993 you were saying, right, who in F1 is going to come in and win races and be a future world champion? Yoss Stappen is the name people would have picked out of you. Yeah, overwhelmingly at that time. Yeah, there was no question. It was unusual because he wasn't from a moneyed background. He was for, you know, his father and grandfather's scrapyard and ran a bar. It was just very, very work in class, sort of background that he'd done, but he was useful with a spanner and he was very, very interested in the nuts and bolts of it. So he was able to do it sort of on a, on a bit of a budget locally in, in Holland. So that he did enough to get him noticed, and it was actually who brought him out of the X Formula One driver, who had made good money as an entrepreneur, who decided to get behind him and back him and really hyped him to the Formula One people that he still had contacts with, and actually to do that, Estral Test, he had to withdraw his entry from the Macau Formula Three race, which would have been the crowning glory if he didn't. he won that of his problem of three season, but he didn't do it. He did this test instead. So yeah, that was where he was at. You know, he was on the verge of something big. - Yeah, absolutely, and you have to be very aware of what it took to get to the brink of Formula One without the money to throw at it. So this is the kind of talent we're talking about. And the amazing thing is that actually, the Yoss journey to Formula One lightly maps onto the max journey to Formula One in terms of how quick it is, the qualities it showed, the level of kind of racing education to an extent, not as comprehensive, but similar in terms of the progression. But then it all diverges terribly for Yoss, ultimately. The moment Yoss chooses to sign for Beneton, which seems a really, really good choice. Beneton is a team on the up. They're about to win their first championship in '94 with Michael Schumacher. They've had a strong '93. Yoss gets a deal to be test driver in '94 with a guaranteed race seat for '95, necessarily guaranteed where, but he's guaranteed to be an F1 in '95. And compared to what everyone else is offering, this is a good deal. And again, it has those, the echoes from the future, if you like, with max in the max signs with Red Bull because it gets him straight into F1. This deal with Beneton gets Yoss guaranteed entry to Formula One for '95. And then it all gets brought forward by JJ Leto, who's big crash, the neck injury he has. And then suddenly Yoss is in the car as Michael Schumacher's teammate for the first two races of 1994. Yeah, so in hindsight, he wasn't ready, came in too early, had the original plan played out. He would have been getting a lot of mileage away from the spotlight of Grand Prix, and would have probably come in much better prepared in '95 as it was, not only was he under-prepared, but he'd hung knowingly, you have to bring Rutt and Gator into this as well. They had hung knowingly made Yoss just a bargaining pod for Flavia Brea Tory, because that team was absolutely centered around Michael Schumacher. And Brea Tory was in a driver management and making money on drivers. So he'd surrendered, unknowingly, he'd surrendered control of his own destiny at that point. And so as well as becoming essentially just the second string car in a team that was totally focused around one driver, he wasn't even going to be in charge of where he was going to go. Now McLaren offered him a similar deal test drive for '94. The other lower grid teams were saying they would put him straight in. They would give him a race seat. But they decided that Bennett and was the best option. And I'd say, no, that's where it went wrong. That's the first point at which it went wrong. And I think that loss of control of his destiny really, really sort of colored how he looked at things when he was later bringing on marks. Exactly, and when we're looking at Yoss's career, there's these key lessons that he learns. And '94 is a big chunk of the learning. As you said there, controlling your destiny, making sure the team is focused on you is very, very important, and then the right preparation and all of these things. He was up close against Schumacher. He couldn't measure up to, ultimately, this wasn't a time of simulators and all that preparation. So actually, when he jumped in the car and needed a writer into La Auguste, he was taken out in a crash that wasn't of his making. It was caused by Eddie Irvine, who got a one race band later upgraded to a three race band for it, but that ended up with Yoss being launched, hitting Martin Roller's head on the way through in the accident, as well, thankfully, Martin was all right there. But positive reaction, actually, to that into La Auguste debut, needed the Pacific Grand Prix as well. Then he was out of the car because later I was back and it just starts this weird season 'cause later he comes back, he's not really fit. Later, then gets benched again. Yoss comes back in, has the pit for a lane fire in Germany, which, obviously, everyone's seen nothing remotely Yoss's fault. That was entirely out of his control. But it means that first season is basically best known for the big crash on debut and the fire. There's a couple of podiums in Hungary and Belgium, one of them, Michael Schumacher, effectively facilitates by letting him unlapped himself and then Brundel's McLaren expires, and that allows the extra lap for Yoss to get the podium finished. But those two podiums, back to back podiums, are as good as it gets. Yoss is out of the car again for the last two races when they put Johnny Herbert in. So he's had this weird season and actually a big chunk of that career momentum's wiped out by that first season. Really, really is. It's not gone. There's still a residual of this guy's good, but already pretty much the die is cast, isn't it? Because he doesn't have a benefit on C for 95. They place him at Simtech. It's a deal that puts him at that team and gives Simtech gearboxes, which seems like a good deal for Simtech, but the gearboxes keep breaking. And then the team goes out of business and other than Yoss has this brilliant 95 Argentinian who are on pre-drive, where he qualifies fantastically. Briefly runs in the points before retiring. But that's a short lived season and just that momentum edbs away. And there's still this residual, oh, this guy's quite good. Still there in 95, still there in 96 gets a point for arrows where he is now, but that momentum gradually just peels away. And after a few years, he's really a journeyman. Yeah. And I think that's just, it's up to you of energy when you get into a situation like that, where you're the second driver and you're not the focus of anything. And you've been used to being at the absolute center of everything. You've been used to being treated as a mega star and a making and with everything centered around you in the junior category, in cardigan and in the junior categories. And everybody there for you, everybody's on your side. And suddenly to be in the lackey role, I think it does damage you. And not only that, but you're going up against Michael Schumacher. And as a rookie, you're going up against Michael Schumacher. And in his more reflective later years, your sister said, you know, even disregarding the equipment differences and there were significant equipment differences and even disregarding all the factors against them. When you looked at some of the things that Michael was able to do close up, you suddenly have to say to yourself, you know, well, I came in thinking, I was going to win race, I think I'm going to win with championship, I'm going to beat everybody. And then you come against somebody like that and you think, no, maybe I have to recalibrate here. And even he acknowledges that. Maybe he wasn't Michael Schumacher, but he was, you know, it was pretty good. But better than he was able to show subsequently, I think. Yeah, he's a great what if question. What could he have been shaped into with the right opportunities, the right knowledge? I mean, I did interview them. Just before Max came into F1 and he said, I should have started with the team lower down. So say, footwork, 94 footwork would have been. Yeah, what a nice place to start, good tidy car, could score points. So that would have been an interesting move for him to have made. But equally, we also have to remember that. You go all the way back to that footwork test where he was really quick. I think people slightly underestimated track evolution and maybe what that can happen. So I don't want to frame him as someone who was stunningly sparkling, quick and it all went away. But I do think the raw materials were there to be an extremely good driver. Yeah. And he had, he had a lot of the things that Max has. You know, a good bit of technical knowledge, underpinning it, quite a feisty competitive character to say the least. And you just wonder with a little bit of that around him how far he could have gone. Again, I don't think he's Mark Rishemaka, but nobody is. So I think it's important to remember that, but yeah, his career does just turn journeyman. As I said, he goes, Simtech, arrows, Tyrell, back to arrows. He ends up at Menardi, the Honda projects that was still born in 1999. That was the big opportunity. That may have turned it around for him. Probably possibly died suddenly and that was that. Yeah, he was a test driver. He was going to race for them. That could have changed things. But then he's just back into just fighting around for lower down seats, goes back to arrows, gets shoved out by arrows for 2002. And there's legal action about that because he had a contract for OT, but they were struggling financially and then has that final year in '03 with Menardi, which is a no hope season. But he managed to just top of qualifying session. He did. That one at ManiCorps went into one, too. He was adjusting Wilson. Yeah, so it was to do with the one lap qualifying, single lap qualifying and it was, did it rain? Did he go, yeah, they went out first and then the Menardi's went out first and then it rained. And so everybody got slow. Everybody the way now was slow and the last person. So I mean that the Menardi's were one, too, with Yossi, was one and just Wilson, too. And that was to set the qualifying order the next day. It wasn't great positions, but it was just one last moment. So Yossi's career really fizzles out. He does a little bit after F1, the SMA1 GP, has an OMP2 class win at Le Mans. But his attention is turning to Max. Max arrives in September. 1997, so if you look at some photos of a very, very young Max Verstappen sitting in his dad's car when Yoss is still racing and it soon becomes clear and we'll get onto that and how that plays out in part two, that everything Yoss has done really in motorsport is a research operation for Helen's at the max. That turns out to be exactly that, and it just could not have been a more perfect preparation given Yoss's story. Given the fact that both parents are racing drivers, his mum's selfie company was a really, really top car racer herself and then he just lives in this environment, doesn't know any other environment rather than the racing environment and his dad is absolutely, totally involved in the nitty gritty of car racing and knows all the shortcuts and all the ways to be competitive in that and so perfect, the perfect grounding. Just before we end this part, I just wanted to take a quick detour because this is often forgotten actually, it's not talked about a huge amount because it's not great footage of the accident but it's sparring 96. There's an accident that could have thought about the end of Yoss and might have meant there was never a max. He has a huge crash at Stavolo as a result of a hub failure in the arrows, hits the wall, and probably without the energy absorbing headrests that had come in that year, that could very, very easily have been a fatal outcome ultimately. It was very similar actually in terms of the deceleration to the Ratsenberger crash at Himalayan 94 but the force was massively reduced and I think it's just worth noting that because you can find footage of it online, Yoss gets knocked out briefly when he gets out of the car and he collapses and he's okay from it but this is just one of those moments where a driver could have been lost without some of those safety features that had come in. Yeah, I mean it's starting on the shoulders of Giants, isn't it? The safety crusade. But yeah, it's sort of a sobering thought, isn't it? Yeah, exactly and just wanted to mention that really. It doesn't really fit in with the max story but it's an important part of Yoss's career and in the next part of the podcast we're going to get into the early days of Max and Yoss's role in it. So let's get onto Max Verstappen, Mark. Now, we've mentioned Yoss but in terms of the gene pool as it were, he's also the son of Sophie Kumpen who was an extremely good car so he's got racing DNA if you like on both sides and again, I don't want to present this as some kind of perfect family situation because obviously there were all sorts of challenges there in the background but it does show it's a driver who has definitely got the DNA if you like to be what he is. Yeah, it's a fascinating mixture of nature and nurture and it's always the question in success in sport, how much is nature, how much is nurture and he's just fantastically in and out with both, isn't he? He's just, if you had to write out the recipe for, well, a likely top driver, we'd look exactly like that. Both parents' racing drivers, both parents, very, very good racing drivers, born into the sport and just never exists outside of the sport. It's just, only does that. And so then you have the hard taskmasters, you know, repetition, you know, complete focus, all the things that, you know, would be very easily lost with a kid left, just he's a talented kid left to his own devices, all the structure and just really drilled into him very hard. In a way that could have turned a different personality off the sport altogether or men turn away from it because, you know, it's probably unpleasant at times that level of pressure and that level of aggression sometimes as well. You know, in terms of, you're not learning your lessons properly and you're not doing as I say, you're not listening to me, all of that and the reactions from that. But he was either a remarkable personality psychologically marks because he's not being damaged, he's not cowed by that. I still retained his own independence despite, despite that. And everybody knows the family well says that's these mum, his mum has got this sort of gentle side and he's the diplomat between the fiery yoss and his mum and that, those skills, just the skills in a very sort of turbulent marriage that he's ended, that Max has ended up being the diplomat off. Even they were transferred into racing and the, some of the card guys were saying, you know, Max was brilliant at just handling yoss, even though yoss was in charge, he was still the boss. Max could handle yoss and just know when not to argue with him and then just get the team to, you know, go with what was needed. So, yeah, he didn't, he doesn't have those scars that I think a less strong person would have given that level of intense honesty in the way he was coached. But it was, it was Max that everybody's in insistent that there was around them at the time. This was not Yoss's project, Yoss just agreed to do it. It was Max, it was just bang, bang, bang, from a very, very young age. So, you know, he wasn't, he was hamming on an open door, I suppose, but it wasn't Yoss, it wasn't Yoss saying, you're going to do this. It was the other way around. It was Yoss saying, well, okay, if you want to, but we're going to do it my way if we're doing it. And that's the story, that's how it came about. Yeah, there's a great quote from Helmut Marko who says, Yoss was a really good teacher and instructor, but I think he was more than hard on this young boy. That's Helmut Marko. Exactly. Yeah, and that is, that is the level of intensity that Yoss brought to it. It wasn't, it wasn't gentle. It wasn't, there wasn't anything subtle about it. It was, you know, he's very black and white and yeah, he's full on. Yeah, and obviously there's a lot of criticism of this and justifiably so I tend to look at it as ultimately is Max's story to tell. Yeah. And it is for Max to decide and understand what impact that has had on him. And we're just talking about how it played out. It's definitely not, this is not what is very much not an endorsement of the methods because I think if you look at not just in motorsport, but sports all over the place, there are cases of very, very problematic parental influence and over, like pushing and being overly harsh et cetera. And I would say that you've got to be very, very careful about the, the effects of those. Yeah, I think, you know, you hear of the success versions of it, like the, Max for Stappen, the William sisters, Andrea Garcia, you know, all, you know, receiving extreme sort of parental, not guidance, just, just more than that, really extreme and to, to borderline abuse. Well, and some of our agacy basically said he hated tennis, whereas Max for Stappen seems to love striving and anyone in the entire universe. Yeah. So you hear the, and I'm sure there are, you know, there are many, for each one of those success stories, there are many damaged people that have been turned away from the sport that they initially loved. So I don't, I wouldn't say it's a good blueprint. It's just something that worked. Yeah, this is not the template. I don't think so. What we're talking about here is basically how it, how it played out and obviously, you know, Yoss has, has his, his negative, should we say, I think if you have a bit of a browse online, there's been, I was going to say brushes with the law, but it's full on collisions with the law. So, yeah. Again, while Yoss is key to what Max has done, this isn't a story of, of, of heroes doing amazing things, is it? It's just the story of how it played out. This has just all happened and we're just telling it. Exactly. Yeah. And it's important to remember that Yoss was very embedded in carting. He's still interested in carting, even when he was racing in Formula One. So he could be actively involved, but he also knew all the right people. So in your book, you talk to various people in carting, you're involved with, with educating Max and Yoss is very systematic with how he does it and into them and he talked about how, you know, people used to put a little bit of oil on the clutch to boost the start. But I wouldn't do that with Max. I wanted to see him fight his way through to the front. It's kind of this thing of not just being successful and winning, but it's getting around it education and all of the, all of the challenges and making sure that Max knows what he has to do in order to be successful. Again, a lot of pressure. There are negatives to that. But it also is an important part in shaping Max. But imagine the gift of that if you're like a spoiler. that wants to take in that information that he's able to impart to you. You know, we put him in a test session in the middle of traffic. So you've got to practice your overtaken. He said, "There's a good way of overtaking. It doesn't cost you a lot of time and there's a bad way of overtaking and getting a position but it loses you a lot of time. You've got to explain that to someone at such an early age so that it gets embedded very, very early and things become just like stuff that would take years to learn. There's so many of those that he's just getting the benefit of and he wants to know. He wants to know more. He's asking more and more and more and the more Yoss is answering him. The more questions he's got and the further up he's going and the more sophisticated the machinery is driving, the more questions he has and so yeah, it's that and he's the contact. A lot of them are the same people, a lot of the same people that Sam Ran, Fritz van Amesfort in particular, who run Yoss to his GM Lotus title, Ran Max to his F3 season. So yeah, in Carding as well, a lot of the same people. Just so everything was there, everything necessary if the guy was any good was there and of course he was fantastically good and that's where the DNA comes in, that's where the nature comes in because you could say, oh, it's just repetition, all those hundreds of hours at the card track that Yoss forced him to do is what's made him good, it's not, for sure that improves you but it's just extracting the potential that's already there and you wouldn't, before he was even allowed to race, before he was old enough to race, Yoss had him doing testing. And he's going quicker than the guys that are winning races at a three years old of them. You have to have an enormous inbuilt talent to do that. You don't achieve that just because you want to do it. So that everything is there, everything is there in his physiological makeup to make him able to fully exploit those lessons and it's just like the perfect case study of how to build a champion really. Yeah, but probably a very difficult one to repeat, I would say, but it's also a version of a story that so many drivers live as well because everybody knows that famous story about Yoss being angry with Max for making a mistake and he's not speaking to him and then leaving him at the petrol station and he does get picked up, but this is often used as a fairly critical story and I think rightly so, it's not a particularly pleasant one, but I have heard versions of that story countless times from countless different carters, many of which I never heard of as professional racing drivers. Again, I'm not saying it's justified or correct, but this is not an unusual kind of tale to hear from this environment. Oh, it's an extreme environment. If you're taking it seriously, if you're not doing it as a hobby race, if you're looking to progress and be on the ladder to Formula One, it is horrible and ruthless and you've got to be at ease in that environment, otherwise you're going to get buried. Yeah, and that's a tale in a love sports as well. It's not necessarily good. In fact, I would argue in many ways it isn't, but it is what it is, isn't it? Yeah, sport can be a brutal place to operate it. Now, Max has tremendous success in karting and already his reputation is big and he moves into car racing in 2014 and one of his first race outings, in fact, his first single-seater racing outing is in the Florida winter series put on by Ferrari and the first event for this is at Sebring in the USA early in the year. Now, one of his rivals among various future other Formula One drivers, Lance Strolls, Nicholas Latifi, that is there, is a certain Ben Anderson, our colleague at the race who was doing the first event at Sebring for a feature and Ben has a very revealing story because he cross swords with Max on the track and we thought it was worth dropping in because it's an unusual early tale in which both Max and Yoss play a part. So I was invited to do the Florida winter series in January of 2014. It was something set up by Ferrari, ostensibly under their driver academy system and they wanted to give basically young up and coming single-seater drivers the chance to rather than test in Europe race but in nice conditions. That time in Florida, it's good weather so you're not kind of blasting around a wet circuit in the UK. You're actually getting to compete on interesting tracks in the states in good conditions. I got to do Sebring, which I think was round one. It was the first round. So I got to do the very first round at Sebring, obviously an iconic circuit, especially in the American sports car scene and Max Verstappen happened to be there doing his first single-seater race. So he, he and his dad, Yoss, obviously got wind of this thing. I think from their point of view, it also gave them the chance to put themselves in the shot window Ferrari a little bit because at that point he was considering what to do in terms of car racing. He wasn't yet committed even to a series. He'd done some form of the Renault testing. He'd done some form of three testing. He'd obviously been massively impressive but the path was not yet totally clear. So I think they saw this as a chance to get some more single-seater experience in front of Ferrari. You had people on the ground. They had driver coaches. They had academy people there taking you every step through the weekend. The whole ethos of it was, it was competitive and there were races and qualifying sessions but it wasn't strictly a championship. It was meant to be an educational thing. You all sat in the same classroom between the sessions. The data was put up on the screen, incidents were analysed and the whole idea was to pick through these various things and see what each driver could learn. I think that was a big part of it too for the Verstappans because Max was so new. He was just out of karting. It was a good opportunity for them to shortcut some learning because you had very experienced drivers there. Ostensibly I think the thing was mostly funded by Lawrence Stroll. It was a Lawrence Stroll vehicle to get Lawrence Stroll some experience because he was looking to move into car racing too. We were driving a former or a bath cars which were effectively F4 level but what was fascinating about the race weekend is one Verstappans rawness. He was so quick straight away, mind blown, considering he had no experience. He was ruffling feathers straight away just from being fast on track. Then you saw the killer instinct for Stappan team work dynamic where I remember they complained. We had practice day on the first day of this meeting. It was essentially three days if I remember right. It might have been four. My memory is not serving me the best but there was a practice build up and some qualifying sessions and then the races happened at the kind of crescendo point of the weekend. In the early phase, in the practice phase, Stappan was quick but they started complaining about the engine. Every car was a former or a bath with the same engine and they started complaining that there was down on power and I'm pretty sure they got it switched before then they had to qualify the next day and then Verstappan was bang up there, qualifying on pole position. You saw this kind of thing that just was very big on this right through Max's career even into Formula One. He used to talk to me about the material. You've got to make sure the material is the best it can be. They always had that attitude even from the carts. That's why he did the engines himself because he wanted to be the one that was in control of it and they carried that with them right right the way through. Early single seat isn't into Formula One. You could call it meddling but from Joss's point of view it was about giving Max the absolute best tools so there was no excuse. It was like he's now just got to go and do the job and if he does the job right then he should succeed. For the most part that weekend he did. There were just the rough edges of clearly a kid who wasn't experienced in cars that had wings and appendages that could easily break. He looked like a cart racer and he would follow too close. We had an incident in the second race. I think it was the second of four races or in first grid one so I happened to be slightly further up than I should have been. He was coming through and I was dicing with somebody else going into sea brings I think turn two. Just short straight between turn one and turn two and Max was right behind. This guy was on my inside and I wanted to do the classic move of break a bit early and then dive back up the inside of the car in the exit of the corner. Actually quite a classic carting move really. Max misjudged my early breaking point and just clatted into the back of me and took me out onto an escape road. Escape road broke his front wing, broke my rear wing and that was the race over for both of us and we trundled back to the pits and I saw Joss straight away. I knew him a little bit anyway and I'd got to know a bit more in that weekend too and I just did my racing driver thing of like you know what was Max doing and Max would have wanted I think to argue his point but Joss sided with me and kind of slapped Max down and said yeah he needs to learn that a car is not a cart and you can't follow that closely and Max that whole weekend was very much in Joss's shadow I would say you know his young teenage lad his dad is reasonably successful. certainly well-known Formula One driver. He was the one calling the shots. This kind of later stage Formula One Max, who knows his own mind, allows his dad to do his own thing in the background, but it's very much, I'm the one in control, I'm the one certainly agenda. He wasn't present at this point. He was just there trying to absorb as much as he could do his thing, and then kind of do as his dad was told. And I always joke that I'm probably the only one who's had an incident with Max Verstappen, where he's actually had to admit that he wasn't fault, but it was mainly because Jost was the one telling him, "No, you can't do this. You need to do better." But you know, Max is, obviously like anyone has an ego, but he has this ability also to set it to one side and just absorb the information and then immediately take it on board and do better. That's the other thing you noticed with him throughout his career, but certainly it was present this weekend too. It's like the baseline level is so high, but then he just builds on it so, so quickly. So it was no surprise to see the career trajectory he took from it. At that point, you didn't know how incredible it was going to be. They were thinking about doing Formula 3. They ended up doing Formula 3, and of course they went to Formula 1 after to one season, and the rest is history. You didn't know for definite at that point that this was going to happen, but there were some very clear signals that this guy was going to be absolutely special. If you took Lance Stroll by way of comparison, similar level experience had done some carting, no car racing. He was fine, reasonably decent in that first weekend, but he was nowhere near the Verstappen level. So you could see even then, two guys who've made it to Formula 1 done a lot of races, the gap between them in terms of what they've gone on to achieve, and what we think of them as drivers was probably even present back then when they were 15, 16 years old. So very interesting weekend. It was privileged to do it, and I guess I can dine out on that story forever now, because a time I didn't know it, but I was sharing a grid with not only a multiple future Formula 1 World Champion, but possibly one of if not the greatest drivers of all time. I do remember when he did his FP1 debut for Torosso as it was then at Suzuki in 2020-14. He remembered I was full time in the FP1 paddock at that point, and he did remember, and he joked that I taught him everything in you as everyone was talking about how impressive he'd been in that first session. So at that point, he definitely remembered. But of course, what counts as one of the high watermarks of my racing career? If not one of the most interesting weekend, certainly for him, it's just a mere footnote in another wise, incredible, decorated career of racing. A great tale there from Ben, but Mark, already there's very much an eye towards getting into F1. Here, isn't it? There's been interest from a number of different entities in Formula 1, including Red Bull, Helmet Marko is very aware of who Max Verstappen is, has had conversations. They've stayed ruthlessly independent, but the time is starting to approach where they need to decide what to do. The main racing program straight into F3, amusingly the argument that Joss uses as well. If you go straight into F3 and he doesn't quite succeed in the first year, then you can do a second year, and it's okay when you're seen as a failure. But of course, Max's second year is in Formula 1, but he races for Van Amos for racing the Dutch team in European F3, finishes third in the championship, and again, it's a stronger it, but he's the one everybody is talking about from there, and it's all about what is the next step. Yeah, I mean, he was the he was the form man. He might not have got the most points, but he delivered the most sensational performances. So yeah, I think Renault was interested, Mercedes sort of wolf was interested, obviously, as you mentioned, Helmet Marko was, and at various points of all try to enlist through Joss, of all try to enlist Max and Joss as Helmet Arms length, and his rational is that he wants to have the option for as late as possible to decide. I mean, he doesn't want to be put in a rail track, if you like, on somebody's junior program, not even the Red Bull junior program. So yeah, he is with again with the help of who brought them got to, they find some money from somewhere to just about get the F3 season up and running, but it's it's you know, it's not a given financially, but you still have all his buzz around him, and yeah, it's it soon becomes clear that he's not going to be doing a second season of F3. So you know, he's probably he's probably going to miss F2 up. Exactly, and obviously, although Esteban Alcon wins that championship, Max is the one that everybody is talking about the most, and in part three, we will get more into detail in how he makes the step into Formula One. So we left Max for staff and doing very, very well in European Formula Three, winning a lot of races, not the championship, but it's time to make a decision, isn't it? There's a lot of companies who are interested in Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, and basically this opportunity, this enthusiasm is very much played to his advantage, isn't it? Yeah, Yos plays as brilliantly, so Yos leverages this interest, and he particularly hones in on Marco and Tour de Wolfe, and also aligned with Tour de Wolfe is Niki Laude, an archnemesis of Marco, they came up together, I mean they're friends, but they're friends and rivals from the late 60s. Frenemes is the word, isn't it? Yeah, so Marco used to talk louder that he only had a career because he took the drives that Marco couldn't take because he lost an eye, and loudly used to say, don't worry about it, you wouldn't have made any use of them anyway, not the other way I did, so don't worry about it, that was the adversarial sort of relationship, so that was an element of it, and I think Yos used that as well, if I don't want him getting them, he definitely don't want him getting them, of all the people, so at one point Marco was sitting with Christian Horner trying to decide how they get the guy and they don't let Mercedes land them, and Marco said, well, the only thing we can offer them in that Mercedes can't is an F1 drive in the junior team, so Mercedes was talking about Blazingmann and an F2 team, and then Blazingmann, one of their customer teams, the following year, and Formula One, whereas Marco was saying, we could offer him F1 straight away, I think that would do it, and of course it did, so they present that to Yos, and Yos is okay, and then he could get the manager Raymond Vermilain, and do the deal, and it's a deal where they're almost doing Red Bull a favour, to give them access to this driver who hasn't even driven a Formula One car yet, that is the level of how they've leveraged the interest in him, okay, well, okay, if you're prepared to do this and this and this and we can get him straight into F1, yeah, all right, but there's going to be certain conditions, and he's got to be in the senior team by X-Date and blah blah blah, so it was, they dictated the terms, so he wasn't ever really on the Red Bull junior scheme, they ticked that box just before I announced, I think I'm saying he'd been added to it, but he didn't come up through the Red Bull junior scheme, he came up through the Yos for Stappen scheme. Yeah, which is a validation really, that whole strategy, because ultimately for him to get that drive, he was 17, which just was not old enough, really, and they even changed the rules later on, even though Max showed he was more than capable, but I always remember we were both there for this, the first time he drove public KMF1 cars as a Zooka in 2014, he was in the car for Fp1, I remember we both went out to watch the first set, I was on the inside of the track, you were on the outside, so we both had different perspectives, but I remember we both saw something very similar there, a driver who, you could see what he was working on, the way he was changing the way he was taking the corner entrance, that left hander, so it's. Yeah, it's left in the connected with the right, so if you compromise one for the other and working out where that ultimate balance is between which, where do you take the most speed in and where do you, you know, compromise your line, he was playing with that straightaway, and it looked, you know, within five, six laps, he looked like all the other drivers, he just looked like someone that was a well-established Grand Prix driver. Yeah, straightaway, I just remember thinking, yeah, this guy absolutely knows what he's doing, and actually that trait for the experimentation, you'd see that in his early years in Formula One, and if you go and watch on Friday practice, he doesn't do it so much now because he's basically so quick getting there now because he's got all the experience, he just plugs in and knows all of those trade-offs, but for the first few years in Formula One, you'd see that a lot, wouldn't you, the experimentation, how quickly he'd work out what the best trade-off was, what the limitation was that would drive that correct trade-off, so you could see you were dealing with someone that had so much more than just a lot of talent for a driver of that age. He had a mentality and a mindset. that was marking him out right from the start in that form. - Yeah, I mean, it's adaptation. He's probably the most adaptive of all. All the drivers on the grid isn't he? It's a, you can see him changing his approach going on by corner sometimes. It's, yeah, it's remarkable, really. And it's there right from the start. And you saw it, especially when he transferred from the Tora Rosso, from one race to the Red Bull at the next, very different car, very different handling car. And you saw him just in the early stages of that FP1 in Barcelona, his first Red Bull drive, you could see him doing the same thing there. Just, you know, oh, I don't need to turn in so early here. You could see him, his first run street where how you would have driven the Tora Rosso. And then he seemed twig, this has got a lot more front end grip. I can take much later lining in here. And I can make much more aggressive on the brakes and then early on the power, you could just see it all unfolding very, very, very, all within the space for a few laps. You know, so, yeah, this is just remarkable driver, really. There was actually some great examples really early on of him being a complete package straight away because in that Tora Rosso, the full year in '15, he did a lot of work on tires and mastering the time management. And in fact, that race, which was the fifth race of his second season when he was dropped in at Red Bull, required some good time management in that Grand Prix to win on the two-stop versus the three-stopper. But he could do it, but he'd done a lot of work with Tora Rosso, with Chevy Pugelar, who was engineering him in terms of understanding that. And that was a strength from quite early on, wasn't it? So once again, it wasn't just sheer speed that impressed him, in fact, in that first season, his qualifying performances were probably less impressive than his race performances. The races could be absolutely incredible. The qualifying performances were good, but not blowing Carlos Sites completely out of the water, who was his teammate, but the race performances were something special. Yeah, and there were little glimpses of something very special. I mean, when you first time ever around Monte Carlo, and he'd not driven there in the juniors, he was even in the rookie season. So it was, what, race six or something like that? Seven. He goes P2 to Lewis Hamilton and FP1, three tenths off. You know, in a Torra Rosso. So just things like that just tell you that the potential is off the scale. You know, so you look at the averages, it doesn't really tell you very much. That's usually just a function of how much preparation I've got, but you look at the peaks. It's a similar thing we've seen until now. You look at the average of his rookie season. There's nothing special at all, but some of the peaks were give you an indication of what to expect in the future. And that was very much Max's 2015 season. And Ollie, he did do a lot of work on the tyres. Later on as he became frustrated at Red Bull not delivering a race winning car, he would sometimes go against that and then just say, "Right, remember, is it Austin?" Where I think GP was on the radio telling about you, you left Rios getting too hot, you can't do this pace. I'm not here to finish fourth, and I think he ended up finishing fourth and getting a reprimand afterwards from Helbert saying, "Well, you're not going to win races if you're going to look after your tyres." So, you know, he did rage against that because it's not how he naturally wants to drive, but he obviously can do it, and he can do it very well. And he had this extended period, didn't he, when Red Bull was good and could grab the old win. But never a championship challenge until the infamous 2021 season. When he did win the championship, I think in '21 he was the best driver on balance over the season, Hamilton was very strong, but over the whole season, I had to stab him just that little bit, more impressive overall, but a proper clash of the Titans that year was. But what's interesting is you see some of these traits, don't you, still the wanting to be the focal point of the team, obviously, on track, he kind of takes control of it, takes the team off Ricardo, pretty quickly, Ricardo moves on, primarily because he sees it's becoming Verstappan's team on performance, if nothing else, not because it's favoring Verstappan. It's a team will always favor the stronger driver because they're the stronger driver. But there's still always those flirtations of willy leave, leveraging the growing power in the driver market as well. So, you know, making sure that wasn't just sat there expecting it to come to him, always proactive. - Yeah, I don't think Verstappan's, and you have to consider them as Verstappan's, it's Joss, Max, and Raymond Femoulin, the manager. They are just one unit really, in terms of negotiations and where they want to be. I don't think you can think of the Verstappan Red Bull relationship as like a fairy tale intimate all one thing like Michael Schumacher at Ferrari, or even Lewis Hammond and Mercedes, that wasn't quite as tight as Michael and Ferrari, but even that, it's very much good for hire and are you my best option at the moment? And there have always been very prepared to see what's out there and leverage any interest. And there's one, I think it was 2018, there was a chance that if there was gonna be a brick clause in the contract if he wasn't in a certain position in the championship by a certain date, he was potentially free in 2019. And I talk about it in the book where I'd arranged an interview with him at Silverstone, British Grand Prix, when all this was going on, when we were making overtures towards Mercedes, and we sat upstairs in the Red Bull hospitality, and it was looking out over the Mercedes truck with a big three-pointed star, and a photographer said, could you just move across a little bit so that the photographer's thing so I can get up and Max looked behind him to see what was there and he realized what the game was. He said, "Oh yeah, sure." So he's absolutely prepared to play the game. And yeah, I think that's just it, and they're very tough with each other, incredibly tough with each other. The two halves of that, they're the staff and Red Bull. But that's how they like it. That's how they both, you see them both at their best then. - Yeah, very much so. And perhaps it became most conspicuous all of this when there was the instability at Red Bull, which lasted probably for about a year where there was proper butting of heads. There was the wider context of Red Bull, the kind of battle for control, which eventually over a long period of time played out with Horned Aparting Marco. Gone, the staff and still remains there. Red Bull greater, corporate control. But you had this interesting thing, didn't you? Where you have Yoss, would occasionally make pretty incendiary comments about it. Max would be asked about them, would be fairly conciliatory, but he was always very good at making clear his position. I remember in Saudi Arabia a couple of years ago, him being asked kind of where he falls in line with the commentary on it, whether it's sort of on the Yoss side or any base. He said, "Well, I'm not going to slide aside "with someone else who isn't my dad, am I?" And I always thought it was revealing because I never, again, I never feel that it's just like he mindlessly follows. No, he has his own voice. And it kind of seems to work for them because Yoss is the kind of almost more a wrecking bull type figure who's very, very direct, can be very aggressive, not afraid to throw a grenade in there and all sorts of things. And then Max can kind of play off that and then Raymond's in the background doing the work there. So again, that unit seems to work really well. And ultimately, you'd have to say the outcome that they've got is what they want. Because otherwise Max would not have signed the new deal to 2030, yes, there's still escape clauses there. That would be lunacy not to have that in there. But he likes the idea, I think, of staying with Red Bull. There is loyalty there as well to the people immediately working around him. But he always said, "Well, there are certain things "I needed to see." So again, leveraging that power, controlling your destiny. Again, it's team for staff and making sure they get what they need out of it to have the success that they need. Yeah, and I think pulling that together, sort of pulling that back from uncompetitiveness to maybe fighting for championships again in the future would give a more satisfaction and just switching to whatever the fastest team is at the moment and winning there. I think you said after winning the first title, that was it, that was the goal and never achieved it. And you said everything else, it's just you're just repeating it 'cause you enjoy it. You just indulge in yourself almost. So the numbers mean nothing. When you're looking at it like that, when you approach it in that way, who cares, whether you've got one championship or ten championships, no matter if the goal was won. And I'm just doing more of the same 'cause I like it. So that's a liberating way to approach it and you get the sense that is how he looks at it. Yeah, I think that's the big thing with Max. The fact he still does seem to love it. And the fact that he will take his sim rig to Grand Prix and he will do sim racing in spare time on weekends. He will go and race at the Nurburgring, he will drive other things. It doesn't matter. It doesn't seem in any way to be a driver, a person who is tired of the sport to sing. He's not falling out of love with more racing, at all. He might fall out of love with F1 at some point, but he's not going to fall out of love with the sport. Let's move on now to fast forward where we try and take the bigger lessons from what we've seen from this story. I guess the big thing is this idea of manufacturing a driver. I think there is a concern I've got that this is now seen as a template, and I think people will try and replicate it, and I think that's a very, very dangerous path to go down, because it's a unique set of circumstances, and for some of the reasons we've alluded to, with a lot, I think it would have gone quite badly wrong for the child involved, should we say. So, I feel like this is very, very hard to repeat, but it's something that a lot of those teams now who are signing more and more carters, you're seeing more of these drivers who are developed from an earlier age, Mercedes were coming out, and so on and so on, so this is the lightening in a bottle that everybody's trying to reproduce now. Yeah, there's probably learning to be taken from it, and I think some of the better driver development programs are probably understanding some of those lessons, but in terms of a being a template, no, absolutely, it should not be, because these were unique, absolutely unique circumstances, and a particular remarkable personality that was able to withstand that, and it could just as easily of destroy them. Well, I would say probably it should fail, because I think it's really easy to look at it as well, all those ingredients. Of course, it was going to happen, but I think there are so many ways for this to trip up quite nastily, that you have to that point, you zero don't know, the specific personality of Max, and the fact he was primarily self-motivated to do this is really, really crucial, and again, alluded to all these stories and other sports, there's lots of cases where that is not the impetus, and the impetus comes from elsewhere, which is where it can go really well. Yeah, I think that's a saving grace of the story, that it wasn't actually Yoss's project, Yoss agreed to do it, but I don't think the impetus came from him, and that's the way that Sophie tells it, that's the way that the friends that were around them at the time, that's the way that the carting people that were around them at the time, that's the, he said, he was absolutely, he could not stop him, he just was not satisfied until he was in that cart, and once he was in that cart he was not satisfied until he was racing, the other kids, even when he wasn't old enough to do it, he was still, he just hated the injustice of that. Why, why kind of race? I'm faster than those guys, we've done a test, I can go half a second quicker than him, he's allowed to race, why am I? It's just that, you can still hear that voice in him now, is this, you know, that's just to raise, and that's that's why I worked, that, you know, off the scale, tell him. And the unique experience of Yoss has to play a part in that, I think, because it's all of us in life, I think any of us being honest with ourselves, one of the things you would like to do is go back to yourself, I don't know, 15 or 20, and just download a load of knowledge, if you just knew and understood this, all this hard work, hard earned experience and knowledge, if you could download that, then we'd all do better at everything, wouldn't we? I'll be sitting here talking to you. No question. Definitely, definitely, that's a fork in the road, isn't it? All those early mistakes lead you on this, on this path, but I think that's why it's so hard to see this sort of thing repeated, because I don't think you can get that ingredients, and you also need the the basic physiological raw material, and while sort of referred to that as being in the DNA, it is to an extent, but also, you can't guarantee it's there. No, it's not, it's not something you can kind of oven bake and create, and history's full of people who've tried this kind of thing, and it leads in very bad directions, but it's, there are bits of good fortune in there as well, in terms of no matter what the environment, the breeding to use that word, all of these things, there's no guarantee it works, even though it seems like, of course, it's going to work when you look at it from this perspective. Yeah, from hindsight, from the other end of telescope, but yeah, it's it's absolutely not, I can't say that, more clearly, it can't be a template. Yeah, so hopefully people take that on board, but it does make for a unique story. I don't think it's any driver like Max was stopping in that regard, in terms of that combination of of things of the abilities, and so that physiological ability, that comfort with rear end instability, which I can send will always make you quicker, because if you can handle that sensitivity, if you can rotate the car quicker early in the corner and get on the gas, you're going to be faster. Exactly, not two is about that. And for a lot of drivers, that becomes a, that becomes a spin. Yeah, it's gone too far in over rotation, and this is what Schumacher had, it's what the staffen has, and that's something that can be harnessed as well. So how much of that is, was there in nature, how much of it is nurture? I mean, some of it is about the raw materials, but it's about how that raw material is honed. And actually, the sim racing is such a fantastic element of this, a fascinating element, because I think there's a spirit of experimentation there, with the sim driving, and also the ability to almost hack your brain to deal with some of these more extreme car dynamics, because ultimately, if you do that in a real car, you might back yourself into a wall and do thousands of dollars worth of damage or more, but you can do that in a sim racing car. And we're seeing now generations of drivers who are all experienced with this kind of thing, even in home sims. And it's interesting to see if that's broadening that skill set as well. So maybe there's a lesson there as well, but it's also just a lesson in the total dedication needed, the total dedication of the individual in max, the total dedication of YOS there as well, and the environment and getting the right people and the right decisions, all those things you have to do, and being determined not to take second best or just assume it's going to pay off. I guess that's perhaps the one thing that you can take for any aspiring driver. Make sure you are willing to put the energy in and you're willing to go the extra mile, and make sure you do whatever you can to control the environments that you're in, because that's the best way to take the random factors, the external factors off the table. Yeah, I think it was fast-tracked because of YOS, and YOS did a fantastic job in charting a course through those waters, and did a fantastic job in leveraging the resultant interest in them. So I think you do have to give YOS a lot of credit to how effective that was. Yeah, and the result is one of the greatest Formula One drivers of all time, and a driver who, when he retires, I think there's going to be a good case he could put that he is the greatest of all time. Those are debates that will go on forever and can never be definitively resolved, but that's the class of driver. Oh, yeah, absolutely of that colour. He's already in that conversation. And there's many, many, many more racists to come for. Max Verstappen, he signed on with Red Bull until the end of 2030, so who knows what achievements lie in the future. But hopefully we've given you a little bit of an understanding of how he came to be the role YOS played, and why this is not a template for manufacturing drivers, but is its own unique story. We hope you've enjoyed this episode of F1 Rewind. Let's know in the comments what you think, and please do like, subscribe, follow, recommend to friends, review all of those things, help us get the podcast out there, and help us have the opportunity to talk about more of these amazing subjects. So thank you very much Mark, thanks to everyone for listening. Join us again for another episode of F1 Rewind. The Athletic.