Max Verstappen’s talent is almost always a positive for his Red Bull team, but there was one occasion on which his driving ability actually rather got in the way
Max Verstappen is quite good at driving fast cars.
Obviously, that is a laughable understatement. He is a three-time world champion at the age of 26 and the dominant fashion in which he secured his most recent crown was unlike anything seen before in Formula 1 history.
Understandably, his colleagues at Red Bull absolutely adore him for it. But that outrageous talent of his has also proven to be a hindrance for his team in the past – as explained by technical director Pierre Wache when he recalled the 2020 season.
It was an era in which Mercedes were still the dominant force on the grid. Lewis Hamilton won his seventh title that year while Verstappen had to settle for third with two race victories. Red Bull were the champions’ nearest challengers, though they finished a distant second, 254 points adrift.
“We started 2020 not far off Mercedes and we had a massive down in the middle of the season before coming up again,” said Wache at the end of that season. “Clearly, we went in the wrong direction and we recovered – that’s where we missed something in our analysis in terms of development direction.
“We identified that and what the driver could use as performance. We had some characteristics that made it very difficult to extract the theoretical performance from and what we identified after mid-season – this characteristic was the main limitation of the car and we moved away from it. At the end of the season we could confirm this and that gave us a good foundation for ’21.”
It is not uncommon for F1 teams to take the wrong development direction. The teams are all blessed with an abundance of talent and some of the finest engineering minds in the world – but the detail of the regulations and the hunt for marginal gains make it very easy for teams to disappear down the wrong rabbit hole.
As Wache explained, Verstappen’s remarkable ability to get the best out of a twitchy and unstable car in the corners took them in the wrong direction that year. It was only when team-mate Alex Albon was being left further behind, and the Dutchman himself eventually hit a wall in terms of performance, that Red Bull realised they were barking up the wrong tree – but months too late.
The Frenchman continued: “Max’s ability was a contributory cause to the problem we had. He has an ability to control this sort of instability that would be impossible for some others. We know that, sometimes, making a car on the edge in this way can create a quicker car.
“You don’t realise you went too far in the wrong direction because you are extracting more lap time from the car. And that was only because he has so much talent.
“So you keep going in this direction but you go too far. After his feedback – and he gave us some help – you are in so competitive a situation and the system is so big, to revert to what you did is quite long and painful.
“It’s a big gain for him having so big a talent that he can set up the car with some rear instability and extract more performance from a given car. But also, if we cannot give him a car that is not stable enough, it’s not good. It’s a shame, but him having so much talent heightened the problem.”
