Max Verstappen | The face of Red Bull legacy Premium

In this profiler by The Hindu, find out about the journey of Red Bull Formula One driver Max Verstappen. Subscribe now to read the full story.

“There is no such thing as a low-risk lap in Monaco; it doesn’t exist if you want to be fast because you have to be on the limit”, said a 17-year-old Max Verstappen, after he crashed in the qualifying race of the 2017 Monaco Grand Prix, and then out of the main race halfway into it. The narrow streets of Monaco are unforgiving as the youngest entrant of Formula One (F1) would learn. But as his name goes, he never settled for anything below his maximum.

Fast forward to 2023, the two-time world champion has tweaked his explosive driving style to become a serial winner. He emphatically qualified in pole position of this year’s Monaco Grand Prix and then won the main race on May 28 for the second time in his career — battling the rain-soaked French Riviera track — by a mind-blowing margin of 27 seconds, ahead of the second-placed Fernando Alonso.

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If pressure makes diamonds, Verstappen had all the right stressors in his journey. He inherited a racing DNA from his mother Sophie, a former mini-kart racer, and father Jos, a former F1 driver, and had his development phase under the eternally self-correcting Red Bull, and teammate Sergio Perez, who has himself won two out of six races this season to push Verstappen. But the journey was far from a straightforward one.

In 2015, when he made his F1 debut with Red Bull’s junior team Scuderia Toro Rosso, at 17 years and 166 days old, he was far from flawless, often picking up penalties for dangerous driving and scorns from peers for being reckless; ingredients that earned him Rookie Of The Year and the Personality Of The Year awards. When he was promoted to Red Bull, his karting style of being too late to brake, a technique called dive-bombing, or under-braking irked his peers on the circuit. Kimi Raikkonen would go on to remark that he would someday cause a major accident. Charlie Whiting, F1 race director, also implored the prodigy to tone down his aggression.

Verstappen had to unlearn a win-at-all-cost attitude from his karting days to learning self-preservation. For someone who had built his early career finding unseen lines on the road, Verstappen’s promotion to the senior-most level came with a huge risk for Red Bull because accidents and crashes in an F1 livery meant expensive repairs. But his shortcomings quickly made way for maturity while remaining hell-bent on winning. He clarified soon after his early struggles that he doesn’t need anyone shouting at him for his mistakes.

His first F1 win came aged 18 in 2018, which involved beating the likes of Sebastian Vettel, Kimi Raikkonen and Daniel Ricciardo, who held five world championship titles and hundreds of race wins between them at the time. Verstappen built a reputation of being a resilient driver who refused to be a pushover simply because his opponents were legends. In fact, tricky race conditions like rain would bring out his best.. As a young boy, he would drive with frosted fingers to take full advantage of empty tracks. This conditioning paid off on several occasions, most memorably a third-place finish in the drenched 2016 Brazil Grand Prix, a title-winning first-place finish at the 2022 Japanese Grand Prix and many more.