Max Verstappen

Max wanted to fight Ocon when Ocon drove him of the track when Max was in winning position and Ocon was a lapped driver. Not elegant, but understandable.

My personal opinion is that that particular steward IS an idiot.

 

Journo-s:
"Max, are you worried about starting from the pit lane?
Do you think it's fair?
Maybe they should have brought you to start a full lap behind others?"

Max:
"Yea, it would have been much more fair then, but I will win this race anyway. And 5 next races as well. Hahahah ... "

 

Man........ can't say what I want to say.

 

Sure - we disagree on this. Fine.

 

Why he has the car to do what has been shown. Start any position and pass to win. This is nothing new in F1. He has the car. He takes a car that can win and does so. Just like MS, LH etc etc. You need a capable car and a capable driver. They need each other. It only demonstrates how not equal things are. Thats ok. Its life!

 

It's ... not about the car.

New facts arose about Max Verstappen's dominant performance in 2022, when the journo-s found out about a secret 'butt cushion' that helps him swipe the car around the corners like it was flying.
Truly amazing!

As experts say, it was also beneficial in eliminating porpoising on RedBull car and very inline with budget limits for teams in 2022.

"Red-Bull" drink maker seems to be denying those facts, saying that nothing but Red-Bull gives Max such speed during the race. Butt ... (pun intended) ... some dare to say differently.

Stay tuned for more news on Max on our channel.

 

In fairness to Chuck, he hasn't been racing at the very top level of motorsport for long at all, where the pressure is immense, and especially at Ferrari. Max is already a seasoned F1 veteran in spite of his young age.

 

Second youngest driver to race for Ferrari in the team's history. No team is under as much scrutiny as Ferrari and Leclerc is dealing with that just fine.

 

Agreed. The bigger issue is the pitwall and reliability. Lec made 2 mistakes this season, and especially Imola was relatively easily done. From a team that let him down so often this season already (forget the incredibly poor 2020 and 2021 cars), he remains remarkably composed. What goes on behind closed doors is fine, but so long dirty air isn't vented to the outside too often, zero issues.

 

Just curious: who was the youngest? For a long time Ferrari has only taken on only experienced drivers. The last time they had a rookie driver was AFAIK in the late seventies (Gilles Villeneuve)

 

Ricardo Rodriguez at 19yo.

 

Ricardo Rodriguez from 1961-1962. I think he was 19 and scored four points total.

 

I have associated Ricardo Rodriguez as always linked to NART but indeed, he was a works Ferrari F1 driver in 1961 and 1962.
His results:

1961
32° Gran Premio d' Italia DNF

1962
12° Grote prijs van Nederland (22° Grand Prix of Europe) DNF
20° Grand Prix de Monaco DNS
22° Belgian Grand Prix 4th
48° Grand Prix de l'A.C.F. DNA
15° British Grand Prix DNA
24° Großer Preis von Deutschland 6th
33° Gran Premio d' Italia 14th / DNF
5° United States Grand Prix DNA

In those days only points for the first 6 finishers so 3 points (4th place) and 1 point (6th place). Extremely fast driver, made fatal but understandable mistake in accepting to drive a Lotus in the 1962 Mexican Grand Prix (his home GP).

 

In fact it was Ferrari withdrawing its entry to the Mexican GP that brought that turn of events.
Ferrari had a disastrous 1962 season after losing some of its engineers at the end of 61.
That was a serious affront to both Ricardo and the Mexican organisers.
The race had been added to the calendar that year to honour the local hero.
It would have been unthinkable that Ricardo didn't race in his home GP; luckily Rob Walker offered a seat in one of his Lotus.
Rob Walker has a private team who had some success against factory teams: he had won 3 Monaco GPs, for example.
At the end of 62; the Lotus 24 was certainly not inferior to the Ferrari, as results show.
Ricardo lost control at the Peralta during the last practice session.
For more details about the events around that GP, and the accident, read Jo Ramirez' memoirs.

 

The Lotus 24 was a better car than the 1962 Ferrari, but the common practice of Colin Chapman to "add lightness" made his cars a lot more frugal (and therefore dangerous in a sport which was already very dangerous by nature).

This makes me wonder how many of the current drivers would have had the same style of driving in the fifties / sixties.....

 

F1 drivers, when asked, which car would you drive given a choice.

A) Would you drive the faster and lighter car?

Or

B) Would you drive a safer car that adds 25kg of weight with a higher survivability for the driver?

Most chose option A.

 

Allegedly, Jochen Rindt was told by his agent, a certain Bernie Ecclestone, that he would more likely stay alive if he stayed at Brabham, but he would have more chance to win the world championship if he drove a Lotus. We know the rest. It's probably a front brake driveshaft* failure on the Austrian's Lotus that caused the Monza accident.
Rindt had previously voiced his concerns about the Lotus fragility in a letter to Colin Chapman.

Also, a few years later, Mario Andretti related a conversation he had with Chapman when he drove for Lotus.
Chapman: I want to built cars as light as possible.
Mario: I want to stay alive as long as possible.

Chapman's idea of a racing car would be one that would literally collapse after crossing the finishing line. Many Lotus didn't reach that !

*The Lotus 72 had inboard front brakes to reduce "unsuspended weight", another of Chapman's pet hates.

 

I believe there's a copy of a letter Rindt sent to Chapman in the Bernie biograph, if not then another book I have somewhere, but he plainly stated that he feared for his life in Colin's cars, but obviously still drove them. Also, and I know you know this, I'm not trying to teach you, but for information. While it was brake failure that most likely caused Rindt's crash, it should have been survivable. the issues were first the Armco was not properly bolted together so when he hit, the barrier pulled away and his car hit the support post hard. Then he refused to wear crotch straps on his harness so only had four belts. Some say it was a manly issue of not want to crush his gentleman's appendages, others say that he thought he could get out of a burning car faster with only four belts. Either way he submarined on impact as he slid down not being properly restrained, and the belts slit his throat. Very sad day.

 

On Max, it's funny that some are saying he had support but now it's waning due to his success. I'm the opposite, and so are several other friends. I couldn't stand him when he started. He was a snotty arrogant little **** who could do no wrong in his own eyes. He was making a lot of too low percentage pass attempts and taking people off, or exceeding track limits etc. to pass. Nothing was his fault, and it was all a conspiracy theory against him. This wasn't helped by the fact he drives for RB who's management team I have no respect for on the human level. He was not really that much different from Carlos or Daniel as team mates once you take out luck and team treatment. Especially when they started blaming Ricciardo for the Baku incident when it was clearly 100% Max's fault. He was demonstrating a lot of the dangerous and unsportsmanlike behaviors that will prevent me from ever considering Senna or Schumacher as GOATs

But since then he's matured massively as a driver. Last year he fought hard, really hard, he and Lewis had a lot of back and forth, that supports/denigrators of both use to show their guy is the greatest, or the other is the anti christ, but I called it hard and fair. He did get lucky with the Spa debacle and the Abu Dhabi MAsi call, but both had good and bad luck. But I've got no major beef with the guy over the last couple of years, and no doubt this year he's got a great car that is sometimes the fastest, and sometimes behind the Ferrari, but he and the team are both delivering at the top of their game and will win it easily and deservedly.

Oh, and anyone saying Ferrari are going to have to watch out or no drivers will want to drive for them in the future based on their car, team performance etc. needs to go and study some history. The periods of pain come and go, there have been lean periods in every decade with the possible exception of the 00's and the team has been knows to be a hard place for drivers since it's inception.

 

I have the same opinion about Max. He is a worthy champion.

 

I used to call him Max Vercrashin. not anymore

 

Talking about last season (2021), some may not quite agree with that.
But this year, with new car's regulations, RedBull are earning WDC & WCC titles on their own.

On a side note - A pity that Ferrari lost their race pace during the season. With more races they should understand tyre management more, not less :/

With the end of Merc-AMG domination, there started RedBull domination era, and now who will kick out the RedBull?
Probably it might be Merc-AMG again.

 

Hopefully some other team (from Italy). Except for one freak season with Brawn in 2009, it's mostly been a Red Bull/Merc seesaw for a VERY long time now.......

 

Lotus had bad reputation back in the day but a guy bothered to check the stats and found that actually their safety record was just slightly below average. Probably they got more attention because those fatalities were high profile drivers. Well, and because a well funded team is expected to be above average.

 

Thankfully not all Lotus failures ended in fatalities, but with Chapman's obsession with lightness, his cars had some sort of inbuilt fragility that became very quickly apparent.
Well before Lotus became an household name in F1, many of its Junior, F3 and F2 sold to private owners regularly suffered suspension failures, hub breakages, collapsed wheels, etc ... and became expensive to own because as they needed new components very often. I remember that in the 60s, Lotus had a bad reputation in the lower categories because of this, and other builders like Brabham, Merlyn, Tecno, and March took its share of the market.