Max Verstappen: Formula 1's 'bull fighter' & the family that shaped him
Max Verstappen, aged two years and eight months at the 2000 European Grand Prix at the Nürburgring, where father Jos was 13th
"He was driving all the time. He had a feeling with an engine. Didn't matter whether it was a quad bike, an electric jeep - you know, the small things for children - or whatever. He was always busy with driving. Every day he needed to be on it." Max was at a race track near their home in Genk in Belgium with family members. "He was half-crying," Jos recalls. "He was four and a half and there were younger people driving and he wanted to drive as well. So that's when it all started."
"Without my dad I wouldn't be sitting here right now," Max says. "Since he stopped racing in F1, he basically spent all his time preparing me in the best way possible. We grew up together, he was my go-kart mechanic. Driving with the van from Holland or Belgium to all the go-kart races all over Europe.""We still have that go-kart," Jos says. "It is hanging in the Verstappen shop. I remember the first time he got in it.
"But you could see, compared to all the children of his age, he was definitely a lot further than the others. Also, we were competing against children two or three years older and that makes quite a big difference.""It was tough," Jos says, "because the tyres were soft and at the end of the race you could see he was tired. But that showed his character, the way he was competing. He didn't mind if other people were older or whatever, he wanted to win.
"So I prepared ourselves really well and he loved it. Us two in the van going there. He was sleeping all the time. You see a lot of things happening on the track and on the way you talk about the situations to tell him how it should be - really educational about how to race. Verstappen , pictured in March 2010, aged 12, celebrates victory at La Conca, Italy, on his KF3 debut
Frits van Amersfoort is a Dutch racing team owner who ran Max Verstappen in Formula 3 in 2014. It would be his only year in single-seater racing before progressing to F1. "In a lot of different ways. Nice ways. A bit more angry ways. No, it works for me. I needed it. He made me toughen up, which is good."
Manor, as it happens, also gave Hamilton his first run in a racing car, in 2001. The circumstances were different. Where Verstappen had a track to himself, Hamilton was at a group test, with all manner of other cars around of varying performance levels, and the test was at Mallory Park, another tiny circuit, in Leicestershire, not so far away from the UK's motorsport hub.
Verstappen did a few more Formula Renault tests over that autumn and winter, and was quick everywhere. Jos and their manager Raymond van Beuren decided they could skip that category and go straight for Formula 3. Max won 10 races that year, one more than Esteban Ocon, but lost the title to the Frenchman - himself now also an F1 driver - largely because of an engine failure at a race towards the end of the season. The punishment for it was 10-place grid penalties at three separate races.
Drivers are meant to go step-by-step through the junior categories. F3 would normally be the second or more likely third category they do, and many drivers spend more than one year in each category. Only the special ones need just one year in each, never mind just one in anything, before reaching F1.
To illustrate Max's determination and single-mindedness, Van Amersfoort recalls an incident at the end of that year. "Max was P2 in the qualifying race but he didn't give up," Van Amersfoort says. "He crashed the bloody car trying to win pole. That's Max. Verstappen won F1's driver of the day at the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where Lewis Hamilton took a crucial victory
Jos says he "doesn't know" where Max developed that style. "He did it in go-karts," he says, "so I don't see anything different. When he sees the gap, when he has that feeling he can overtake, he will go for it." Max says: "My dad sometimes was a bit worried that I couldn't be bothered or I was too relaxed, but I said: 'Dad, don't worry. This is just the way I like it and how I approach to get into a race weekend or, like, my zone.'
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