It’s Monza weekend and the last race for the Formula One European season is upon us. Ferrari work all year to ensure they have a competitive car for their home race in Italy, but it seems other teams too have stepped it up for the Italian Grand Prix.
Just 0.4 seconds covered the top ten in final qualifying and for Kimi Antonelli to be less than 50 milliseconds from his team mate it was a much better day than he has seen for quite some time. Yet it was Max Verstappen and Red Bull who were the stars of qualifying, whilst the margins were thin it was he who built steady progression into the sessions claiming the fastest lap of all time in an F1 car.
Red Bull brought a new floor for the weekend in Monza, which certainly hasn’t hurt the pace of the RB21, although Max believes crediting this upgrade with the turnaround is too simple an explanation. Verstappen began the weekend half a second off the pace then in second practice he narrowed the gap to just under two tenths. Come final practice he was now just 0.15s away from the top of the time sheets and a stunning final lap in qualifying saw him pip Norris to pole by just 77 milliseconds.
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Setup changes: “Small steps” the secret
Yet the weekend could have gone differently as Verstappen reveals given members of his engineering team wanted to take the setup of the car in a different direction. When the final call had to be made he overruled them and his conviction was proven to be correct.
Red Bull arrived in Northern Italy unsure as to how well the RB21 would adapt from the previous weeks high downforce setup to probably the lowest of the year. “We have obviously learned and understood quite a lot since last year,” he said. “The car is quite different from last year, although this season we’ve still had plenty of struggles with the car balance. That meant it was still a bit of a question mark to us how good or how bad the car would be here.
“But on Friday I was more satisfied with the balance than usual, and I think we know a bit better how to set up the car by now. That allows us to make small steps after each session instead of having to change a lot of things throughout the weekend. Obviously that has helped me a lot in qualifying.”
Learning from Zandvoort
In fact such was the simplicity of the weekend Verstappen admitted he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had such a relatively uncomplicated Friday/Saturday preparation. “That has been a very long time ago,” he said. “Also, the fact that we have only changed small things throughout the weekend has been a long time ago.”
Max emphasised the improvement in the RB21 was less to do with the floor and more from learning done amongst the dunes of Zandvoort last time out. “I think we have learned quite a lot about this year’s car in Zandvoort, and I hope that we can use that knowledge for the rest of the season,” he added.
“Of course, I have to say that our car works a bit better on medium- and low-downforce tracks anyway, because we always have quite a lot of understeer in the middle of the corners. That’s something you can manage a bit better around this track.”
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Verstappen over rules his engineers
Clearly there was doubt amongst even Verstappen’s closest of engineers over his choice of final setup before the qualifying hour. When told he had topped the time sheets, Verstappen was heard telling his engineer Gianpiero Lambiase. “It worked! Relax there, it’s all good,” almost an “I told you so.”
“Before qualifying, some people within the team wanted to try something else with the set-up, but I said: ‘No, we shouldn’t do that,’” Verstappen revealed. “When I walked back to my room, I could still see some faces and a few people doubting that set-up direction. But I just felt, ‘this is what we need to do,’ and luckily it worked out.”
“Well, in the end you make these decisions with multiple people, also with GP [Lambiase] and some other people around me. Of course, I also understand why certain questions were asked and why some people might have preferred a different direction. But in the end, I’m the one sitting in the car and feeling certain things. I felt that we had to make just a few small changes and that it would be better then.”
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Verstappen: No mistakes
Of course even a car with the right setup needs its drivers to execute the lap accurately, something Verstappen believes he also delivered. “In both of my Q3 laps I didn’t have any big mistakes,” he said. “That’s always quite tricky to achieve at this track. Braking from such high speeds into these two chicanes, it’s not always easy to hit the apex properly, but today it all came together.”
Max was quicker than both McLaren’s in a straight line which may prove crucial come the race on Sunday. The MCL39 also has a less powerful DRS than some of the other teams, so a combination of the two may help Verstappen defend his lead when under attack.
“I think I have a little bit more top speed, but ultimately you need to go fast around the corners as well,” he explained. So now it seems Verstappen is now Red Bull’s chief strategist, lead engineer and part-time motivational speaker. While Milton Keynes crunches numbers, Max simply sits in the cockpit, shrugs, and says, “Nope, we’ll do it my way.” And more often than not, he’s right.
It does raise the question of what happens when he eventually calls one wrong. Would the team dare say “told you so”? Probably not. This is Max Verstappen: driver, set-up guru, and the man who turned “Horner’s monster” into Monza’s pole-sitter.
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Sergio Perez will return to the Formula One grid for his sixteenth season of racing since his debut in 2011 for Sauber. His big break came following the announcement in 2012 that Lewis Hamilton was leaving the McLaren team for Mercedes and Checo was recruited as his replacement.
Perez quickly developed a reputation for aggressive driving with his team mate Jenson Button criticising his race craft after the 2013 Bahrain Grand Prix. “I’ve raced with many team-mates over the years and with quite an aggressive team-mate in Lewis, but I’m not used to driving down the straight and then my team-mate coming along and wiggling his wheels at me and banging wheels with me at 300km/h. I’ve had some tough fights in F1 but not quite as dirty as that. “
His McLaren career lasted just one season and the Mexican driver left to join the Silverstone based Force India team for 2014. Yet it was following the announcement he would be leaving the team at the end of the 2020 season, when he claimed his maiden F1 victory in the Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain…. READ MORE
A.J. Hunt is Senior Editor at TJ13, where Andrew oversees editorial standards and contributes to the site’s Formula 1 coverage. A career journalist with experience in both print and digital sports media, Andrew trained in investigative journalism and has written for a range of European sports outlets.
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