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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
**FULLY UPDATED PAPERBACK EDITION OF THE BESTSELLING BIOGRAPHY ON Max Verstappen, NOW DOUBLE WORLD CHAMPION** Few drivers have shaken up Formula 1 in quite the same way as Max Verstappen. Already the youngest competitor in F1 history, he made history as the first Dutch driver to win the World Championship in 2021. In 2022 he retained his title with four races to spare and went on to achieve the highest season points tally of all time. As the son of former F1 driver Jos Verstappen, Max was destined to be a racing driver. And as sports journalist James Gray deftly shows, since his headline-grabbing debut victory at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix, Max has continued to make an indelible impression on the sport, courting criticism and plaudits in equal measure. Gray seeks to understand the outspoken nature and aggressive driving style that make Verstappen a must watch before, during and after races, and why his Dutch fans, who turn up to cheer him on in their orange-clad droves, are quite so fanatical.
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CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
‘We need a miracle.’
Red Bull boss Christian Horner meant it. Max Verstappen was trying to chase down Lewis Hamilton in the final stages of the most dramatic title race of the modern era, the two drivers perfectly level on points before the race but the British driver now ahead on the track. In the stands, thousands of orange-clad Dutch fans with nails bitten down to the quick clasped their hands together in prayer to whatever deity they thought could bring the intervention that Max needed to close the gap.
On that day, Mercedes had the faster car. Abu Dhabi had often been a place they had dominated the racing, but Red Bull had been close enough for Verstappen to pinch pole position on Saturday. Hamilton, though, produced the perfect start off the line and surged into the lead, despite running on the harder medium tyre. Max’s soft tyre should have given him an early advantage, but Hamilton had cancelled it out. Formula One is a sport of compromise: reduce downforce for speed on the straights and you will have less grip in the corners; spend more money on a driver and you will have less to develop the car; pit for fresh tyres and be faster or stay out and maintain track position but with slower rubber.
Tyre strategy is crucial: softer tyres are faster but don’t last as long, so Max knew he had to make the first part of the race count. Running behind Hamilton was not part of the plan and viiiwould end in defeat. He lunged down the inside of the hairpin. For weeks, the chatter in the paddock had been about how aggressive Max would be in the final race of a season that will be remembered by many for a series of crashes between him and Hamilton. Just six corners in, Verstappen showed that once again, no quarter would be given.
Hamilton, knowing a crash that ended both their races would hand Verstappen the title, veered away from the corner. In Monaco he would have hit the wall. In Silverstone he’d have beached in a gravel trap. But in Abu Dhabi there is endless space. He circumvented turns six and seven, effectively going straight on. Max drove the track as it was intended and emerged from the corners more than a second behind Hamilton. His left thumb slammed down on the radio button.
‘He has to give that back,’ Max pleaded on the radio, a message less for his team and more for race director Michael Masi, the much-maligned referee of such incidents. The Australian disagreed and Hamilton continued in the lead. Red Bull’s lawyers scribbled furiously. Mercedes’ probably did too. No one was under any illusions about whether there would be a protest after the race. There would almost inevitably be a protest. It was simply a matter of who would be protesting what. Both hoped it would be the other.
And for the majority of the race, even as Sergio Perez played an invaluable pawn role in holding up Hamilton to bring Max back within a few seconds of the lead, it looked as though Mercedes would be celebrating and Red Bull would be litigating late into the Middle Eastern night and beyond.
Then, the miracle. Nicholas Latifi, who finished 17th in the World Drivers’ Championship, may never again have such a seismic impact on a world title race. The Williams driver hit the ixbarriers with five laps to go, blocking the track and bringing out the safety car. It eradicated Hamilton’s lead and allowed Max to dive into the pits for fresh tyres.
But Red Bull needed a little more of the miracle dust. There were still a number of back-markers who, by coincidence, had been caught between Hamilton and Verstappen in the safety car queue. They formed a protective barrier for Hamilton, who was probably starting to plan the acceptance speech that would see him crowned a record-breaking eight-time world champion.
Fate though had one final twist for him. Race director Masi ordered the lap cars to unlap themselves, but only those who were at risk of interfering in the race for victory. Had he ordered all of those behind Verstappen to follow as well, the race would have ended behind the safety car. There simply was not time to complete all the protocols. Hamilton would win the title ahead of Verstappen at 70 miles an hour. There would be more drama at the roundabout outside the circuit. Masi would not have it. He made a call. The safety car pulled in with a lap to go and the two mighty drivers were given a minute and a half to sort out the small matter of who would take the world title. It was a sudden death situation, the like of which Formula One has never seen and may never see again. The ultimate test of nerve.
On the pit wall, nerves, fingernails and race plans were long since lost. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff, an increasingly animated figure as the year wore on, was straight on the radio to Masi.
‘Michael, this isn’t right,’ Wolff said. He knew that Hamilton had old tyres and Verstappen new ones. It would take yet another miracle for the Mercedes driver to hold him off.
Things were no less tense next door in the Red Bull garage. While Wolff tends to sit at a monitor in the garage, Horner prefers to be up on the pit wall with Adrian Newey, whose xtechnical brilliance has been at the heart of so much success at Red Bull, sitting on his left. Horner’s eyes were on stalks, as wide as if he himself were driving the car, scanning the countless screens with every possible piece of data for any signs of trouble or opportunities for advantage. The truth was that there was nothing he could do. It was up to Max.
The driver himself was virtually silent. He had a few moments earlier voiced his frustrations at the ‘typical’ decision not to let the cars unlap themselves and give him a shot at Hamilton. As they moved out of the way, there was a mutual understanding on the airwaves of what this meant. His engineer Gianpiero Lambiase calmly talked him through the engine modes required for the final lap. After giving his technical instructions, he simply said: ‘This is it.’ 90 seconds later, he was screaming:
‘OH MY LORD, MAX.’
Max’s response was an unintelligible cry of pure emotion, the kind that had not been building for just a few seconds, minutes or hours, but for a lifetime. From practically the minute he was born, Max’s life had been leading to this point.
This is the story of how he got there.
1
BORN TO RACE
In a sport governed by the stopwatch, having a good sense of timing is important. Max Verstappen has never lacked that. Even his birth was conveniently timed.
With a due date at the beginning of October, it was likely that his mother Sophie Kumpen would have to rely on friends and family for support in the days after giving birth to her first child, rather than husband Jos. This was not because he didn’t want to be there, but because it was a busy time of year for a full-time F1 driver that would include the longest trip of the season to Japan.
Instead, Jos happened to be racing at the Nürburgring on 28 September 1997 while his wife crossed her legs at home in Belgium. He had been looking to challenge for a rare top ten finish for Tyrrell before he retired from eleventh place, seventeen laps from the end of the race. Some joked that he was hoping to get an early start on the 124-mile trip back to Belgium so as not to miss the birth of his son – he had already driven further than that on the track before being forced to leave his car parked at the side of the road. Fortunately for both parents, Max was born 2on 30 September 1997, two days after the Luxembourg Grand Prix. Even if he had been forced to drive his ailing Tyrrell home, Jos would have made sure that he made it back in time.
Max Emilian Verstappen seemed to be a healthy enough baby. Jos’ personal website, which remarkably existed way back in the late 1990s, records the birth in oddly forensic detail: his son’s weight was seven pounds, two ounces, his length 48.5 centimetres long and the delivery lasted just 40 minutes. Max, to quote, ‘had chosen the right moment to come out’. It goes on to predict that ‘if Max has inherited the racing talents of both his parents, a new F1 driver for the year 2020 has been born’. The prescience of that comment, which turned out not to be optimistic enough when you consider that Max made his F1 debut four years earlier than that, was not merely the exuberance of a new father. The racing pedigree of Verstappen Junior was impressive. That said, Jos was not overly enamoured with the trials of early fatherhood.
‘I have to say, the first year I wasn’t really into babies,’ Jos said in a 2021 documentary. ‘They don’t do very much.’ He added with a smile: ‘I was no expert when it came to changing nappies.’ His expertise lay on the track, he felt.
Jos had two nicknames in his career: ‘Jos the Boss’ and ‘Vercrashen’. Between them, they rather succinctly sum up how he was viewed by the racing community, as a strong, dominant character with a boot full of talent but an unfortunate habit of ending races in the wall.
Jos grew up a few miles from Hasselt, where he raised Max, across the border in the Dutch town of Montfort. He had come up through karting from the age of eight with no shortage of speed, and in 1984 and 1986 he won the Dutch Championship. In the modern era he might have been fast-tracked into a driver academy or one of the larger teams with seats in various series. 3Perhaps due to a lack of funding or political influence though, or just because he was such a talented karter and thoroughly enjoyed the success at that level, he was content to remain on the karting track until much later. Whatever the reason, Jos did not make the transition into car racing until he was nearly twenty. In those teenage years he went from winning national championships in the Netherlands and in Belgium to Continental ones; by the end of 1991, his victories could not be ignored any longer.
Triumphs in the 1993 Marlboro Masters (a Formula Three race day held at the famous Zandvoort Circuit) and the German Formula Three Championship in the same year earned him the chance to test an F1 car for a team then known as Footwork, although Arrows is how most race fans will remember them. They put him in their car at Estoril the day after the Portuguese Grand Prix, his first ever drive in the monstrous V10 engines that were prevalent at the top of motor sport at the time. It was a tremendous step up in pace for Jos, having only driven in F3 before jumping into the Footwork in 1993. He was going from 175 brake horsepower to 750, more than four times as much power under his right foot, as well as having to deal with a semi-automatic gearbox, traction control and carbon brakes. The extra speed through corners alone would make most drivers’ necks ache with G-force. Nevertheless, Jos the Boss took to it like a duck to water.
In his very first fifteen-minute run, he was on pace with the backmarkers of Sunday’s Grand Prix. After another five minutes on track he had matched Aguri Suzuki, the man usually behind the wheel of the car he had been given.
‘I must say I thought it would be quite difficult, the jump from F3 to F1,’ Jos told reporters at the time. ‘But really, it was not so difficult. On the first lap I thought, ‘Shit!’ I never thought it would be so fast. But by the third lap I was really enjoying it; it 4was fantastic. After ten to fifteen laps it feels normal and you find yourself wanting more. Still, it’s very fast.’
By the end of the day, in which he logged 65 laps and was left with a sore neck and shoulders, he produced a lap time that would have qualified him tenth on the grid if he had done it a few days earlier. He was only 0.07 seconds slower than Derek Warwick, Footwork’s lead driver with twelve years of F1 experience.
Even in that very first experience of F1 though, the watching media were treated to a reminder of the two-faced nature of speed. Verstappen returned on Thursday, still sore from his efforts two days before, and while he immediately started punching in lap times, he then lost it through the high-speed final sector and spun into the barriers. It signalled a premature end to the day – but it did not appear to do much to dampen the excitement around the name Verstappen. The phone started to ring off the hook.
‘We had contact with … most teams,’ Jos said in a revealing 2019 Beyond the Grid podcast appearance. ‘We did a day of testing with McLaren at Silverstone, we had contact with Eddie Jordan, Flavio [Briatore, boss of Benetton].’
Eventually, Jos chose what he felt was the secure option above all else, signing for Benetton because they offered him a two-year contract rather just a one-year deal. Initially, he was supposed to be a test driver in 1994 but when JJ Lehto broke his neck in a pre-season crash, Verstappen made his debut at the Brazilian Grand Prix alongside one Michael Schumacher. His meteoric rise, having spent barely two years in professional racing driving, was eerily similar to what his son would achieve two decades later.
Jos’ debut was no fairy tale. He had plenty to prove after Schumacher had out-qualified him by nearly two seconds to start second on the grid with Verstappen seven places behind 5him. Caught up in a frantic midfield battle for eighth place, he pulled out to overtake Eddie Irvine 36 laps into the race, only for the Jordan to move over to lap a backmarker, unaware he was being challenged, and collide with him. In a terrifying scene, Verstappen was powerless to stop his spinning car which then hit the braking McLaren of Martin Brundle and was thrown into the air, completing a full barrel roll before hitting the tarmac again and skidding off into the barriers. Remarkably, no one was seriously hurt, despite Brundle’s helmet splitting, so great were the forces involved.
‘I was never scared and it didn’t hurt my confidence at all. I never had a problem with that,’ Jos said with typical bravado.
He spun out of his second race too – ‘every time I was trying to match Michael’s pace, [the crashes] never stopped me trying’ – before Lehto came back from injury.
If Jos had learned anything from his first taste of F1 it was that physically he was not up to the game, but he had also quickly twigged that politically Benetton was Schumacher’s team first and foremost. That was not to say they did not rate Verstappen – after all, they had offered him a longer contract than any other team and when Lehto failed to produce his best form on returning from injury, Verstappen was reinstalled. By that point though, Schumacher had won five of the first six races and if they were predisposed towards him before, they were now entirely on Michael’s side. Jos insists that he understood but the frustration of feeling abandoned in his first ever season in F1, with less than three years of racing experience behind him, is clear.
‘All the testing went into the [mid-season] rule changes, not into helping me get confident in the car to make me faster. It wasn’t like it is today where they really help the other driver who is struggling but at that time they didn’t care.’ 6
When his son found himself in a similar position as the youngest driver on the grid and teammate to the vastly more experienced Daniel Ricciardo, Max did not lie down and accept any suggestion of a role as second fiddle. Perhaps his father, a close adviser throughout his life, had learned a valuable lesson from his rocky Benetton ride.
Despite the difficulties, Jos’ accession to the fastest circus in motor sport was a cause for celebration in Montfort and the town became, according to Jos’ father Frans, ‘a place of pilgrimage’. For years, Frans ran a pub called the Cafe De Rotonde, named after the large roundabout in the middle of town where it sits, and when his son was racing, he did big business. ‘Especially in the early years it was a madhouse,’ Frans said in 2015. ‘Back then, the entire street was closed off and there was a large tent running across the length of it. I had eighteen TV sets and the crowd numbered 2,000 or 3,000. This was the case during the races in Hungary and Belgium, where Jos finished third. After that, it was complete mayhem – the whole rotonde was jam-packed.’ Even now, only 3,000 people live in the whole of Montfort.
This is no exaggeration though. Blurry VHS footage from the day of the 1994 Hungarian Grand Prix, in which Jos drove from twelfth on the grid to finish third while his Benetton teammate Michael Schumacher took the win, shows Frans being held aloft on the shoulders of some pub patrons who, from their pained expressions, look as though they might have underestimated his hefty frame. Outside, the pavement is packed with parasols and beer barrels being used as tables. A group of men are dressed in traditional Flemish costume, which for the uninitiated might not look out of place in a German beer hall a few miles away, and they chant ‘Jos, Jos, Jos’, as well as some very lyric-heavy songs 7they have written about his exploits and heroism. One of them has a signed picture of Jos tucked into his hatband.
‘Jos brought that about and it is my belief that Max will stir up even more,’ Frans said. No pressure, kiddo.
By the time his grandson had made it into F1, Frans had given up the pub and moved to the other side of the roundabout to run an ice cream parlour, but that did not stop the partying, albeit with a bit less alcohol involved. When Max made his debut in F1 in Australia, the race was too early in the morning back in the Netherlands to run any sort of event but his second event in Malaysia would start at 9am, a reasonable hour for Frans to get a licence to start dishing out ice cream breakfasts.
He put up a marquee next to the shop and kitted it out with a speaker system and large TVs before filling it to the rafters with Montfortenaars. In his Toro Rosso, Max finished seventh, beating his teammate Carlos Sainz and both drivers for the more senior Red Bull team. There were jubilant scenes in Montfort. A lot of ice cream was sold. Frans said: ‘I am the most proud grandpa in Holland, rather yet … the world. I have never hidden that.’
The tradition continued with the party moving from a temporary marquee into Zaal Housmans, a cafe a couple of hundred yards down the road from the roundabout owned by Frans’ friend Harald Hendrikx. On race day, the street would practically be blockaded by fans trying to get parking close to the bar, Dutch flags with Max or Jos’ name painted on them hanging out of their windows, and Red Bull Racing caps and shirts everywhere.
The races would be shown on an enormous projector at the end of the room with memorabilia and sometimes a giant portrait of Max’s face sitting on the stage, more often host to a 8local band or an open mic night, next to the screen. The whole venue was bedecked in supportive flags and banners.
Contrary to what you might think, Frans wasn’t in it for the money. The proudest ‘Opa’ in the world convinced Harald to keep the beer prices reasonable and encouraged entire families to come and spend the afternoon watching the racing. He wasn’t profiteering, he merely wanted everyone to share in his joy (although if they wanted to buy any merchandise, he would also happily sell it to them). ‘Every Grand Prix live here at Opa Verstappens, free entry, everyone welcome,’ proclaims the sign outside Housmans, underneath which sits a replica of Max’s Red Bull Racing F1 car.
When Max won for the first time in Spain, Frans stood on the stage as his grandson sprayed champagne behind him, waving an enormous flag in celebration. Confetti dropped from the ceiling. Beers were downed. Frans had been at parties like this before, but never with a Verstappen on the top step of the podium. Finally, they had a Grand Prix win.
Frans passed away in 2019 at the age of 72, after a long battle with cancer, just a few days after Max had won his eighth Grand Prix. The hearse processed from the roundabout where he had poured beer for Jos’ fans in the nineties up to the hall where Max’s face adorns every surface. He left his bar for the last time with townsfolk holding red flares in the air. Despite their presence on the walls, Jos and Max were conspicuous by their absence. The grandson had only just won the race in Brazil and had not yet finished his racing season. Jos meanwhile did attend the funeral along with Max’s sister Victoria, but not the memorial in Housmans. It hinted that while Frans had always made out that his family were close-knit, it was not always the case.9
In 2016, police were called after a heated argument between Jos and Frans. It’s not clear what had caused the flashpoint. Max had just finished fifth at the Hungarian Grand Prix, meaning the party had been going for several hours which could explain it, but the police report records that Jos had pushed his father off his chair and he had fallen against the wall. Understandably, the incident made the national media in Holland. Having initially tried to deny anything ever happened, three days later Frans withdrew the complaint, calling it ‘a private matter between me and Jos’, before adding that ‘we’ve seen before that Jos has loose hands but this was the limit’.
What his father was referring to was the famous temper of ‘Jos the Boss’. He had a reputation as a driver of being someone not to be crossed but once he had retired, he found himself outside the F1 paddock where the deadly nature of the sport seemed to legitimise the odd outburst or confrontation; he was in the ‘real world’, where his actions had real consequences.
Frans was hardly a shrinking violet either. In May 1998, an argument broke out at a karting track in the Belgian town of Lanaken between Jos, who was there with his father, his group of friends and another group who wanted to use the facility. It quickly turned into a fight, in which a 45-year-old man was left with a fractured skull with Jos identified as the culprit in court. Under Belgian law, a financial settlement with the victim can reduce a defendant’s sentence, and sure enough the Verstappens, both of whom were found guilty of assault, got the chequebook out and were handed five-year suspended sentences each.
At the time of the incident, Jos was without a drive. He was dropped by Tyrrell for the simple reason that he was not fast enough and having tested back at Benetton, he was not given a contract because he could not raise the sponsorship. He was 10desperate to get back into an F1 car as soon as possible, with his reputation for raw speed ensuring his name was never far from the newspapers and magazines when someone was struggling.
It is easy therefore to see how he might have been eager to throw his weight around, with an ego still inflated enough to believe he had been wronged and to ensure he would take umbrage at being asked to share or even vacate a parochial karting track. Fortunately for him, the case took two years to go through the courts and the controversy did not stop Stewart giving him a drive just a month after the widely reported fracas, replacing the poor-performing Jan Magnussen (whose son Kevin would go on to race against Max in F1).
Jos’ temper did not seem to fade despite the close shave with time in prison. He appeared before the courts again in 2008, with assault on the docket once again, and Max’s mother Sophie the alleged victim. The pair had separated by then and she had a restraining order against him, but he was accused of an assault and a series of threatening text messages. He was found not guilty of the more serious violent charge but was guilty of breaching the restraining order and, not for the first time, was handed a suspended prison sentence.
The Dutch public opened their newspapers in January 2012 to discover that Verstappen Sr had once again been arrested, this time on suspicion of attempted murder. Jos had been detained in the Dutch city of Roermond after an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Kelly van der Waal. Some suggested he had driven his car at her, explaining the gravity of the charge. The case was dropped two weeks later and in 2014 the pair reconciled and got married. The ceremony was small and happened largely in secret. He and Kelly, along with a few guests, jetted off to the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao in January to get married by the 11beach. Jos wore a three-piece beige suit with bright white shoes while his bride wore a strapless bridal gown in a mermaid cut and a slightly sweetheart neckline. It was a setting and occasion from which the memories should have lasted for years to come – but the marriage lasted just three years.
The pair did have a child together; Kelly gave birth to a daughter, Blue Jaye, a half-sister to Max seventeen years his junior, whom he happily welcomed into the family just as he had his little sister Victoria when she came along a good few years before. Jos had a fourth child with partner Sijtsma on 4 May 2019, a boy named Jason Jaxx, and the four children regularly spend time together as a family.
Max is a caring and kind older brother. He had just turned two when his mother came home from the hospital with a little sister for him, but he was gentle and sympathetic, a skilled peacekeeper.
‘Victoria was the boss,’ his mother Sophie recalled years later. ‘Max would always give her the sticker or colouring book to keep the peace. It sums up his character, really: open and sweet. Max is an emotional person and will always want to solve things by talking first.’ She adds, a slight against her ex-husband: ‘He got that fierce racing instinct from Jos. The gentleness he got from me.’
Family life was not a struggle in the Verstappen household in the early years; Jos was making good money in F1, although he could have done without losing his drive after a contract holdout with Jordan that left him out in the cold once again. He was stripped of the chance to lead Honda back into F1 when the project crumbled due to the sudden death of his friend and former Tyrrell boss Harvey Postlethwaite. Nevertheless, his progress was perhaps stifled due to the fact that his manager, 12Huub Rothengatter, still believed he could extract hefty retainers for Jos’ services from teams despite the nickname ‘Vercrashen’ still following him round the paddock. ‘No one parks a car better than Jos Verstappen,’ the joke used to go, so often would he find himself stationary by the side of the track.
Little Max was blissfully unaware of the highly political nature of the F1 paddock. To him, his father was a travelling, conquering hero whom he hated to see leave. He would cry when Jos would leave home for a race weekend, not just because his father was going away but also because he knew he was going racing and he wanted to go with him. He would hang on to Jos and sob. He wanted to be at the racetrack, where everything smelled of petrol and speed.
Even before he could walk or talk, Max would play with toy cars or bikes, obsessed with anything with wheels. His parents tried to keep up with his hobby, insisting that they never pushed him into it but just let him do what he wanted to do. When he was two, Jos bought him a quad bike for Christmas. It was the Verstappens’ first Christmas as a four-person family with Victoria born in the October, so perhaps Jos was just trying to keep the peace, but more likely he was beginning his son’s training. More than a decade later, after a spectacular save in the wet during the Brazilian Grand Prix, Max cited his time riding a quad bike in the snow when explaining how he went about trying to stop an F1 car skidding. As he got older, and the quad and motocross bikes grew bigger and more powerful, he would ride around with his friends, racing them and messing around in the snow or the mud. He himself is not sure whether he was trying to hone his skills by competing or just enjoying himself; the upshot was the same – the development of an innate understanding of grip, especially in tricky conditions. 13
His mother Sophie said: ‘With his first balance bike, a kind of car that he had received from Mercedes, I can still see him skidding and making turns. The speed was there early on.’
Max did have other interests as a child. The house was something of a menagerie, with five cats, four dogs and a cockatoo. Max remembers that every now and again his father would come home with a new pet, and Sophie would be expected to look after them while Jos went around the world with work. An eighth-floor flat in Monaco is a little less pet-friendly, but that did not stop Max from getting two cats in 2021, Jimmy and Sassy, and enjoying their company while also getting frustrated at their habit of curling up underneath the pedals of his simulator on the rare occasion he would forget to shut them out of the room.
Young Max played football, not very well it should be said, but he was left-footed and tried hard, two qualities often high on the agenda for youth football coaches, and his father noticed that he always had good balance while running during the game, probably from spending so much time on bikes of one sort or another. He rarely enjoyed school, finding it hard to sit still and look at the board. He felt trapped. Sometimes he would ask to go to the toilet and never come back. On Wednesdays, lessons finished at 12pm and he would head straight to the track. Once he turned eleven and started secondary education, Jos picked the school he would go to on the basis that the principal had agreed to be flexible, because Max’s karting would require him to travel abroad. As long as Max kept his grades above a certain level, he would get the days off he needed to make the trips to bigger and better competitions. At 3.15pm on a Friday he would sprint through the school gates and jump in the van with his dad, off to some karting track in Italy or Holland or Germany. Sometimes 14all he would have in his rucksack was a spare set of underwear. Everything else he needed was in the workshop.
He did like geography though, probably the only subject he did like. His bedroom walls were not covered with posters of his favourite racing drivers like Ayrton Senna or Michael Schumacher, or stars of his favourite football team PSV Eindhoven, or even the great Johan Cruyff whose approach he said would later shape his approach to racing; instead, he had pictures of different countries and a world map. He wanted to know where everything was and to be able to point to the city his father was away in that week.
The first time he got to go with his father, his first real experience of F1 cars as far as either Jos or Max can remember, was when Verstappen Sr was testing for Arrows in 2000.
‘When we went testing I took him with me – just him and me – and someone from the team was looking after him when I was driving,’ Jos says. The team effectively ran a crèche for Max but the cars on the track were enough to fascinate him. Keeping him off the circuit itself was perhaps a greater struggle than keeping him entertained.
It got to a point where taking Max along with him was less of a battle than leaving him at home in Belgium, and Max’s face became a regular sight, running around the paddock and in and out of garages. It started in 2001 in Malaysia, when Max was just three and a half years old and Jos was into his second year at Arrows, the only time in his career that he completed two full consecutive seasons with the same team.
It cannot have been entirely pleasant for Max, with temperatures on the Friday afternoon reaching 37.6 degrees Celsius and humidity at 50 per cent, although his own memories were that the whole place looked like a giant playground. 15
‘Finishing is the most important thing,’ said a pessimistic Jos after qualifying eighteenth on Saturday. The team had been forced to replace the engine during practice on Saturday and the car was still understeering badly and needing a front suspension upgrade that would not arrive in time for the race. On the most physically taxing circuit of them all, he did not sound like he was looking forward to the race or expecting to produce anything for his son’s first appearance at a Grand Prix weekend. What followed was a race that his son’s modern-day fans would have recognised.
After an aborted start, Verstappen went from seventeenth to sixth on the very first lap after a late adjustment to the clutch that just seemed to work and sliced through several seemingly impossibly narrow gaps. ‘How on earth did that get there,’ commentator Murray Walker remarked upon telling viewers it was indeed the Arrows of Verstappen running in the points before noting that ‘this is Jos the Boss’s opportunity, and he knows it’.
The rain started to fall just a few laps into the race, catching both Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello, the leading Ferraris, out on the same corner. Fortunately for them, the extensive run-off areas at Sepang allowed them to keep the cars running and get on to the right tyre but it allowed the likes of Verstappen to move up the field even further. At one point, he was running second behind David Coulthard when his mirrors were filled with his former teammate Schumacher coming up behind. The German was on intermediate tyres, faster but less able to withstand large amounts of water on the track, while Jos was on the full wets. One-time teammates at Benetton, Verstappen was determined to make life as difficult as possible for Schumacher. He succeeded. Afterwards, Jos took it as a compliment when the 16reigning world champion mentioned it was ‘miserable’ trying to overtake him, although he did still manage to get past and went on to win the race.
Jos finished just outside the points in an agonising seventh place, the last car to remain on the lead lap: Schumacher had lapped everybody else. The Dutchman was torn between the emotions of a result far better than anyone could have predicted and missing out on an invaluable championship point by such a narrow margin. The rain had even taken the edge off the gruelling conditions. By the time he got to see Max again though, he was still understandably exhausted.
A friend snapped the two of them sitting in the hospitality area at the back of the Arrows garage at Sepang. Jos has his racing overalls peeled down and tied around his waist. Max, hair much blonder than it is in adulthood, has dressed up for the occasion, in a short-sleeved checked shirt with a button-down collar. He gestures to his father with two fingers while Jos looks quizzically at him. One hand on his father’s arm, Max looks as though he is giving him a stern debrief. ‘You were second, Papa, you could have finished second,’ he seems to say. Few would have predicted that the same boy would celebrate his twentieth birthday with a victory on that very track sixteen years later.
2
A DUTCH FLAG ON A BELGIAN RACER
The Netherlands is not traditionally known as a powerhouse of motor racing. It is a sport that in general comes as a by-product of other industries: America’s obsession with NASCAR came as a direct result of bootleggers building custom cars to outrun the police; in Finland, driving skills in all conditions are an essential part of survival which explains their love of rallying; Italian and German regimes set car production at the centre of their economic plan and their cars dominated, and still do dominate, the top end of motor racing; the British Empire similarly put England at the forefront of car technology in the first half of the 20th century.
For the Dutch though, the path to petrol-fuelled passion is not so clear. Traditionally a great seafaring nation, their flat, fertile land did little to inject racing into their veins and there were no multinational motoring giants based in the Netherlands to power their teams. While Max Verstappen is very much the present and future of Dutch motor racing, it is not altogether clear where the past originated.18
Race cars were first seen in the Netherlands, it seems, back in 1898. At the time, there were estimated to be just twelve cars in the whole country, so when the Paris–Amsterdam–Paris race blew through the country in July, it was not without some intrigue. The race was organised by the Automobile Club de France and inspired the inauguration of a similar Dutch body – the Nederlandsche Automobiel Club, which later became the Koninklijke Nederlandsche Automobiel Club (KNAC) thanks to royal recognition – to ‘promote the automobile industry in the Netherlands’. They would run club trips and conferences, lobby governments and even built hotels to improve the lives of motorists as the car began to take over Europe. They earned their ‘royal’ title in 1913 by helping the armed forces keep up with automotive progress elsewhere as war on the Continent approached. They fought hard for civilian rights on the road too, petitioning the government not to introduce speed limits or tolls. The three things they wished to promote among members were: road safety, driving skills and speed competitions.
A few races best described as ‘primitive’ were held in Scheveningen, another seaside resort close to The Hague, before World War I, but racing in earnest did not take place in the Netherlands for a few more decades. Sports cars were popularised, or at least entered the public consciousness, in the 1930s when Prince Bernhard, a KNAC member for more than 60 years, brought his two-seater Ford V8 to the Netherlands, and was also often seen in an Italian Alfa Romeo 8C 2900, of which only 40 were built. He was a popular if often controversial figure with a love for fast cars, boats and aeroplanes, but his work in World War II enamoured him to the Dutch public. For his wedding to Princess Juliana in 1937, Queen Wilhelmina ordered a Maybach Zeppelin, a particularly opulent German car with a 19twelve-cylinder engine, and had a custom four-seater convertible based on it built. Just a year later, in one of his other sports cars, the prince broke his neck and ribs in a 100 mph crash.
The appetite for fast cars was seized upon by the mayor of Zandvoort, Henri van Alphen. The town was a popular seaside resort, in striking distance of Amsterdam and The Hague, and is mentioned as a summer haunt of the family in Anne Frank’s diaries. Hoping to use the event as a billboard for the seaside resort, Van Alphen set up a street circuit through the town and managed to attract a number of global motor racing superstars to perform exhibition races on it. The highlight of the 1939 event was the presence of Manfred von Brauchitsch, one of the best drivers in the world who had won the 1937 Monaco Grand Prix and was employed as a works driver for the then-dominant Mercedes-Benz team. He drove his Mercedes W154 around the street circuit, which met itself in the middle, separating the two sides of the track with just a few straw bales, to the delight of the locals.
Just a few months later though, war broke out. It could have stopped Van Alphen’s grand plans to make Zandvoort the capital of motor racing in the Netherlands in their tracks, but like all great visionaries, he was not to be deterred.
After the German invasion of Holland and subsequent occupation, Van Alphen managed to convince the Nazi forces to continue his plans for the town’s racing infrastructure – although he dressed it up as something quite different. He presented them with a plan for a new park in the north of the town with a hiking trail winding its way around it that coincidentally looked a little like a rather handy racetrack. He included in the plans a long straight road that he said would make a fine street for a grand victory parade once the war was 20over. His plan was feasible, but the idea that it would make an idyllic hiking spot was rather far-fetched; the area he had chosen had been largely demolished by the Nazis, including hundreds of houses and hotels, to build the Atlantic Wall, a defensive structure that was designed to keep the Allies at bay should they attempt to land on the Dutch beaches.
Nevertheless, the Germans bought into Van Alphen’s plan and gave him the manpower to execute it, making it a happy unintended consequence (or not?) that many of the working-age men who would otherwise have been sent to Germany to help with the war effort remained in Zandvoort to work on the project. And even though Van Alphen was removed as mayor to be replaced by a candidate from the National Socialist Movement, a fascist political party sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the construction continued until Van Alphen was reinstated when the country was liberated in 1945 and the NSB outlawed. He did retire of his own will in 1948, and Zandvoort’s circuit was opened later that year, but his successor Hector van Fenema did not forget Van Alphen’s mighty input: the complex was officially named ‘Burgemeester Van Alphenweg’, literally ‘The Road of Mayor Van Alphen’.
Once the circuit had been built, the town of Zandvoort then took on their next challenge: actually putting on a race, something they had no real idea how to do. Over the sea in Britain though, they were a little more experienced and so they recruited Desmond Scannell – then secretary of the British Racing Drivers’ Club and who had a great part in the early days of making Silverstone the fixture it is today – to help organise the first Zandvoort Grand Prix.
‘Prijs van Zandvoort, internationale autoraces’ the 70 cent programme proudly proclaimed with a large Firestone advert 21on the bottom half of it. It notes the date as 7 August 1948, arguably the birth of motor sport in the Netherlands. In a country with not much motor-sport history to speak of, it had an improvised feel. There were no real garages at the circuit so most cars competing came over by boat several days in advance and parked up in the middle of Harlem, the nearest large town. One gentleman claiming to be the King of Siam, whose nephew was racing, arrived to watch with his entourage and was initially turned away by the ticket inspectors. Not wishing to risk a public embarrassment, one of his superiors ushered the group through without asking them to purchase a ticket. It is not clear whether he really was the monarch.
In the end, all 50,000 who attended the historic day were not disappointed. Sammy Davis, a British racer who won Le Mans in 1927, had been the chief adviser on design; he used what was available to him, namely the road that had been built by the occupying Germans, Van Alphen’s hiking trail and the natural undulations of the sand dunes. Corners wound their way around mounds and dunes at improbable angles, sometimes banked for speed, other times off-camber to persuade cars away from the racing line. In that sense, it has a feel not unlike a links golf course, of which the town boasts a number for anyone wishing to combine the speed of the racetrack with something a little more sedate.
Early on, with sand being regularly blown on to the driving surface by the rough winds off the North Sea to distress the tyres of any car willing to take the track on, Zandvoort was seen as a challenge of driving skill. The high-speed first corner, at the end of a long straight, slightly banked and called Tarzan, is still one without a common consensus on the fastest way around it, making it a popular overtaking spot in the early races. 22
The grid for that first event in 1948 was predominantly British, Scannell convincing a number of his members to make the trip over, many of whom would form part of the first Formula One World Championship two years later. After two 24-lap heats, the deciding 40-lap race was a thriller: a battle between Prince Bira of Siam, a member of the Thai royal family who had been sent to England to attend Eton and had subsequently settled down in London, and Tony Rolt, an army officer who had been captured shortly before the Dunkirk evacuation and spent nearly two years as a prisoner of war in Colditz. He was best known as the man who had helped build a giant glider in an escape attempt from the East German castle, but was liberated before needing to use it. As such, both men were minor celebrities and having them battle it out for the win – which Bira eventually claimed – was something of a success for the track that had initially been built as an attempt to attract more tourists to the seaside resort.
The drivers enjoyed it too and within two years of the inauguration of the Formula One World Championship, the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort had become a favourite on the calendar. It began to add famous names such as Alberto Ascari and Juan Manuel Fangio to its roll of honour. What had started off as essentially a marketing stunt had turned into a serious sporting event.
However, this was still a Europe picking itself up after World War II and a Netherlands reeling from the sustained occupation of the Nazis. In short, money was tight and nothing was immune. The 1954 race was not held due to the expense of putting it on while the Suez Crisis of 1956 and 1957 meant that oil tankers delivering to the Netherlands were affected and the price of fuel was so high that for two years the race was not held. When it 23returned in 1958, another famous name etched his name on to the history of the track as Stirling Moss took victory.
More realities of motor sport started to strike too though. Just eleven laps into the 1960 race, Dan Gurney had arrived at the famous Tarzan corner at full speed in his BRM, only for the brakes to fail at the crucial moment. He sped up the banked corner and flew over the fences at more than 100 miles an hour, landing on the grassy mound behind, hitting and killing a spectator, an eighteen-year-old named Piet Alders from Harlem. Gurney, who broke his arm in the accident, became a far more cautious driver because of it; for the rest of his career, he would sometimes gently tap the brake before a heavy braking zone, just to check it was still there, and generally looked after his brakes better than his rivals.
Gurney though appeared to be the only one in the sport who was seriously affected by the accident. The early days of F1 had little concern for matters of safety, whether of drivers or spectators, and deaths were a tragic but occupational hazard. The death of Alders was, the town’s local newspaper De Zandvoortse Courant reported, quickly forgotten by the massed crowd. ‘It seemed to have happened far away, on another planet,’ the race report recorded. Europe had perhaps become all too used to the idea of the sudden loss of life after years of war. That or the racing was too enthralling to be ignored, with Jack Brabham dominating the field, two greats in Jim Clark and Graham Hill in a race-long duel in the midfield and Stirling Moss producing a brilliant comeback drive after a flat tyre that seemed to capture the crowd’s imagination.
For all the race’s popularity, the Dutch Grand Prix has still never had a Dutch winner. In the 1952 race, two Dutchman had 24raced – Jan Flinterman and Dries van der Lof – but neither ever raced in F1 again. The first regular Dutch driver of an F1 car was Carel Godin de Beaufort, or to give him his full title, Count Karel Pieter Antoni Jan Hubertus Godin de Beaufort, a free-spirited aristocrat who lived on the familial Maarsbergen estate just outside Utrecht who once tied a bratwurst stand to the back of his car at the Nürburgring before setting off, which ended up as a heap of splintered wood, bent metal and ruined sausage. (As a child, he had once played a similar trick on some dignitaries visiting the house and his father ran into the house to fetch his hunting rifle. Fortunately, his son had scarpered.) Despite De Beaufort’s eccentric sense of humour, he was known as a true gentleman of the paddock and referred to by the Germans, who admired him greatly, as ‘Der letzte Ritter’ (The Last Knight), a nod both to his heritage and his character.
De Beaufort, who won Le Mans in 1957, believed that the closer the relationship between driver and mechanic, the faster the car, and that the extraneous workings of a team, sponsorship deals and factory visits, only detracted from that. He was a privateer who owned the car he drove at Grands Prix and knew it probably better than anyone else.
‘My way is different from theirs,’ he would say of the corporate factory-backed teams he raced against. ‘I go to the factory and tell them exactly what I want.
‘On my return from a race I’ll tell them all my stories and show the guys my time sheets and the photographs I took. In the evenings, I’ll take them out to dinner. And in case they need to work late, I’ll buy them a crate of beer and bring along a pile of food.’
He would help out too, and he was well respected by the Porsche mechanics whom he often fed. So it was a moment of 25almost universal celebration when De Beaufort became the first ever Dutchman to score a Formula One World Championship point, and on home soil too. At the 1962 Dutch Grand Prix, better remembered for being Graham Hill’s first ever race win, De Beaufort brought his Porsche home in sixth place for a single point and revelled in having beaten Jo Bonnier, one of the works drivers ‘who has never been to the factory’ and had ‘no meaningful contact’ with their mechanics. He also pointed to his timing sheets, where his lap times almost all began with one minute, 42 seconds.
‘That’s how I’ve managed to become the fastest Porsche of the race. That’s my style, to be fast and consistent during the entire race.’
The story of De Beaufort’s career ends in a sadly familiar fashion though. He had brushes with death throughout racing, some due to his own recklessness and others due to the nature of the era. Even on that day in 1962 when he first scored a point, it was tinged with sadness. His friend Ben Pon, whom he had put into a second, newer Porsche for the race, started nervously and having been passed by De Beaufort, was desperate to impress by re-passing his team’s leader. He spun off and was thrown out of the car.
‘When I passed the wreck, I was worried he hadn’t made it,’ De Beaufort said afterwards. Miraculously, he had – but swore never to race single-seater cars ever again. He was one of the lucky ones. His friend was not.
De Beaufort had, later in his career, developed a reputation for safety. Despite some of the reckless pranks of his younger days, Alfonso de Portago’s fatal 1957 crash at the Mille Miglia, after which the Spaniard’s body was found in two pieces and nine others were killed, he started to be called Veilige Careltje 26(‘Safe Wee Carel’) because of his caution on the racetrack. His demise then was perhaps all the more tragic.
De Beaufort died after an accident at the Nürburgring in 1964. During practice, he had worn a Beatles wig to entertain spectators during his early laps, but then decided to start trying to find some pace. On his fifth lap, the car veered off into the trees and he was thrown out, suffering broken bones in his thigh, chest and crucially skull. He was moved to a neurological centre but after two days of medical attention, he was pronounced dead on the Sunday evening. The likes of Graham Hill and Ben Pon carried his coffin at the funeral on the Maarsbergen estate, where he was subsequently buried at the age of just 30.
While he had made a lasting impression on the motor racing world, the Netherlands was struggling to catch up with the rest of Europe. The Dutch Grand Prix appeared to be under serial threat despite having apparently overcome the financial challenges of the 1950s, and Zandvoort was far from immune from the dangers of a deadly era. Piet Alders would not be the only person to lose their life there. Piers Courage crashed during the 1970 Dutch Grand Prix after his steering broke on the notorious Tunnel Oost bump and rolled up one of the dunes. His own front wheel struck his head and removed his helmet before the chassis burst into flames.
Courage’s death, combined with the substandard facilities at Zandvoort, saw the race removed from the calendar at the behest of the drivers in 1972, and there was an overhaul of the safety structures in place. There was an extra corner added to reduce speed in the final sector, new asphalt and a new race control tower, but key areas, such as the flimsily attached Armco barriers, went undeveloped, marshals remained perilously under-equipped 27and the pit lane was still regarded as too narrow, but the race was reinstated nevertheless after passing its inspection.
That made it all the more gut-wrenching when just eight laps into the return of the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort in 1973, disaster struck again with the eyes of the world watching.
Roger Williamson had won consecutive Formula Three titles and been offered a drive by BRM for the 1973 season, only to turn it down and drive for March instead. He was just 25 and racing in F1 for the second time when he suffered a suspected tyre failure at high speed on the Hondenvlak right-hander and flew into the fencing, before rebounding across the track. His car rolled and the fuel tank burst, engulfing it in flames.
What followed is one of the most shocking pieces of footage in the archive of F1, and a scene hopefully condemned to time gone by. Another British driver David Purley, a former paratrooper, pulled over and ran to the flaming wreckage. He desperately tried to turn the car over, knowing that Williamson was still alive because he could hear the driver’s screams. Marshals rushed to his aid but, unlike him, were not wearing fireproof suits and were therefore unable to assist other than deploying a fire extinguisher from a distance, which Purley soon grabbed from them and tried in vain to put out the fire, alternating between the fire extinguisher and trying to roll the heavy car to the point of exhaustion. He was awarded the George Medal for bravery, but Williamson could not be saved.
Staggeringly, the car was not removed, even once the fire had gone out. The race continued with the car covered by a blanket. After the race finished, a recovery crew, the police and a judge arrived. In possibly the most morose scene ever witnessed on a racetrack, Williamson’s body was taken out of the cockpit and 28placed straight into a coffin. ‘Better safe than sorry’ is not one of Holland’s most used proverbs.
