Formula 1 – Max Verstappen (Red Bull), from the praise of patience to the risk of the requirement

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This is a gigantic step back. Never, since the year of his promotion in 2016, Max Verstappen had fallen so far behind the leader of the World Cup after the first three Grands Prix of the season. Substantial difference: he is the defending champion and this gap of 46 points Separating him from Charles Leclerc has absolutely not the same value as when the Batavian prodigy was only a privileged spectator of the domination of Lewis Hamilton.

Once the darling of the Red Bull team, the 24-year-old driver is now an unofficial boss. The Dutchman has never had his tongue in his pocket but he now allows himself to press where it hurts. “You can’t afford this stuff when you want to fight for the world titlehe dropped Sunday in Australia, after a second retirement in three races. It’s unacceptable, it can’t work like that.”

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Is the title the cause?

A month will therefore have been enough to crack a project that has become a winner after a fight with twists and turns, lasting and painful. Without really knowing if there is a causal link between these two observations. At the end of last season, we readily imagined that the arms race which had opposed the Red Bulls to Mercedes would end up affecting their preparation for the new era.

Verstappen: ‘I couldn’t follow Leclerc without destroying my tyres’

The winter tests, combined with a confidence assumed by the leaders of the team, had quickly dispelled this idea. She resurfaced:Our car is far too heavy but we completed its development late, because we were in the title race until the end of last year.“, admitted Helmut Marko, adviser to the firm during a interview granted to De Telegraaf.

Red Bull will provide updates at the next two Grands Prix, at Imola then Miami, but has not yet clearly defined the causes of its leader’s second retirement. The only clues so far? This new failure has nothing to do with that of Bahrain, and it had pointed the tip of its nose… even before the start of the Grand Prix.

love and reason

Not enough to reinforce the less worrying thesis of the double accident. “There doesn’t seem to be a clear solutionconfirmed Verstappen. So we have to work hard to try to improve our reliability.” World champion at 24 after being the precocious talent in the history of F1, the Dutchman logically put his patience aside after winning a title which, for him, had nothing to do with it. finality.

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From his turn of glory in Abu Dhabi, the oranje champion had proclaimed his love for the team that revealed him, to the point of wishing that this collaboration lasts “all his life“. Red Bull granted his wish by offering him a solid gold contract. The risk of a start to the season like this is to bring love back to its senses.
Like every time he re-engaged with the energy drink brand, Verstappen was keen to include an activatable exit clause in the event of a significant loss of performance. So far, he had never really brandished this threat, including when Mercedes courted him. This time, any result other than a new world championship title would be a form of regression in the Dutchman’s career. And that changes everything.

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