How Max Verstappen went from ‘rough’ to ‘polished diamond’: Experience meets speed

Through his success in 2023, Max Verstappen delivered the most dominant season by a driver in Formula One history.

At times, races looked like a foregone conclusion before they’d even started. The hope stirred by a close qualifying would quickly fade when Verstappen got into his groove in the race.

He didn’t just beat his previous record of 15 wins in a season from 2022. He destroyed it with 19 victories in 22 races — and over 1,000 laps led.

“When you look back at the season that he’s had, particularly across the different challenges of the different venues, circuits, conditions, he’s been just phenomenal this year,” said Christian Horner, Red Bull’s team principal.

A combination of factors made Verstappen’s season possible, be it Red Bull producing such a strong car in the RB19, teammate Sergio Pérez’s struggles, and the lack of sustained threat from rival teams.

But 2023 also marked another step in Verstappen’s evolution. His raw speed and “extremely rare, natural talent,” to quote his race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, matched with a growing experience that made him almost impossible to beat in 2023.

It was something Horner quickly noted after Verstappen clinched his third title in the Qatar sprint race with six grands prix to spare. “He’s always had the speed from the moment he sat in the car,” Horner said. But speed alone doesn’t make a champion.

“He arrived in Formula One as quite a rough diamond. He’s now a very polished diamond. He’s maintained all his raw attributes but now brings experience to couple with that.

That “rough diamond” landed in F1 off the back of only one year in single-seater racing. Verstappen had already fast-tracked from go-karts to Formula Three, where his performances quickly drew interest from all the front-running F1 teams. Only Red Bull was prepared to get him straight into F1 for 2015, starting with its sister team, Toro Rosso (now AlphaTauri). At 17, Verstappen became F1’s youngest-ever driver.

Four races into Verstappen’s second season, Red Bull had seen enough: Daniil Kvyat’s struggles prompted it to promote Verstappen to its senior squad and send Kvyat in the opposition direction. It was deemed an enormous leap for the young Dutchman — only for him to win on his Red Bull debut in Spain.

“This rough diamond turned up and won his first race. He didn’t take much polishing, did he?” Paul Monaghan, Red Bull’s chief engineer, told The Athletic. “It wasn’t bad from the outset.

“What I saw in Max when he first arrived was a very driven, determined young man with a huge amount of self-belief. Sometimes, people may perceive that as arrogance, but it’s not. It’s confidence and self-belief. And my goodness me, he’s got the talent to back it up.”

That confidence becomes an expectation for nothing but the best — both from the team around him and hims