MAX VERSTAPPEN has be called out by US for brief pressing urgent matters

on October 31, 2014, to be precise—a young wannabe F1 driver was strapped into the cockpit of a Toro Rosso STR9 and sent out of the Circuit of the Americas pit lane to continue the lessons in F1 he had embarked upon a few weeks earlier at the Japanese Grand Prix.
Max Verstappen’s 32 FP1 laps in Austin on that warm, sunny Texas morning netted him the 10th best time of the opening practice, nine-tenths of a second off STR race regular Daniil Kvyat. Solid but unspectacular, and certainly not the kind of showstopping performance to put F1 on alert that he was a driver who would one day enter the pantheon of F1 greats.
How times have changed. In the decade since, Verstappen has grown from raw rookie to podium finisher, and then from regular race winner to all- conquering record breaker. And throughout that period, Max’s races in the U.S. have provided stellar waypoints on that remarkable upward curve. Here’s how Max went from early-weekend wannabe to world-beating superhero.

Just a year after his practice stint with STR, Max was back at COTA in a race seat with the Italian outfit, and on an almost washed out weekend disrupted by the potent tail end of Hurricane Patricia, Verstappen stormed to eighth place on the grid in a delayed qualifying session on Sunday morning and then a few hours later stunned onlookers by surfing COTA’s rivers of rain to fourth place in the race. Lewis Hamilton might have wrapped up his third title on the day, but figures focused pundits were pointing to 18-year-old Verstappen’s extravagant gifts in the race’s early wet phase as the true highlight of the weekend.

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“I really enjoyed today’s race,” the teenager said afterward. “Fourth is a great result and I’m just really, really happy. There were some very good battles out on track, and I’d say this was the most complete race of the season.”

Another fourth place, this time with the much more competitive Red Bull team, might not seem like anything to write home about, but this was back in the day when an arcane system of penalties for use of extra PU elements meant that Verstappen, who had qualified sixth, was hit with a 15-place grid penalty for fitting a new bunch of bits to his engine. With prerace penalties to the rest of the field figured in, the Red Bull racer ended up in P16 on the grid, with a mountain to climb.
Verstappen, though, scaled the peak like a rocket-fueled Sherpa, scything through the field with flamboyant ease, to eventually come up behind Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen. There was no way the Finn was going to deny the flying Verstappen, and four corners from the flag the Dutchman barged past to take an improbable podium finish. Just one problem: The stewards deemed he’d left the track to get the move done and a post-finish time penalty dropped Max to fourth. No matter; it was a drive of thrilling bravery and commitment.
Not that Max saw it that way. “It’s never nice to be about to step out onto the podium and then have it taken away,” he grumbled. “I had a great race and I am happy with fourth but it’s the way I got there that hurts. We have an amazing race with loads of overtakes and action and then due to 5 cm or 10 cm of curb the result is changed. People don’t like to watch that.”