Crushing Italian GP win highlights ‘new’ Max Verstappen skill

Nico Rosberg has been left impressed by a critical set-up call by Max Verstappen that ultimately paved the way for his victory at the Italian Grand Prix.

Four-time world champion Verstappen ended a near-four-month F1 win drought with a dominant performance at Monza as he converted a shock pole position into victory, nearly 20 seconds ahead of the McLarens.

It has emerged that a key factor behind Verstappen’s win was the Dutchman’s demand to run a skinnier rear wing despite scepticism from Red Bull’s engineering team.

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“What I learned of Max Verstappen is that he’s also now becoming so smart that he actually does such fundamental set-up decisions,” Rosberg, who described Verstappen as a “top five driver of all time”, told The Sky F1 Show.

“That’s also a new facet which I hadn’t seen so often yet. And that’s so impressive because that’s probably one of the key ingredients to the win, was his determination to push through his view on the set-up, which was ‘we need to take more wing off’.

“The simulation tells you where the optimum wing is. And all engineers follow simulation. So the engineers will see the simulation and say ‘no, Max, you need to run more wing than that’ and Max is like ‘no, I want less wing than that’.

“He got his way and he puts it on pole with two magical laps. It was unbelievable, just perfection. And then dominates the race with speed. It’s not 20 seconds because McLaren were rolling the dice and took a really, really horrible strategy in terms of how to get from A to B.

“It was around five or six seconds between Verstappen and the McLarens but still, it was just awesome pace that he showed in the race - incredible.

“I would say the quickest driver, not the quickest car. He really did a phenomenal job. He just has that tiny edge on everybody else. The extra sensitivity, the speed of reacting, just to balance that car magically on that tiny edge, it’s just incredible.”

The Laurent Mekies factor

David Croft suggested that new Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies utilised his engineering expertise to work with Verstappen on making the crucial set-up decision. 

“Now that Laurent Mekies is in charge, they have a man with an engineering background as their team principal, who probably better understands the engineering demands from what his drivers are telling him, than what Christian Horner did,” Croft said.

“I think that Mekies-Verstappen partnership took a huge step forward as well. The team principal went into bat with the engineers and said ‘I know your simulations say one thing but I think we can make this work with what Max is saying so let’s give it a go’.

“To me, there was a lot of hope for the future from Red Bull out of this, and the future this season too, and maybe Max now has a lot of faith in Laurent Mekies that he’s a team principal that will listen to what he’s saying.

“He’s been very critical of this car. 12 months ago this was a monster of a car and not in a good way. But together they might forge a very good partnership for Red Bull where Max feels he’s being listened to and we might see a little bit more of this.”

Rosberg added: “I also heard that Laurent being an engineer had an impact on this decision Max was able to make.

“As the most senior person in the room with the engineering competence, he was seeing the dynamic of the engineers with their simulation numbers and Max wanting to go a different route and in the end called the shot and said ‘let’s go with Max’s feeling’ and gave him the freedom to go down his route, which proved to be right.

“So it was an example of where Laurent had a first really big impact on performance and winning a race together as a team.”