F1 News: Alguersuari explains why Verstappen is the greatest ever

Former F1 Red Bull Toro Rosso F1 driver, Jaime Alguersuari, was interviewed by talkSPORT and explains why, despite racing alongside Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton in various junior formula and in F1, Max Verstappen is the Greatest of all Time (GOAT).

We noted some of the highlight quotes from Alguersuari as he explains why he has come to the conclusion he has after racing against all three drivers.

“We have to understand that Max Verstappen probably is the best driver ever in F1, and that’s because of his whole education. To see him doing what he did in Australia and especially driving not the best car in the wet and still finishing third.

“Whoever you put on this car besides Verstappen is not gonna look great. Probably would look a bit closer, but I don’t think anyone in the grid would beat Max. So let’s start with this. With this mindset

“Liam Lawson is not a bad driver. Not a bad driver at all. You know, he’s quite new to Formula one, and you have to give him time. You have to give him time to know the tracks. There was very little time in China, especially because it was a sprint race.

“These Pirelli tires, they’re really, really difficult to make them work. If you don’t get these tires into the right temperature window, you just don’t have the grip. You see his onboard in Australia. Liam was struggling for grip massively. When you see Verstappen’s on board, he had grip everywhere. You know, front, rear, traction, combined traction, lateral grip.

“I know how Red Bull works because I’ve been there. Helmut [Marko] and Christian [Horner] put pressure for performance. I think it’s just great because, you know, they try to get the maximum out of their drivers, but my point of view is that you have to give a kid like Lawson a little bit of time.

I think Formula 1 has changed, but I think Helmut Marko hasn’t changed, and he won’t change. He has no interest in changing.

“I think things have worked for Red Bull so far and for Helmut, but I’m not sure if it’ll work for the next ten years in terms of having this method or this mindset with drivers.

“You see what happened to Hadjar and you see two different reactions from two different people. You see Anthony Hamilton and you see Helmut Marko. Anthony had no interest in this kid, just that he just personally felt so bad for him and he went to support him and he gave him his love and support as a dad. He felt like his dad.

“I remember in 2008, British Formula 3, where I was just fighting for the championship in the last race at Donnington Park, and he literally called me before the weekend.

“That phone call wasn’t a support call. It was actually a threatening call. And he actually said, if you don’t win the championship, you’re out of the program. So that was the end of my career. And it was a one minute call – and I won the championship.”

“I don’t personally think that anyone can beat Verstappen because I think Max is in a different dimension.

“Another former Verstappen teammate, Alex Albon, was saying he used to love a car that oversteered. He thought he was a really oversteery driver. Then when he got in the Red Bull, he was like, wow, Verstappen is on a whole different level when it comes to this.

Is the Red Bull built around Max Verstappen?

“There’s this whole story that the car is built around Max. There’s no engineer in the world that built a car for a certain driving style.

“As drivers, we all know that an understeering car is definitely slower than a slightly pointy, oversteering car. That’s crystal clear, since you drive in Formula ford or Formula 3 or Formula 4 or whatever. But then during the weekend, you just develop your setup with your engineer, with weight transfers, with springs, with, you know, the height of the car, and then you have your driving style. It’s crystal clear that Max has a very pointy driving style and a very certain driving style which he has developed during years and experience and knowledge which is unbelievable.

“The way he drives, he just performs. Nobody is able to cope with the problems that Max might be able to feel. Let’s say he starts to feel graining on the front left and starts to feel understeer and the way he handles certain situations, certain problems with his car, Nobody is able to cope with those problems as he does.

“So let’s understand this for real. It’s not that Red Bull has developed A car that only fits this kind of driving style, no, you are able to go in that car, but then you have to understand how to drive this car.

“Max Verstappen understands how to drive every single situation under every single circumstance because he has been trained, and he has the talent to feel every single sensation for finding grip in an incredible and such an unbelievable way that nobody is able to feel and find.

“As his teammate, you jump in and you might be smoother than Max. You have a different, slightly different driving style than him. You try to compensate with a little bit less oversteer. Understand you’re going to be slower. So that’s my point of view on things about what’s going on inside Red Bull or any car that Max Verstappen would drive. He knows a pointy front end with a slightly loose rear will make him quicker, and he does it without crashing.

“When you have an unbalanced car, you feel it like this. And he’s just able to drive with every kind of situation or problem in a better way than anyone. Anybody else. And that’s it.

“Is a combination of his speed and also his intelligence of the setup – manage how he reads the car, how he feels the car, how he manages the tires, the race, how he performs when he’s out of the car and understands the dynamics.”

Jaime Alguersuari is not the only one who thinks Verstappen is the greatest

Sky F1’s Bernie Collins believes Red Bull are in “big trouble” and would put them as the “10th-fastest team” on the grid without Max Verstappen behind the wheel.

“Max is very, very strong. He gets the most out of the car, he puts a lap in when it matters,” Collins told Sky F1.

“He very rarely makes mistakes. He generally out qualifies others who make mistakes, he gets the best lap together when it matters, and even in racing when it matters, he manages to pull it out.

“I think that the difficulty they have as a team, and, it was a very interesting, in my opinion, interview with Christian Horner, Natalie [Pinkham] pushed him on team development, and he did say that the team had followed the direction of their fastest driver in developing the car, and now they have a car that’s quite tricky to drive, that lots of other people cannot get on top of because it is so nervous, twitchy.

“The characteristics of the car, looking at it now, perfect hindsight vision 20-20, Liam would have really benefited from driving that Red Bull [more], which we think is very different in characteristic to the RB.

“Liam’s performance in the RB was not dissimilar to Tsunoda, for example, and now he’s at a point where he’s qualifying 20th on the grid, and the RB looks quicker, and even Max came out and said he’d be quicker in an RB.

“I think they’re in big trouble. I think that they should have looked at the younger talent and said, ‘Who has the most forward aero balance? That’s what we believe the characteristic of that car is.’

“It’s very on the nose, we would call it, very different to the RB in characteristics. So they should look at who’s driving, of their young drivers, closest to that spectrum. They’re the one that’s going to succeed the most.

“They should have maybe put all of them in an old Red Bull for a day and said, ‘Okay, who can get the best lap time out of this car?’ That’s one metric of doing it, because the RB is fundamentally different.

“If Max leaves or doesn’t show up at a race, they are currently the 10th fastest team. And I was criticised last year for saying, when Checo [Sergio Perez] was there that if Max didn’t turn up for a race, they were the fourth fastest team, but at the minute, they’re 10th fastest.

“Your championship position for constructors is based on both cars. That’s how your employees are paid their bonus.

“It will start to become very detrimental within that team that people are looking at being fourth or fifth or wherever they end up in the Constructors’ if they cannot get that second seat working.”