Albon: Max has a unique flying style

Alex Albon looked back on his time as Max Verstappen’s teammate at Red Bull Racing and spoke about the key moments that distinguished the three-time world champion’s unique driving style.

Albon was Verstappen’s teammate for a season and a half: he was promoted from Toro Rosso to Red Bull’s senior team in mid-2019 and retained his place the following season. But unable to achieve the pace and stability shown by Max, Alex was replaced by Sergio Perez in 2021 and ‘demoted’: he became the team’s reserve driver, combining these duties with performances in the DTM touring car series.

During the High Performance Podcast, Albon shared his opinion on what allows Verstappen to achieve such success.

“First of all, a lot of people say that this car is made especially for him, as it was with Michael Schumacher at Ferrari, and Max is building a team around himself,” said Alex, answering the question of how difficult it is to become Verstappen’s teammate to be. . “But the bottom line is that the car is what it is, and he is a very fast driver with a unique driving style, and that is not easy to deal with.

Everyone has their own style, and I would say my driving style is a little smoother, I prefer the front wheels of the car to hold the track well, i.e. so that the car follows the trajectory exactly. Max also has similar preferences, but his steering precision is on a completely different level. It flies so accurately and sharply that I even wanted to cry.

I’ll try to explain what it looks like. For example, if you are playing on a computer and you increase the sensitivity to the maximum and move the mouse, the cursor will simply shoot across the entire screen. When the mouse starts working like this, you get a little nervous.

What ended up happening to me was this: at first I wasn’t that far behind, but as the season progressed, Max demanded that the front of the car behave exactly like this, he wanted the car’s behavior to be more and more sharp and would become sharper. . At the same time he was driving faster and faster and to keep up with him I had to take more risks.

If you’re a few tenths behind in a session, you try to improve something, but it all ends in you flying off the track and having an accident. And everything has to start again. Then you start to lose confidence in yourself, and the gap with Max continues to grow, and the next time you try a different approach to piloting, it all ends up in another flight or other problems, and then the problems start to arise to accumulate and grow. like snow com. Every time the car’s behavior becomes even more acute, your nervous tension also increases.

But similar phenomena occur in every sport. If you don’t make progress, you inevitably start to think, and every time your car turns a corner, you don’t know how it will behave. I’m just talking about the moment you stop trusting the machine, and that means nothing will work for you anymore.”