How Red Bull's radio tension is key to Verstappen dominance

That triggered the first of what would be multiple tetchy interactions between Verstappen and his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, after the Dutchman was frustrated with how close he had been to dropping out.

I flagged this interaction in the post-race column, but for anyone who missed qualifying or just needs their memory jogging:

Verstappen: “I should have just f****** pushed two laps in a row like I said. Ahhh…”

Lambiase: “But you are through, Max.”

Verstappen: “Yeah I don’t give a f*** if I’m through in P10! It’s just s*** execution.”

Lambiase: “OK, and then when the track was two seconds quicker for your final lap and you didn’t have any energy left, how would that have gone down? But you tell me what you want to do in Q3, and we’ll do it. Let me know. Sets, fuel, run plan…”

It was an unexpected spat, but even more unexpected was the hangover. Verstappen apologised after the session and Lambiase said he was slowly getting used to it, but that didn’t mean he had let it go by Sunday.

Twice in the race there were pretty blunt messages sent to Verstappen regarding his tyre usage, and while the replies weren’t aired you got the impression the driver knew that his race engineer was not happy with him both at the time but also because of what had gone before.

“Sometimes it gets a bit sparky between the two of them,” Christian Horner said after the race. “But Max is the kind of character that will rev very quickly and it’ll come down very quickly. GP doesn’t forget so quickly.”

Clearly not.

I was questioning how seriously to take the interactions on Sunday night, and I think Verstappen’s response of the messages only being “50% serious” is about right. But they should be taken seriously in other ways – in the sense of how much they tell us about the relationship between Verstappen and Lambiase and the characters they are.

The spark was Verstappen’s ultra-competitive side that is always striving to be as good as he and Red Bull can be. The form he’s in and the car advantage he has, if he had failed to escape Q2 even a 16th-place start would have been little cause to doubt his ability to win Sunday’s race. He did so from 14th on the grid last year at the same venue, after all.

But Lambiase and Verstappen have worked together for seven years, and the majority of that time has been spent with far less competitive cars than this one. In Verstappen’s first five seasons with Red Bull (OK, he was still with Toro Rosso for the first four rounds of 2016) he won 10 grands prix.

In the first 12 races of this year, he has won 10 grands prix. Or looked at another way he has won 10 straight races in the last eight weekends thanks to two Sprint victories as well.

Those first five years taught Verstappen a lot. He knows that this time that he’s currently enjoying will not last forever, and there’s every chance he’ll be intensely fighting for a title in future like he was in 2021, or worse still only getting fleeting chances to pick up a win. And in those scenarios, everything has to be perfect, so why not make sure it is perfect now?

That’s not to say he was right on Friday, of course. And Lambiase has played a hand in Verstappen’s success like all good race engineers can claim when they have a partnership that clicks. While Verstappen’s immense skill behind the wheel is obviously the key ingredient, Lambiase has not steered him wrong at any stage – at least to a degree that has become public knowledge – in recent memory.

And for that, when the criticism starts flying or Verstappen believes something wasn’t done right and isn’t addressing the overall picture – understandable over team radio rather than in a full engineering debrief, I’ll admit – then if you can imagine Lambiase thinking he has done more than enough in his time with Verstappen to convince the driver that it wasn’t actually “s*** execution” at all.

In fact, Red Bull’s execution – at least on Verstappen’s side of the garage – has been so faultless recently that you really do wonder how anyone might beat them.

But such is the nature of F1 that eventually, someone will. And just like Verstappen knows there will be a time that the stakes are far higher and the team needs to be perfect, so too does Lambiase.

It’s why they clash. If they ever think the other might be doing something that jeopardises their ability to get to the end of a race in the quickest manner possible, they’ll call them out. Lambiase did it many times on Sunday when he didn’t want Verstappen running into tyre trouble that would have, at worst, seen him have to settle for a slightly smaller margin of victory.

The best way to deal with such a strong and confident character who wants nothing more than to win is to be exactly the same. And I could be talking about either side of the partnership there.

“Max is a tough customer and he would break many race engineers,” Horner says. “You’ve got to have somebody who’s got the self assurance to deal with that.”

Quite clearly Lambiase has, and both he and Verstappen are so driven to do the best job they can it will spill over into a public little spat even on the way to an eighth win in a row by over 20 seconds.

Don’t mistake it for a sign of weakness between the two, it’s a clear example of what makes them such a formidable pairing.