Saying farewell to his fourth Red Bull team-mate, Pierre Wache is adamant Red Bull have never intentionally designed a car specifically suited to Max Verstappen.

Stepping up to Red Bull in 2016, Verstappen displaced Daniel Ricciardo as the team’s star driver with the Australian driver moving onto Renault with Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon and more recently Sergio Perez slotted in as Verstappen’s team-mates.

‘It wasn’t our intention to develop a car specifically for Max Verstappen’

None of them though, managed to overthrow the now four-time Formula 1 World Champion and one by one were dropped by Red Bull.

It had Perez declaring that Red Bull’s upgrades in 2022 were “going away from me” while a year later his father Antonio Perez Garibay claimed that the “car is set-up for Max”.

Perez added his name to the list of Verstappen’s former team-mates when Red Bull announced in December that he would be replaced by Liam Lawson having finished the 2024 championship a whopping 285 points down on the World Champion.

Perez achieved just four podiums during the campaign and scored a mere nine points in his final eight races in a season in which Red Bull struggled with the balance of the car.

A big part of Verstappen’s team-mates’ issues have been the characteristics of Red Bull’s Formula 1 cars, cars that are sharp on the nose in a manner that suits the Dutchman’s driving style.

But according to Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache, it was never a deliberate decision.

“It wasn’t our intention to develop a car specifically for Max,” Wache said of the RB20 as per The Race, “but as a driver he can cope with less connected balance. To make a quick car, by definition you go towards this.

“You still have the possibility to create an understeery car but it would be slower. Our job is to move away from this and then use the set-up to make it quicker. Max is able to cope with this and I think Alex explained very well with his computer mouse comments.

“A few years ago in Budapest in practice, Max’s DRS didn’t close as he hit the brakes. But he didn’t fly off the road when he turned in – he just said it felt light on the rear.”

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What Alex Albon said of Max Verstappen’s driving style

Verstappen’s former team-mate Albon, who spent a year and a half racing for Red Bull, spoke of Verstappen’s driving style in 2023 when he denied growing speculation that Red Bull deliberately designed their cars to suit the Dutchman.

Revealing that while he liked a car that was sharp on the front end, Verstappen’s level of sharp was “eyewatering” in its intensity.

“The first thing is a lot of people say that car is built around him, that he’s like the Michael Schumacher of Ferrari and he’s created this team around him,” Albon told the High Performance Podcast.

“But truthfully, the car is what it is. He is very quick. So what ends up happening is, he has quite a unique driving style and it’s not that easy to get along with.

“I would say my driving style is a bit more on the smooth side. But I like a car that has it good front end, so quite sharp, quite direct. Max does too. But his level of sharp and direct is a whole different level. It’s eyewatering.

“To give people kind of a maybe an explanation of what that might feel like, if you play computer games at all, if you bump up the sensitivity completely to the max and you move that mouse, it’s just darting across the screen everywhere. That’s kind of how it feels, it became so sharp that it makes you a little bit tense.

“And every time the car becomes sharper and sharper, you start to become more tense. Every time you go into a corner, you don’t know how it’s going to react, you don’t have that pure confidence in the car. It just doesn’t work. It never works.”

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