As he watched his dad’s van pull back on to the Autostrada without him, Max Verstappen was struggling to digest what had happened. In all of his 11 years and 11 months on this earth, he’d never seen his dad as angry as he was at the go-kart track a couple of hours earlier. And he’d certainly never been left alone at a gas station in the south of Italy. This seemed pretty serious.
There was only one option left: call Mum.
As he sat waiting for his mum, who was in a separate car a little further back on the same road, Max was still working the mistake over in his head. It was a silly mistake. A costly mistake. One of those weird moments in motorsport where a number of seemingly unrelated factors lead to a split-second decision that ultimately ruins a whole weekend’s work.
The weekend had looked so promising, too. The event was the KZ2 World Championship final at Sarno — a track near Naples, under the shadow of Mount Vesuvius — and Max was making the step up to shifter karts (go-karts with a gearbox) for the first time. His father, Jos, a former F1 driver and now Max’s full-time kart mechanic, always made sure his son had the best equipment when he moved up a class, and once again Max immediately looked very competitive against older, more experienced competition. But then there was the mistake.
But, you see, it wasn’t all Max’s fault… For starters, a burnt-out clutch in one of the early heats had left him tenth in the pre-final. Then the hot Neapolitan sun had caused his rear tyres to overheat and blister as he made up those ten places to take pole position for the final.
That meant that when they decided to swap the tyres on the rims for the final, it was always going to take a few laps for the grip to return. And that’s why, when Max held the lead from pole position at the start of the final, he had been coaxing the kart into a slide through the corners — sacrificing some lap time to build up rubber on the outside of the tyre and extract maximum grip on the…
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