Max Verstappen: The Inside Track on a Formula One Star

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Max’s response was an unintelligible cry of pure emotion, the kind that had not been building for just a few seconds, minutes or hours, but for a lifetime. Hughes' immaculate credentials and first-rate access enable him to generate fresh and fascinating insights, and to paint a fully-rounded and richly-textured portrait of one of the most exciting young sportsmen on the planet.

As the son of F1 legend Jos and elite-level kart driver Sophie Kumpen, Max was destined to be a racing driver.Caught up in a frantic midfield battle for eighth place, he pulled out to overtake Eddie Irvine 36 laps into the race, only for the Jordan to move over to lap a backmarker, unaware he was being challenged, and collide with him. The final few chapters chart his promotion to the main Red Bull team with his famous maiden victory at Barcelona, bromance with Danny Ric, occasional opportunistic wins, 2020 and the epic 2021 battle with Lewis. By the end of the day, in which he logged 65 laps and was left with a sore neck and shoulders, he produced a lap time that would have qualified him tenth on the grid if he had done it a few days earlier. In a terrifying scene, Verstappen was powerless to stop his spinning car which then hit the braking McLaren of Martin Brundle and was thrown into the air, completing a full barrel roll before hitting the tarmac again and skidding off into the barriers.

A definitive and intriguing biography of Max Verstappen, Formula 1's superstar, Lewis Hamilton's great rival and the winner of the 2021 and 2022 World Drivers' Championships. There were still a number of back-markers who, by coincidence, had been caught between Hamilton and Verstappen in the safety car queue. As for the book, I’d have loved to read more from personal interviews with family and friends, even Max, and a lot more than was stated on his F1 career.More than half the book (first 8 chapters) cover Max’s pre-F1 junior career which James Gray manages to cover in good detail. And for the majority of the race, even as Sergio Perez played an invaluable pawn role in holding up Hamilton to bring Max back within a few seconds of the lead, it looked as though Mercedes would be celebrating and Red Bull would be litigating late into the Middle Eastern night and beyond.

Yeah, I liked that I found out more about Max and his family, but other than that it was pretty lackluster and nothing I couldn't have found out from the internet or watching his races. i like the book and the chapters, but what i would recommend is that you know formula 1 and the history and the terms. He had a few moments earlier voiced his frustrations at the ‘typical’ decision not to let the cars unlap themselves and give him a shot at Hamilton. Jos had been detained in the Dutch city of Roermond after an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Kelly van der Waal. From chapter 5 onwards, this is thankfully the case and there is above all a lot of coverage of his karting career, some of which I didn't know much about.

Well written and great insight into his relationship with his father, his young career and how he became his own man and driver. Another biography from Mark Hughes will be released soon to hit the shelves, so we’ll have to see how it stacks up against James Gray’s book. Frans had been at parties like this before, but never with a Verstappen on the top step of the podium. He had plenty to prove after Schumacher had out-qualified him by nearly two seconds to start second on the grid with Verstappen seven places behind 5him. It quickly turned into a fight, in which a 45-year-old man was left with a fractured skull with Jos identified as the culprit in court.