For the last few years, it's been clear that Max Verstappen and Red Bull are operating on another level compared to the field when it comes to the complete fusion of car development and driver style. Why?
Ever since 2018, Max Verstappen has been the undisputed team leader at Red Bull Racing, and really no teammate has been able to challenge him on a consistent basis. In fact since the start of 2019 you can count on one hand the number of times Verstappen has been either out-qualified or out-raced by his teammate. His teammates aren't slouches either; Pierre Gasly is a capable driver who has shown he can score podiums and deliver a race win under pressure from a faster car. Alex Albon has shown he has the speed and ability to match Lando Norris, Geroge Russell, or even Charles Leclerc, especially in junior categories. And Sergio Pérez has also won races, been on the podium numerous times, and has a long career with more experience than either Gasly, Albon, or Verstappen himself. So why can nobody beat him?
It's just physics...
The fundamentals of racing
To analyze why Max Verstappen is fast, we can take a very, very, high level view of racing, or just driving in general. The goal of racing (typically) is to get around a track in the least amount of time. Tracks consist of straights and corners. Straight-line performance is almost completely determined by the vehicle; how much power does it have? How much torque? How much aerodynamic drag is there? Yes, the corner exit speed also determines the straight-line speed to some extent, but we'll touch on that in a bit.
In many racing series, the difference in straight-line performance between cars is minimal. Especially in F1, and in the case of comparing teammates to each other, the straight-line performance is more or less identical, and only slight differences exist due to setup tweaks. So the performance differentiator must be in the corners.
Cornering basics
Cornering in racing is just like driving your car around town. You turn the wheel, and the car changes direction by turning the front wheels. On a daily drive, cornering is mundane and hardly pushes the limits of physics, although anyone can find the limit fairly simply (provided you are brave enough when approaching a roundabout... although by no means am I suggesting you go throwing your car around like a racing driver; in fact, don't, especially if others are around). Every car has a grip limit; which depends on a multitude of factors; such as the condition of the tires, the condition of the road, etc. which govern what the maximum possible cornering speed is.
When a car reaches the limit of grip, there are technically three things which could happen. The first is that you lose traction from all four wheels at the same time, and essentially have a 4-wheel slide. This would mean the front and rear axles are perfectly balanced such that each has maximized grip until there is no more available. This is incredibly rare and very difficult to achieve, given nuances like slight changes in tire temperature, track grip, moisture, etc. can cause the balance to shift. Much more commonly, there will be understeer or oversteer.
Understeer is what happens when the front tires lose grip first. Drivers will often refer to this as a "front-limited" car. This means that a car tends to wash out away from the apex of the corner, towards the outside of the track. This can result in the front tires sliding across the track, which causes them to wear, which compounds this issue. The solution to getting rid of understeer is to typically add more front downforce, which also adds drag, or if this is not possible, to slow the car down more in the corners, which also costs lap time. The disadvantage is that the "theoretical" maximum cornering speed is lower compared to neutral or oversteering cars, because the front tires lose grip too fast. The advantage of an understeering car is that it is typically predictable and is fairly easy to take to the limit compared to neutral or oversteering cars. Most road cars are inherently understeer-biased for this reason.
Oversteer is what happens when the rear tires lose grip first, resulting in a "rear-limited" car. This means that as a driver enters a corner, the back tires begin to slide, causing the front end to rotate inwards towards the apex. When this rotation becomes excessive, the car will spin. As it is the "opposite" to understeer, oversteer can typically be reduced with more rear downforce, which adds rear stability. Of course, this also comes with a drag penalty, and often times the rear wing is more drag-sensitive than the front, so this is bigger than the understeer correction drag penalty. The problems with an oversteering car is that it can be twitchy, unpredictable, sensitive, and confidence-sapping if the driver cannot handle the lively rear end. The advantage with an oversteering car is that the rotation of the car right before this sliding phase can produce exceptional cornering speeds, provided the driver does not step over the line.
So which is better?
Ultimately, the ideal case would be to get a car which is completely balanced on both axles, and without a bunch of drag which costs you time on the straights. As I said before, it is very, very difficult to get a car to be perfectly balanced. I'd wager that most drivers have only experienced this once or twice in their career, such is the rarity. So if the perfect solution is realistically unattainable, then you have to choose the lesser of two evils, or in the case of many teams and drivers, the evil with a higher potential: oversteer. Why? Because lap time is gained in cornering, so it would make sense that you'd favor a setup that corners "too much" rather than not enough.
The limit of an oversteering car is governed much more by the ability of the driver to manage the slip angle (think of that as the "amount" of sliding on the rear end), rather than the physics of being unable to turn at the required speed. Think about it like this: if a perfectly balanced car can go through a corner at 140mph, there is no chance that an understeering car can make that corner at 140mph. It would have to probably go 137 or 138mph. Doesn't sound like much, but if you have a track with 15 corners, that small deficit adds up to multiple tenths or even seconds on the stopwatch over a single lap. Over a race distance, it could be well over 30s to a minute. An oversteering car, by contrast, could theoretically go through the corner at 140 mph, maybe even more (although at risk of damaging the rear tires over a race distance, which would ultimately be slower), provided the driver can perfectly manipulate the throttle and steering inputs accordingly.
What does this have to do with Verstappen?
Depending on how you look at it, nothing. Oversteer is not some big secret that he and Red Bulll are exploiting. It is well known that many of the all-time greats prefer an oversteering car. Schumacher, Hamilton, Senna, Hakkinen, you name any F1 champion and there is a 98% chance they prefer oversteer. And this isn't limited to F1, or even real-world racing.
If you ever play the Formula 1 game F1®22, or really any vaguely competitive sim-type racing game (I'll stick to F1 for this example), you can download the setup of the fastest drivers on the time trial leaderboards. I've done this, and I've found (and you would too) that the cars are nearly undrivable because they are so twitchy and so skittish on the rear end that you will spin out every lap. But the best drivers in the world (real or virtual) can handle it, because they can control their steering, brake, and throttle inputs such that the car does not lose traction. That is the exact same feeling that Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon had when they drove the Red Bull, and now Sergio Pérez is increasingly experiencing.
The difference with Verstappen (compared to his teammates, at least) is that the degree of oversteer that he can handle is extreme. It is well known that Verstappen likes a "pointy" front end to the car, which means that the front of the car is very responsive to steering inputs, and is very oversteer-y. This is because Verstappen can manipulate the car to keep it on the edge of traction, whereas his teammates cannot. This is not to say that other drivers on the grid could not also handle the same level of oversteer; it's just that they are not employed by Red Bull so we cannot have a comparison. It's very possible that a Hamilton, Leclerc, Russell, Norris, etc. could give Max a run for his money, but if my grandmother had wheels she'd have been a bicycle. It doesn't matter in the real world, for now at least.
It's perfectly logical for Red Bull to develop the car to be prone to oversteer compared to understeer, because the car can turn better, meaning it can corner faster, meaning ultimately it will have a better lap time. What Red Bull really has to keep in mind, however, is that this philosophy is all well and good as long as Verstappen is in the team. But should he ever choose to leave, they need to be prepared to overhaul their philosophy towards a more "normal" car. We saw at the start of 2022, when the car was much more understeer-biased, that Pérez could nearly match Verstappen. The performance ceiling of the car was lower than it is now, it was just easier to hit. It was fairly easy to extract the maximum lap time from the car. But since around Baku in June, Pérez has slipped backwards a bit, while Verstappen has charged clear of Pérez and the field; as performance increased, so did the difficulty in extracting it.
As long as Verstappen is on the payroll, Red Bull have no need to change their philosophy, and as long as the second driver is capable of finishing at the top 4 in every race, there should be no reason to replace them. You get more points from first and fourth than with second and third; so as unfair as it may sound to the second driver, there's no big secret here. The math and the physics speak for themselves.
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