As Max Verstappen zeroes in on a third world title, Mark Hughes recalls his debut victory in 2016, which was so tense it gave his father a nosebleed and saw him hailed as the “talent of the century”

VINCENT CURUTCHET / DPPI

Max Verstappen, just 18, behind the wheel of the RB12, May 15, 2016;

Just five races into his second season of Formula 1, his third season of car racing, 18-year-old Max Verstappen would be racing for one of F1’s absolute top teams from the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix. Daniil Kvyat recalls how he was given the news he’d be going in the opposite direction from Red Bull Racing back to Toro Rosso.

“I was in Moscow, lying on the sofa, watching a TV series and then the phone call came. It was Dr Marko. ‘Hello, well, we have some news for you,’ and there was a 20-minute talk about... there was no real explanation to be honest. I think if the bosses want something to happen, they just make it happen. Simple as that... The people who made the decision can give a better answer to the reason. It’s a question for them. We finished the talk and I went back to finish my TV series.”

The show? Game of Thrones – aseries about the machinations of power.

Race-engineering Max at Red Bull would be Kvyat’s old engineer Gianpiero Lambiase, or ‘GP’ as he’s known in the team. He’d arrived there two years before, recruited by Christian Horner from Force India with the intention of putting him on Sebastian Vettel’s car as a replacement for his longtime engineer Guillaume Rocquelin (aka ‘Rocky’) who was moving up to become head of the Red Bull junior driver academy. “Seb had actually interviewed GP for the job,” recalls Horner. “Because it was going to be for him. In GP I saw a great race engineer who was very practical and after I interviewed him he was grilled by a fourtime world champion and responded impressively well. He’s a tough character, but calm. Sebastian buggered off to Ferrari and GP ended up with Daniil, then Max stepped into the role.