“My father had a plan. And I had to stick to that plan.” I read the interview with Max Verstappen Time Magazine. A special interview, but not because no Dutchman has ever appeared solo on the cover of one of the world’s leading magazines since 1966. Max talks about his upbringing. And about his father. He almost never does that. He talks briefly, leaving a door ajar.
When he was two years old, father Jos gave him a very small quad bike. Even before he turned five, Max was already in a kart. When his son turned out to be talented, Jos went all-in, writes Time. A story we have known for a long time in the Netherlands: Jos built the engines for his son’s karts, he tinkered day and night, precisely and diligently. He drove Max all over Europe, rides of thirteen hours at a time, to let his son race.
Even when it was pouring with rain and other families went home, Jos had his son train on soaked courts. Max was not yet ten years old at the time. “I saw other children running around and playing, they weren’t thinking about the future yet,” he now tells Time. “But my father had a plan. And I had to stick to that plan.”
An upbringing that sounds like a fairy tale. A father who was motivated to the core, a son who oozed talent. Together they did everything they could. Work hard, continue where others stop; that’s where you make the distinction. This is how you breed champions, this is how you become a world star.
When Max was fourteen, he was overtaken by another driver during a race in Naples. Instead of waiting patiently to take the lead again, Max took a risk and crashed. Jos was furious. In the car on the way home, Jos stopped at a gas station. “Max wanted to talk to me, I didn’t want to,” Jos says in the story in Time. “So I said: if you don’t shut up now, I will put you out of the car.” Max apparently didn’t keep his mouth shut, because Jos left Max at the pump. A little later he returned to pick Max up. Then he didn’t talk to his son for a week.
Only once did Jos hit his son on the helmet before the start of a race in England. Not more often, Jos emphasizes. And: “He needed that.” Max won the race. Not much later, Max, at the age of seventeen, became the youngest driver ever in Formula 1.
I read and reread these passages, and I don’t know which makes my stomach ache more: what is said, or what is not said. Of the thought of Max not being allowed to run around and play, or of Max being left at the gas pump. From a father who refuses to talk to you for a week when you’re still a teenager.
The upbringing was successful: Max has become exactly what Jos wanted. He is the very best, filthy rich, world famous. “My father had a plan. And I had to stick to that plan.” I’m reading it again, and would love to know: has anyone ever asked what Max himself actually wants?
Marijn de Vries is a former professional cyclist and journalist.