It must be true then that Red Bull gives you wings. It certainly seemed like that when 18-year-old Max Verstappen beat all the other competitors at Barcelona, to claim the first ever Grand Prix victory for his native Netherlands since the motor racing championships began in 1950.
Verstappen, making his debut in an F1 championship, pulled ahead of Ferrari’s Kimi “The Ice Man” Raikkonen by 0.616 seconds. It was his 24th F1 race, but he had hardly imagined at the outset that he would be leading, and would become the youngest ever driver to take home a Grand Prix trophy.
The man whose record Verstappen broke – Sebastian Vettel, four-time world champion and at age 21, the previous record holder for youngest race winner – finished at third place. Red Bull teammate for Verstappen, Daniel Ricciardo, ended up coming in fourth.
The greatest upset at the Spanish Grand Prix was when defending champions Mercedes, self-imploded, following a collision between teammates Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton after three corners. Hamilton’s car skewed sideways and hit Rosberg’s vehicle, with experts blaming Hamilton for “being too aggressive” and responsible for the accident. It has been an unlucky season for Hamilton who has not won a single race in it so far.
For the young Verstappen though, things couldn’t be better. He was praised for his ‘supreme composure under pressure’, and his victory, to sum it up in his own one word, was “unbelievable”.