New Times ADVeRTisiNG sUPPLemeNT MIAMI RACE WEEK 2024 GUiDe 12 May 2-8, 2024 NEW TIMES ADVERTISING SUPPLEMENT MIAMI RACE WEEK 2024 GUIDE 12 May 2-8, 2024 2015 US GRAND PRIX GRID: P8 | RACE: P4 Just a year after his practice stint with STR, Max was back at COTA in a race seat with the Italian outfit and on an al- most washed out weekend disrupted by the potent tail- end of Hurricane Patricia, Verstappen stormed to eighth place on the grid in a delayed qualifying session on Sun- day morning and then a few hours later stunned onlook- ers by surfing COTA’s rivers of rain to fourth place in the race. Lewis Hamilton might have wrapped up his third ti- tle on the day, but future focused pundits were pointing to 18-year-old Verstappen’s extravagant gifts in the race’s early wet phase as the true highlight of the weekend. “I really enjoyed today’s race,” the teenager said afterwards. “Fourth is a great result and I’m just really, really happy. There were some very good battles out on track and I’d say this was the most complete race of the season.” 2017 US GRAND PRIX GRID: P16 | RACE: P4 Another fourth place, this time with the much more competitive Red Bull team, might not seem anything to write home about, but this was back in the day when an arcane system of penalties for use of extra PU elements meant that Verstappen, who had qualified sixth, was hit with a 15-place grid penalty for fitting a new bunch of bits to his engine. When the extravagant penalties were applied, the Red Bull driver lined up in P16 on the grid, with a mountain to climb. Verstappen, though, scaled the peak like a rock- et-fuelled Sherpa, scything through the field with flam- boyant ease, to eventually come up behind Ferrari’s Kimi Räikkönen. There was no way the Finn was going to deny the flying Verstappen, and four corners from the flag the Dutchman barged past to take an improbable podium finish. Just one problem. The stewards deemed he’d left the track to get the move done and a post-finish time penalty dropped Max to fourth. No matter, it was a drive of thrilling bravery and commitment. Not that Max saw it that way. “It’s never nice to be about to step out onto the podium and then have it tak- en away,” he grumbled. “I had a great race and I am happy with fourth but it’s the way I got there that hurts. We have an amazing race with loads of overtakes and action and then due to 5cm or 10cm of curb the result is changed, people don’t like to watch that.” 2021 US GRAND PRIX. GRID: P1 | RACE: P1 This is probably Max’s greatest stateside performance— and mostly because the Dutch ace delivered this un- der-pressure win while battling debilitating physical prob- lems throughout. Coming towards the sharp end of an increasingly vi- cious title fight with Lewis Hamilton, Verstappen was six points ahead of Hamilton but had not won a race since the Dutch GP seven weeks earlier. Simply, after a trio of difficult outings he needed a win to regain title momentum. But at the start Verstappen blew it and Hamilton lunged through in Turn 1 to take the lead. A cat and mouse game followed but thanks to Red Bull’s aggressive pit stop call to push the Dutch driver margin- ally ahead. It was now a straight fight to the flag, except it wasn’t, as Verstappen reveals. “So, many people don’t know this, but at the time I was still suffering with vision problems from my crash in Silverstone,” he tells the Bulletin. “So the track sometimes started to go really wavy for me and during that race, I was battling, of course, Lewis catching me, but at the same time battling myself, because I was struggling with my vision for quite a few laps in a row. It was just like you’re riding a wave on a boat while going at 302 kilometers an hour. So I had to try and control my breathing in a different way to try and get rid of the problem, because nothing else was working. So yeah, for quite a number of laps, I was almost about to stop the car because I couldn’t see properly. Yeah, I never told anyone at that point, because I had a championship battle. That’s why for me that makes it really a special win.” 2023 MIAMI GRAND PRIX GRID: P9 | RACE: P1 At the start of 2023, Verstappen was outraced by teammate Sergio Pérez at two of the opening four races, and the Dutchman was left scratching his head as to why he was not fully in tune with the RB19. That all changed in Miami, where the Dutchman took the lessons learned at the previous race in Azerbaijan and applied them to devastating effect. However, a messy qualifier meant he needed to come through from ninth on the grid to win. From the start, Max was on fire, weaving through to a P3 and a podium position within 15 laps of the start. He wasn’t done, though. Pérez pitted for new tires, but Verstappen stayed out on old rubber and somehow managed to start eating into the gap between the two. After his own stop Max emerged just 1.6s behind Pérez, eased past his teammate and powered to an impressive win. “In Baku, it was not fantastic that I didn’t win that race, but I learned a lot and sometimes that’s more im- portant than actually winning,” says Max. “It was just a few settings but these things can be quite sensitive when you’re still learning about the car. [Baku] was an impor- tant race to figure that out. And then in Miami that whole weekend started quite well. We had the cock-up in quali, in Q3, where I made a mistake in the first run and then there was the red flag and I couldn’t put a lap in. So to come back from P9 was a very important race result.” 2023 LAS VEGAS GRAND PRIX GRID: P3 | RACE: P1 The F1 show was running at full throttle as F1’s new Las Vegas weekend got into gear but Max wasn’t feeling it and after qualifying in third place on Saturday the champion unceremoniously pulled the plug on the hype machine with one simple sentence: “Monaco is Champions League. This is national league.” But even though the newly-crowned three-time champion hated Vegas’ glitz and is no fan of street tracks, when it came time to shut up and put up, he was at his imperious best. Maybe he could be marked down for an overcooked tussle with Charles Leclerc at the start but thereafter he was untouchable, even with a bit of front wing damage. Race win number 53 from 184 starts for an almost 29 percent career win rate. It was yet another special performance on US soil. At 18, Max Verstappen surprised pundits with his impressive performance at the 2015 US GP, where he placed fourth despite very soggy conditions. GETTY IMAGES/RED BULL CONTENT POOL > p. 11
