Red Bull insider lauds Max Verstappen for making ‘exploiting’ F1 rules an ‘art form’

Red Bull Racing’s senior race strategy engineer Stephen Knowles has nothing but praise for driver Max Verstappen in a recent interview with The Inside Track podcast.

Knowles lauded Verstappen’s ability to not only maximize raw pace but also for making an “art form” of exploiting the regulations.

Max Verstappen transforms exploiting regulations into “an art form”

Four-time World Champion Max Verstappen has made his mark on the sport of Formula 1 due as much to his raw speed as to his ability to make the most of the sporting regulations.

That was in clear evidence during the F1 2024 season, as McLaren’s Lando Norris began to chip away at Verstappen’s lead of the Drivers’ Championship.

As the sport made the rounds to North America in the latter stage of the season, Verstappen and Norris faced several on-track clashes where Verstappen flouted his knowledge of the sporting regulations by positioning his car in such a way at the US Grand Prix to encourage Norris to run wide at Turn 12, netting the McLaren driver a penalty.

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And that ability to understand the limits of the regulations is part of what makes Verstappen such an exceptional driver, according to Red Bull Racing’s senior race strategy engineer Stephen Knowles.

Asked about working with the four-time World Champion, Knowles had nothing but praise.

“He’s really good,” Knowles said on The Inside Track podcast. “I mean, he’s probably how he comes across, really; he’s very direct.

“A lot has been made, and it’s very true that he has a huge capacity. So when he’s driving the car, he can also take on board a lot of variables in terms of strategy and be thinking about alterations to the set-up and his various tools.

“And he’s got a really, really good understanding of sporting regs and the driving guidelines, and I know that’s also been covered a lot in that he’s kind of made an art form of learning exactly what you can and cannot do, what you should and should not do, and really kind of exploiting that.

“And sometimes [that] maybe splits opinion, but I think that that’s an area of performance like anything else. I think the rules that we go racing are part of the sporting landscape, and making the most out of that is a big part, a big part, a big area of performance in the same way as raw pace.

“He takes it onboard.”

That makes for a strong engineer/driver relationship, according to Knowles.

“We have very honest chats,” Knowles admitted.

“He’s not the kind of person that you need to skirt around an issue with. You can be very direct, which I really appreciate.”

That will be a particularly critical trait in 2025, where Red Bull Racing has struggled to find performance with its RB21.

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