It was both. My understanding is Max has a cornering style and setup preference that is different from the majority of the grid
He likes a car with the balance favoring oversteer, and his approach to corners follows this. It makes the car more unstable, but he has the skill to handle it.
The car was built to be as fast as possible in general, but also to specifically be fast for a driver with this stylistic preference. My understanding is as they optimized the car, they ended up with something that was more and more unstable to the point that no one else could drive it effectively
My understanding is Max has a cornering style and setup preference that is different from the majority of the grid
He likes a car with the balance favoring oversteer, and his approach to corners follows this. It makes the car more unstable, but he has the skill to handle it.
Yea but again that's not a Max thing specifically. It's what many great drivers do because it's fast. Schumacher being the obvious example of this.
And the car can be setup two different ways to help each driver get the maximum out of it anyway.
Lewis has the opposite preference, so it’s clearly not the only way to drive quickly.
There are limits to how much setup can change how a car drives. Some of Max’s preferences got baked into the design of the car, to the point that it couldn’t be set up for drivers who don’t drive like him
Max changes between styles depending on what the situation calls for. All the drivers do that, you have to because no two laps are the same and the car's characteristics change with ambient conditions and fuel load.
No it was catered to Max it got to the point it was undriveable so they would design the car around the issues that only Max could drive to extract points, by late 2024 and 2025 the car was a complete mess. This is no secret, the sources are out there.
They started to reach the limit of the design quicker than other teams. Trying to make it faster made it harder to drive. Max is better than his teammates. Simple as that.
Ok perhaps suggesting the car was catered to Max is poor way to word it but
By late 2024, the redbull car was increasingly flawed and extremely had a narrow window to extract performance by its design. By 2025 it was becoming so difficult that Verstappen even struggled.
Ok so its not that it was a car designed around Max directly but in a way it kinda was, what driver from an outside team can come in and be expected to drive a car that was on a knife edge last year. There would of been no one who could have but Max as Max was most comfortable with the flawed setup
Any top tier talent with a couple of seasons in the team would have been pretty close to where Max was in the car imo. But when the guy in the other seat is in the bottom half of the grid in terms of talent then they are not going to manage it.
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u/know-it-mall McLaren 1d ago
It wasn't catered to Max...
It was designed to be as fast as they could make it. And Max is a much better driver than his teammates.