How Max Verstappen conquered the 2021 Saudi GP with his own simulator build

Max Verstappen's former performance coach, Bradley Scanes, has revealed how the four-time champion went the extra mile to prepare for the inaugural Formula 1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix in 2021.

Every race counted for the Dutchman during the 2021 campaign as he fought it out with seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton for the drivers' championship title. Verstappen ultimately clinched the title in a controversial season finale in Abu Dhabi.

The season saw the introduction of the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit, and instead of waiting for Red Bull to get the track on its simulators, Verstappen sourced someone to build the track for his own personal simulator to get the edge over his competition.

"Max is a little bit more of that new generation of simulator driver where they’re getting so many virtual laps of a track that they’re doing some real high-level visualisation stuff," Scanes said on the High Performance podcast. "I think a lot of this gets missed when people talk about Max, and he often gets branded as a natural talent. This has been years and years and years of hard work.

"And there’s a reason why he goes out in FP1 and sets purple after purple after purple while other drivers set up. It’s because he’s been practising the track hours and hours in the week leading up. Saudi Arabia, the first year we went there, is the best example of that. No one could get a handle on that circuit for the entire FP1, and Max just kept going purple, purple, purple. And that’s a difficult track as well.

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / LAT Images via Getty Images

"Red Bull didn’t even have the simulator version of the track in their simulator, and Max managed to find someone online to build out what the track looked like, a spec to put on his own simulator. So he could practise the track. So he was able to practise the Saudi track on something that no one else had access to."

He added: "This is the sort of work ethic and the differences that make champions, right? This is 2021. We’re in a title fight. Every little bit matters. And ultimately, we didn’t win Saudi for a number of reasons, but you know, you could see the pace that he set first off and actually his qualifying lap before he pinged the wall would have probably gone down as one of the greatest ever."