Verstappen should favour Aston Martin if he leaves Red Bull
Max Verstappen should favour Aston Martin over McLaren if he chooses to leave the Red Bull Formula 1 team.
That's what F1 insider Mark Hughes reckons, and with good reason, in a new Wednesday column, The Long Run, sent directly and exclusively to your inbox.
Here's a sneak peek - if you want more you'll need to sign up to our newsletter, which you can do here. Enjoy!
"If I were Fernando Alonso I'd get my signature on another Aston contract ASAP and if I were Max Verstappen I'd fancy the challenge of that way more than just plugging myself into a fast McLaren," says Hughes, having explained that Adrian Newey is the reason the Aston Martin project is and should be so attractive.
Hughes explains: "The fact that Newey, even before the season had begun, had insisted they were not going to piecemeal develop the race-one car and instead concentrate on the mid-season 'B' version we've just seen tells you a lot about his mentality.
"Showing a total indifference to perception, knowing the initial car was going to be miles off, he decided he'd just let it run like that for half-a-season while he worked at attacking the fundamentals of the deficit.
"You might also have noticed that the car has run so far with a visibly greater rake angle than any other on the grid. Newey has always been a high-rake fan and it was he who initiated the trend and took it to the greatest extremes in his Red Bull days, before ground effect regs extinguished the practice.
"The others haven't followed because they cannot yet adequately feed that rake angle with enough airflow to the rear to keep the airflow attached at low speeds.
"For sure, it won't have been attached at low speeds on the Aston either. Yet he's retained the feature anyway. Because he has faith that's where the potential is and the more data they can get from running the car like that, the sooner he is going to be able to feed it.
"He doesn't think like the others. He's sometimes wrong but when he is the knowledge he gains usually enables him to come back with something devastating. That's what history suggests."
This is a small excerpt from Mark's in-depth column, which also investigates the speed of the McLaren after its Hungary upgrade. To get future editions, sign up here.
