I Follow Max Verstappen Closely As His Race Engineer Get To Know

Stop it! I'm John-Pierre Lambiezzi, Head of Racing at Red Bull Racing. I'm responsible for race engineering, strategy, sporting and the race team and logistics. On the pit wall, I'm mostly following Max Verstappen closely as his race engineer. The best part of the job really is the fact that it's an ever-evolving challenge. We cannot stay still and be a part of a very high-performing team and try to operate at 110% at all times. The most difficult part of the job is trying to reach perfection 100% of the time. Winning races from the outside sometimes appears easier than it is in reality. Everything has to be in sync, whether that's from the initial car build, preparations, simulations, drivers in sync, strategy, that's the most difficult part. One picture stands in my mind when I think of my best moment here at Red Bull, and that's an outside view of the exit of Turn 5 in Abu Dhabi. You just have the video scrolling of Max diving up the inside of Lewis and that will forever stay with me. Obviously we have a large amount of data that we can lean on to make as informed a decision as possible 95% of the time. But sometimes it needs to be a split second decision and that's where you start to trust your instinct and your experience that you can make those decisions 5% of the time and be correct hopefully 90% of the time. Change of regulations, obviously we've not had a change in chassis and powertrain regulations for an extremely long time. They have been a few years in the making, although the regulations themselves haven't been set until very recently, which kind of means that whilst we've been gearing ourselves up in simulation world as to what we may expect from the car's performance, how the handling characteristics are changing relative to the current era of cars, I don't think it will be really until we hit the track in February until we actually grasp a full understanding of what's required going into next year. I think from a personal perspective, we follow a process and that's whether it's 2023 and Max is winning 19 races of the 22 and the team is winning 21 races of the 22, or if we are struggling to compete for podiums next year, the process doesn't change. So you stick to your methods and the way of operating and the results will talk to themselves. The seats that stay perhaps the calmest on the pit wall are those filled by the strategists. I think as a race engineer and perhaps even as Piero's technical director, being European, he has some emotion some of the time, but also as a race engineer, you can get fired up and a little bit emotive purely based on the output of what's happening on your particular car. Whereas I think the strategists are able to keep central to all of the noise that's happening around them and yeah, I'd say they've got the best tone on the radio on the pit wall.