SimplyAbuDhabi XLII

He was friendly with the young Mick Schumacher. “I remember we had a holiday in Norway where we did ski, but it was minus 26 degrees at one point so we were more playing indoors. And we didn’t even know how to communicate at the time because he was speaking German and I was speaking Dutch. Then we each started our go-karting careers. At one point, we saw each other on the go-karting tracks again. It was a bit hit and miss, but sometimes we’d talk about back in the day.” Did Michael not become a source of inspiration? “I never had that with anyone,” he says, “where I wanted to be like him or I wanted to achieve what he has achieved.” No role models or heroes? “Never. I never had posters up.” It’s appealing that he seems impervious to the vanity of legacies. The way Red Bull are going, he could one day be an argument in the “greatest ever” conversation, but he just says flatly, “I’m not interested in that. I was never [thinking] ‘I want to win seven or I want to win eight’. I have never been a guy of statistics or records that needed to be broken.” We can, though, introduce one famous name who made a considerable mark upon him: Johan Cruyff, who came to the Barcelona track during testing at the start of 2016 to meet his fellow Dutchman. “It was a very nice conversation,” he says. “We knew that he was very sick at the time. But he was so keen to understand the world of F1 and I think he was very proud to have a Dutchman in F1 and maybe the next big thing, a hopeful. I tried to explain F1 to him. He told me stories from his days in football. “He also said, ‘With my disease, I feel I am 2-1 up at half-time, but we still need to get to the end.’ He felt very hopeful at the time; he’d just had a good few weeks, but then sadly a few weeks later he passed away. That really got to me. You keep on relishing those moments. He was way older than me, but somehow we clicked — the way we were communicating.” Two months after Cruyff’s death, Verstappen won his first Grand Prix, making him the youngest F1 winner. And it was there, in Barcelona. Verstappen sounds almost philosophical about this. He notes that his winning time — 1hr 41min 40sec — has 14 twice within it, and 14 was Cruyff’s number. “For me, something like that — it can’t be coincidence. It’s very crazy that that has happened,” he says. “I amnever a person who really likes tomeet anyone like a famous person. I am not interested. Zero interest. But I was actually very happy that I’d met him. “Then I read his book. The way he was talking about his sport, everything just seemed so simple in a way I could relate to – it may sound weird to say some things are very simple, but sometimes it just happens that way. For me, that’s how it is. “The thing is with people like him, they are so talented, when they are playing or racing, they have so much more capacity for other things to think about. I think that’s how he was when he was playing or coaching; his vision was so much wider than most other people.” Photo by Gongora/NurPhoto Simply Abu Dhabi | 133