Formula 1: ‘Most need 150km to get used to F1, Verstappen needed a lap’

On a cloudy day in Italy in late 2008, Franz Toast sat in his SUV with the engine running, listening intently to instructions on the phone.

At the time, Tost was a proud Formula 1 team principal who had achieved a dream victory against all odds in pouring rain at Monza for the small Italian Formula 1 team. However, he was a crooked-eared commander. On the other end of the phone was Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz, and I had a question for him. Most of them.

“Dietrich was a special, once-in-a-lifetime person.” said Toast, 67, who works in an office in Faenza, Italy. He plans to retire there at the end of 2023 as team leader of Alpha Tauri. “He was warm and kind, but he was always demanding, because otherwise he would not have been able to achieve all these achievements. If something was not going in the right direction, he wanted to know everything, he wanted to know the details. That’s what he wanted. If there is, I have called several times. Know.\”

The phone call was a bit long that day. But details of Tost’s time with Red Bull’s “other teams” include many achievements, notably the success of some of the sport’s greatest champions, including newly crowned three-time F1 champion Max Verstappen and four-time title winner Sebastian Vettel . . Former Austrian Formula 3 driver Tost secured a place at Williams after entering Formula 1 alongside Michael Schumacher’s then manager Willy Weber and his seven-time champion brother Ralf, settling as one of the most accessible pilots. The fun side of driving one of the most affordable and comfortable pit-lane teams is often consumed by the stress of high-level motoring politics.