Racing
© Jake Archibald from London, England
Max Verstappen will start last against 100 competitors in Red Bull’s Max vs 100 kart race at Silverstone on September 16, with the four-time Formula 1 world champion required to overtake the entire field before the time limit expires.
The grid will not be made up solely of racing drivers. Red Bull athletes, celebrities, content creators, public personalities and invited fans from around the world will make up the 100-strong field, creating a traffic-heavy challenge for a driver accustomed to competing at the front of Formula 1 races.
The event will return Verstappen to the discipline where he learned the foundations of racing. He began karting at age four and said in Red Bull’s event announcement: “In go-karts you learn all the basics: starts, defending, overtaking. Of course, I spent a long period of my life go-karting, so it’s always nice to return.”
French driver and race director David Terrien, a kart designer and former junior karting world champion, created a purpose-built Silverstone layout for the race. “Creating a track for 100 drivers at the same time has never been done, never been seen,” Terrien said.
The scale of the task has already been underlined in testing. Sebastian Job, a test driver and two-time iRacing World Champion, ran the layout with 50 karts at Kart Silverstone and said clearing twice that number would be a major test. “I think to overtake 100 cars is going to be extremely difficult. Today we did it with 50, and even that was a challenge to do it in the allotted time. He’s got his work cut out for him big time.”
Verstappen believes his years in karts will help him reacclimatize quickly, particularly in judging the machine’s grip. “It’s about understanding the grip of the go-kart,” he said. “I’ve done so many years in go-karting that you quite naturally get back into things. I will be looking forward to just seeing the carnage unfold in front of me.”
Whether Verstappen can turn that karting instinct into 100 passes before time runs out will define an event built around putting a Formula 1 champion in the most crowded conditions possible.