Why F1 should fear Max Verstappen

Earlier this year I raced Max Verstappen.

Well, I say 'raced', but aside from the fact we were both on track at the same time there wasn't much comparison.

I was in Florida to take part in the Ferrari Winter Series, where Ferrari invites a bunch of young karting and single-seater hot-shots and gives them all the training necessary to make it in the big, bad world of professional motorsport. Fitness, PR, racecraft, mechanics, diet - you name it, they spend a month doing it.

I (over twice their age...) went and joined them for a few days of racing at Homestead-Miami, driving Formula-Abarth single seaters.

Max, I quickly gathered, was the bane of the instructors' lives. He questioned everything, wasn't afraid to argue his point and rarely backed down. For a 16-year-old he was remarkably self-assured.

He got away with it chiefly because, even among a group of 11 seriously talented young racers out to prove themselves, he was a genius on the track.

Turn one at Homestead is a proper heart-in-mouth corner - a bumpy kink taken flat out at 140mph, immediately followed by some panic braking to get round the next left-hander at about 80mph.

It was all I could do to hang on to the pack and get the line right. Ahead I saw Max draft up behind another car and send it up the inside of not just him, but another three cars in the space of as many metres.

I couldn't conceive of how time, distance and physics would permit such a move, let alone the bravery, confidence and skill level needed to not only consider it, but attempt it and make it stick to perfection. I was gob-smacked. Properly impressed.

Max won, naturally. And remember this wasn't against a bunch of track-day punters, but the very cream of the world's young racing drivers.

Afterwards I went and found Max's dad, Jos. Jos-the-Boss Verstappen was one of my favourite F1 drivers back in the day, always giving it his absolute all.

Turns out Max's mum was a Dutch karting champion, too. Jos, and Max's agent Huub Rothengatter, made a bet with me.

We wager, they said, that Max will make it to F1... and by 2017. I refused to take the bet on the grounds that - jokingly - I thought he'd be there before. Funny how these things pan out, isn't it?

So to anyone concerned Max, at the tender age of 17, won't cut it in the pressure-cooker atmosphere of F1, I'd say this: don't worry. The boy's got it. And remember Toro Rosso is the team that played a formative role in the development of one Sebastian Vettel.

That's the Sebastian Vettel who, in 2010, became the youngest-ever world champion at the age of 23. By my reckoning, that gives Max five seasons...