Red Bull Identified Verstappen's 'Successor' - 13-year-old Dutch Prodigy Rocco Coronel

Tuesday, 08 October 2024 at 15:44

Red Bull's motorsport advisor Helmut Marko suggested he might just have a successor to the triple World Champion Max Verstappen in Red Bull.

Max Verstappen is one of the two biggest stars in Red Bull Racing's history. The 27-year-old has already surpassed Sebastian Vettel in the number of wins, and if he can win the 2024 Championship title, he will match his four consecutive titles with the team.

Verstappen is one of Red Bull's biggest assets, and the Austrian team is well aware of it. This is confirmed by the fact that he is the highest-paid F1 driver on the grid, earning $45 million in 2023 (according to Planet F1).

However, the Dutchman's future with the team from Milton Keynes is uncertain at the moment. While he says he prefers to stay with the team now, he doesn't deny that he might have the option to leave as soon as 2025.

Even if Verstappen stayed with Red Bull Racing until 2028, nothing is guaranteed further down the road, as he has previously stated a couple of times that he doesn't plan to stay in Formula 1 for long.

Consequently, Helmut Marko's current main challenge is to search for young talent that could potentially take the Dutchman's place.

Although the 81-year-old previously said there will never be another Verstappen, he is not optimistic that he might have found his successor.

Who is it? His name is Rocco Coronel, and he's the son of the Dutch professional racing driver Tom Coronel. Helmut Marko was present at one F3 test that Rocco attended this year (2024) and said, as per GPblog:

"We were very surprised by Rocco. He is 13 years old, so he was younger than Max when we started with him. There were several good drivers, but for his age, Rocco Coronel was definitely exceptional."

Apparently, the difference between Coronel and all the other drivers on track was so significant that Marko didn't even need to see the timing sheets to know that he was the fastest. He continued:

"I go from corner to corner on a scooter, as always. I don't need a stopwatch. They said to me: 'Coronel is the fastest.' I said: 'I know, I don't need a stopwatch to see that."

"He is quite mature. He has self-confidence. He also has a pretty dominant father, it seems, in the Netherlands. But then his father stopped talking, and he [Rocco] told more about himself."

"I'm impressed with how he keeps the balance between racing and school. So I'm sure that if Max ever quits, we might already have his successor in place."