Old-performance engineer on working with Verstappen: 'One of the easiest'

"I'll be honest, like working with him was probably one of the easiest drivers I had to work with. The communication loop was super tight," Hinsey continues. "A lot of it was nonverbal. I'd look through the data at night, have a chat with him, you know, before he left Friday night. What do you think about this? The tools, talk with GP about the setup and that was it."

Hinsey was mostly in contact with Gianpiero Lambiase. That was mainly about set-up requirements. Despite really liking working with Verstappen and the Red Bull environment, Hinsey decided not to travel the world at the end of 2017.

Hinsey takes a step back

"Do I miss it? I don't miss the traveling." The number of GPs has continued to increase, which is an eyesore for the Briton. "That's why I quit traveling at the end of 17. The, you know, 19 races looking at 24 races was a lot and it's a bit of a different story between Max. Max's sitting here winning World Championships and I was at the time performance engineering a second/third place team and he's, you know, like driving effectively on easy mode, not much challenge and all the races and travel."

"I get it, but even me, like I didn't have any aspirations to be like, 'oh, I have to be a world championship winning engineer.' I was like, I do this because it's challenging and interesting and when it became too rinse and repeat, I was like, I'd like another challenge and that's when I decided to go back to the factory to focus on development rather than operation."