Formula 1 World Champion and Oracle Red Bull Racing Driver Max Verstappen.

When the World champion F1 driver learns to drift drive with ‘Mad’ Mike. The best team is needed to get record results.

Max Verstappen is the current F1 World Champion, winning his first in 2021. He is one of Red Bull’s most prominent athletes.

Away from F1, Max is always looking to test his skills in a different way and learn from the best in other disciplines; this project would be one such occasion. Here, he would become a student of the phenomenal drift racing driver and fellow Red Bull athlete Mike Whiddett, aka ‘Mad Mike’.

Our job; was to create a film showcasing Max’s thirst for knowledge and ability behind the wheel - and that he had a bit of fun doing it, something that would never be lacking with the charismatic Mike as his tutor.

Watch our BTS film

Working with the Red Bull team we had to imagine a way to bring these two worlds together that would perform on social whilst sticking to a rigid budget.
We created many drafts of creative before we finally landed on the Horner Corner as way to help test Max in an entertaining way. Designing, R&D and crafting the props was no mean feat.
The film went on to become the best performing Red Bull Motorport video ever. Fan engagement was through the roof with overwhelmingly positive sentiment and sales of RB increasing as a result.

Max access

Given the hefty F1 schedule (23 races in 2023), Max's time for this project was quite limited. He had the Austrian GP on July 2nd and then the British GP on July 9th, so we had to slot the shoot right in the middle of his recovery from one and his preparation for the next - a single shoot day planned for July 6th.

However, he needed to be in Silverstone that afternoon, so the shoot day became half a day and eventually two hours with him on set. So with all that confirmed, we now needed to work out how we'd do it and where.

The platform

The film would live on YouTube, or as Red Bull calls it, ‘YouTube Main’.

This is because Red has YouTube channels for virtually every sporting discipline where they represent an athlete. So if you're a Skateboarding purest, you'd go to the ‘Red Bull Skateboarding’ channel, or if you like to dance, you'd go to 'Red Bull Dance', and so on. ‘Red Bull Main’, however, is simply YouTube, a mixed audience where not everyone is guaranteed to be a motorsport fan.

Our film had to work for them, meaning it needed to be engaging but not too or complex or take itself too seriously. To us, that meant more 'show' and less 'tell'.

Doughnuts, figure 8s and a Scandi flick

When we informed Mike about the time he would have Max, he simply said, “Too easy - loads of time to do some skids”, in his thick Kiwi accent.

So with that, we began fleshing out what ‘skids’ Mike could teach Max.

We settled on three that got incrementally harder but with Mike instructing from the passenger seat; the doughnut, followed by a figure 8 (two consecutive doughnuts but in opposite directions), and finally, a Scandi flick; a sideways drift around a long corner without losing control of the vehicle.

This was created out of ten cones positioned ten metres apart.

Mike would instruct Max to get as close to the cones as possible without hitting them.

Once Mike was happy he’d executed that well enough, he’d give him a final challenge that would not only test Max’s new drifting abilities and nod to his F1 roots but also make him smile.

Milbrook proving ground

Max would be travelling to us from Red Bull Racing HQ in Milton Keynes, so we needed to keep that journey time to a minimum, and as look would have it, the perfect place was available just ten miles down; Millbrook Proving Ground, a vehicle testing facility for both commercial and private vehicle owners. At the end of their site was the perfect spot - The Dynamics Pad, a huge concrete circle 117m in diameter.

However, although perfect for what we needed to see on camera, the area had no facilities, and so a new list of logistical requirements needed planning.

Horner corner

Once Max had completed the Scandi flick lesson, we thought it would be fun if he then discovered that each cone had been replaced with ten life-size Cristian Horner cardboard cutouts and had become The Horner Corner.

Each Christian would have one enormous hand, and Max would be challenged to knock as many of Christian's hands off as possible.

So, with Red Bull Racing on board and the Boss-man giving us the go-ahead, we created dozens of life-size Cristian Horner cardboard cutouts, complete with a massive, ideally positioned hand so that it could be bumped with the rear of a Mad Bul. We now just needed somewhere to film it all.

Production village

With the Stamp crew and Red Bull's team in double figures and journalists and Social Opinion Leaders being invited daily, the list of attendees was approaching 70. So to ensure that everyone on set was looked after, we organised several mobile units to ensure Mike and Max had emergency response teams available, but those not required on the pad could be kept comfortable and out of harm's way. So from safety vehicles to dining buses, Toilets to an Eco pod, we turned the Dynamic Pad into a production village bigger than any previous project we've executed at Stamp.

The tech

This was a large area to cover, and the challenge here was to get the coverage to produce the fun, fast and unfiltered film Red Bull after knowing that we would get little to no time to shoot any pickups with Max. That meant that both the shoot and the film would have a very live feel and little margin for error. We also need to have a fairly light footprint on the pad itself since the last thing Max needed was camera operators dotted about while he thrashed an unfamiliar beast of the car around. This meant the action would be captured in three key styles; long, onboard and above. We used five operated ground cameras on huge Canon lenses, Six GoPros fixed to the car and two drones; one FPV for speed and one Mavic Pro 2 for statics. Audio-wise, we had the best in the business, so we could hear every word between Mike and Max regardless of how loud the Mad Bull roared.

The rehearsal

Since we had no more than two hours with Max, we needed to make sure what we aimed to do was 100% possible and 100% safe, so we scheduled a full run-through of the action the day before with professional racing driver Archie Hamilton standing in as Max. However, like many rehearsals, things did go wrong, including a rather substantial problem with Max’s beloved Mad Bul (a highly modified Mazda RX-7 FD3S). That said, although we didn’t get the full rehearsal we wanted, we benefitted greatly from what we did that day. The crew gelled brilliantly with Mike and although we all left that night with a more things to iron out than we would have likes, we were excited about the day to come.

The shoot

Max arrived just before 0930, and by 0945, Mike was doing a doughnut around him as the front tyres of the Mad Bul screeched inches from Max’s feet. It was quite the start, and it was soon Max’s turn to get behind the wheel - The first time Mike had ever let anyone else drive his Mad BulMax. To his credit, Max admitted to being nervous, but you wouldn’t know it as he learned very quickly what the Mad Bul was capable of and what he was capable of doing with the Mad Bul. Just over 90mins later, we’d got everything we needed, and Max was off to do numerous press interviews. BTS imagery courtesy of Greg Coleman photography.

Post-production

Despite the limited film time, we had a lot of footage and 15 days to cut the main film, a snappy trailer, and a standalone piece of content for TikTok that just focused on the Horner Corner and multiple sequences of selects. For the main film, we needed to ensure viewers knew what was happening without spending too much time explaining it. And document how Max went from nervous beginner (something you never see in an F1 world champion) to hitting eight or ten of our cardboard Christian Horner hands less than an hour and a half later - a Testament to his ability and the tutelage of Mike.

With some fun music and simple graphics supplementing split screen sequences of each of Max’s lessons, we produced a film that everyone involved is hugely proud of.

When the film launched on April 10th, it reached a million views by the end of it. It has since become the most successful piece of motorsport content Red Bull UK has ever put out.