‘It went absolutely crazy’: The F1 photographer who captured Max Verstappen’s dramatic world title win
Interview: Getty Images and Red Bull photographer Mark Thompson discusses that night in Abu Dhabi, Formula One glamour, blagging his way on to Monaco rooftops and his historic image of Max Verstappen
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Your support makes all the difference.As the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix meandered towards a seemingly anticlimactic finish, photographer Mark Thompson watched on from a deflated Red Bull garage anticipating an early night. “With 15 minutes to go I was in the garage thinking ‘we’re not going to win this’,” he remembers. “You’re almost in neutral, you’re thinking this is an early night, that’s the way it goes. Then, bang! All of a sudden we were winning and everything went mental. It went absolutely crazy.”
Thompson is no stranger to the chaos of F1 having photographed every grand prix for 24 years (“which is either really cool or really sad,” he says, “whichever way you look at it”) before Covid ended his streak. A colourful career for Getty Images has entailed uncompromising drivers, blagging his way on to hotel balconies in Monaco for the perfect shot and partying for two days straight when Red Bull won their first championship. But even for someone who has seen F1 from every angle in every light, in all hours of the day in all corners of the globe, this race through the eyes of this team was utterly, uniquely breathtaking.
“The team are jumping around, you’ve got the guys on the pit wall freaking out, Christian Horner almost crying, it was amazing,” he says. “And now you’ve got to up your game. You’ve got to get pictures and it’s not that easy when everyone’s running around going crazy.”
Thompson went in search of a way to tell the story. He left the garage and headed down towards the bedlam of parc firmé, where he spotted Red Bull’s new world champion Max Verstappen slinking around the back of a giant screen with his dad Jos in tow. In a closet of peace away from the howls of delirium on the other side of the screen, Thompson captured a tender moment between father and son.
“I poked my head round and saw that Max’s dad had his arm around him and he’d sat him down. I stood back and shot it on a long lens – I was sweating so much I could barely see through the viewfinder. For me that was a really special moment to see because ironically I was photographing Jos at the start of his career. You don’t want to intrude, but at the same time that was quite a historic picture, in my opinion.”
For Thompson, it was the poignant culmination of a long and at times gruelling season. F1’s travelling circus has expanded in every direction since he first switched from football photography in the 90s, and the pandemic had made things even more intense, forcing him to embed within the Red Bull bubble. “People talk about the glamour and all that sort of thing, which does exist, but when you work in the industry it’s actually not that glamorous. It’s long hours and hard work, especially for the mechanics, for instance.”
Thompson typically arrives at a circuit on Wednesday to set up his kit and build a makeshift office inside the Red Bull motorhome. Press conferences and sponsor obligations fill Thursday before Friday practice where he’ll get shots of the drivers talking to their engineers. Then he gets out on the track and has the chance to capture the cars – their shape is what drew him to F1 in the first place.
Some circuits are naturally a better canvas than others. Silverstone’s barren airfield aesthetic rarely makes for a great photo whereas the Austrian mountains offer a beautiful backdrop to the sport in the foreground. “Then you go to places like Monaco which offer up countless pictures,” Thompson says. “The first time I did Monaco I literally couldn’t take a picture for a while because it’s just insane to see the cars going around there at that speed.”
In a place like Monte Carlo, it pays to know how to talk your way through a closed door. “If you blag your way onto building rooftops it’s an incredible race to cover. I always carry a couple of signed drivers hats or something like that and that gets you in. I’ve been going to Monaco for so long now I say ‘can I come back to that apartment next year?’. If you want to get somewhere like on the roof of the Ritz-Carlton you have to have a supreme plan, but over the years you get to know the right people and that helps.”
In the garage, building rapport with drivers, team chiefs and mechanics is crucial if you’re going to point a camera at them all weekend. “If you don’t get on with the drivers you’re pretty much finished.” Sometimes they enjoy turning the tables: while Thompson would head across the garage with his second camera to shoot teammate Daniel Ricciardo, Sebastian Vettel would seize his chance to have some fun. “I’d come back and there’d be all sorts of pictures on the camera that I’d left down,” he laughs. “That was classic Sebastian Vettel, and the funny thing is he’s one of those annoying people who’s good at everything, so he knew how to focus a camera and shoot. You’ve got to be careful not to leave a camera lying around because if the driver doesn’t get it then certainly some of the mechanics would give me some interesting pictures, that we won’t talk about.”
After years photographing midfield teams, Vettel’s first world championship win at Red Bull in 2010 was an unforgettable moment in which Thompson was giddily swept along. An all-night party in Abu Dhabi, then a private jet to Salzburg with drivers Vettel and Mark Webber, boss Horner and the rest. “That whole crazy time was amazing,” he recalls. “I think I didn’t sleep for two nights. We were in Austria for 24 hours, then back to the factory and then home. That was special, seeing that world title and everything that went with it after so many years of F1.”
History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes, Mark Twain supposedly said, and back in Abu Dhabi eleven years later Thompson watched Red Bull’s next world champion win the most dramatic race of all and perhaps the beginnings of a new Formula One dynasty, as mayhem took hold once more.
What does it take to get the perfect Formula One photo? How do you find that silo of quiet in the storm like Verstappen’s father-son moment? Ultimately it comes down to instinct, perseverance and little good fortune. “Sometimes you come away from a race you’ll see what some other people have shot and think ‘why didn’t I see that?’ Sometimes you come away and think ‘I got some mega stuff there’. There’s an element of luck involved in that and sometimes it goes in your favour.”
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