The Quiet Habits Behind World-Class
This past weekend, Max Verstappen made his debut at the Nürburgring 24 Hours, the world’s toughest endurance race. He drove a Mercedes-AMG GT3 alongside three professional endurance racers, in a discipline he had only started competing in eight months earlier.
Verstappen Racing led the race for much of the night before a mechanical failure with three hours to go ended their win bid. They finished 38th. The race did not end the way he wanted. That is not the point of this piece.
What is worth paying attention to is not the result itself, but the path that brought a four-time Formula 1 world champion to the start line of a discipline he barely knew a year ago, and the habits that enabled him to compete in it.
It is worth noting, too, that the journey was not a reaction. Verstappen did not turn to endurance racing because his F1 season went sideways. He set up Verstappen Racing as a factory-backed Mercedes-AMG GT3 outfit in late 2025, months before the 2026 F1 regulations began causing him problems. The team was conceived when he expected his F1 calendar to be full. That distinction matters. He was not retreating from one discipline. He was deliberately building a second one.
And the bet paid off in ways that go beyond the racing itself. The 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours sold out its weekend tickets for the first time in the race’s 56-year history. Team entries were capped at 150 cars for the first time in over a decade. A race long considered too long to be exciting and too obscure for mainstream attention drew its largest-ever crowd.
And, unusually in 2026, the whole thing was free to watch. The Nürburgring’s own YouTube channel and Red Bull’s carried the full 24 hours of broadcast live, with English commentary, accessible from any country, behind no paywall. Most elite sport in 2026 is gated. Premier League football, Formula 1 itself, every major boxing fight, every golf major, all require a paid subscription somewhere in the chain. The Nürburgring 24, with the world’s most famous racing driver making his debut, was broadcast live on YouTube.
One driver did all of that. Not by being a faster endurance racer than anyone else. By being himself, by showing up, and by being part of a system that understood that letting the audience in costs less than charging for it would have made.
One week before the Nürburgring, Verstappen travelled to Japan to test a Super GT car at Fuji Speedway. A car he had never driven, on a track he had never raced, in pouring rain, against one of the country’s top GT drivers.
After one installation lap, he was within a tenth of a second of the local expert’s benchmark time. On his second flying lap, he beat it by nearly two seconds.
Eight months earlier, he did not have an endurance racing licence.
And another quiet detail, easy to miss: Verstappen did not start the race at the Nürburgring. The four-time world champion stayed out of the car for the opening stint. He let an endurance specialist take the start instead, someone who knows the Nordschleife in race conditions better than he does. Not because Verstappen could not do it. Because he knew he should not.
The story is impressive on its own. But the operating model beneath it is what interests me, because it is the part that anyone, in any field, could choose to learn from.
Two kinds of traits
When we talk about world-class operators, we tend to focus on what makes them visible: talent, competitiveness, and the willingness to push when others would back off. Verstappen has all of these in obvious quantities. The story most often told about him is the story of a generational driver who refuses to lose. There is a well-known moment from the production of F1: The Movie where Verstappen, asked to play himself in a racing sequence, would not let Brad Pitt’s character overtake him, even though the scene was scripted that way. He could not bring himself to lose, even on camera, in fiction.
Whether you read that as competitiveness or stubbornness, the same instinct sits underneath. And on its own, that instinct is not a virtue. Plenty of people who refuse to lose end up unable to learn from losing. What separates Verstappen from the average highly competitive operator is what surrounds the instinct, the habits that direct it, slow it down, and channel it into the right places.
Two of those habits stand out in his operating model.
Adaptive learning at speed
The first is the speed at which he learns new things.
Eight months from no endurance licence to contending in the world’s hardest endurance race is not a normal trajectory. It is not just talent transfer. F1 cars and GT3 cars are mechanically and aerodynamically very different machines, with different braking demands, tyre management requirements, and energy profiles. Switching from a Ferrari 296 GT3 to a Mercedes-AMG GT3 within a single season, as Verstappen Racing did when it changed manufacturers for 2026, is itself a non-trivial adjustment, even for a four-time world champion. The Nordschleife, the so-called Green Hell, is a circuit that takes most professional drivers years to read properly. Verstappen has been competitive there in his second season.
What this requires is not just adaptability, but a specific kind of attention. The willingness to start each new car, each new track, each new discipline as if it were the first one. To strip away the assumptions built up by previous experience and look at the new situation on its own terms. This is harder than it sounds, particularly for someone with championships already on their record. The natural temptation, after years of success, is to lean on the patterns that worked before. The discipline is to resist it.
In any field built on changing conditions, this is the skill that separates those who keep growing from those who quietly stop. Markets change. Technologies change. Customer behaviour changes. The operators who continue to perform are those who remain students of the new conditions, rather than of the conditions they originally mastered. Verstappen’s Fuji test is a small but useful example of what that looks like in practice: a four-time world champion willing to sit in an unfamiliar car, in unfamiliar conditions, against an unfamiliar opponent, and treat the exercise as one he might learn something from.
Attention to the small things
The second trait is harder to describe but, in some ways, more telling. Verstappen has a reputation among engineers and team members for being almost obsessive about details that most drivers, at his level, would delegate. He inspects tyres before a session. He asks about differences in brake compounds between corners. He reviews telemetry at a level of granularity that, on paper, is beneath his pay grade.
There is no glamour in any of this. It does not appear in the highlight reel. It is the sort of behaviour that most observers would describe as unnecessary, or perfectionist, or simply beneath someone of his stature. And yet it is consistent across every account of how he operates.
What this behaviour signals is not pedantry, but seriousness. A refusal to treat any part of the work as someone else’s problem. A view that the small details are not too small to engage with personally, and that, in fact, they often hold the answers to the larger questions that decide outcomes.
This is the trait most senior people fail to develop, because it does not look like seniority. Seniority, in most descriptions, is about vision, decisiveness, and the big call. The small things are for someone else. But the operators who consistently outperform their peers tend to be the ones who never quite let the small things become someone else’s job. They understand that the texture of how the work is done is part of the work itself.
What this means for the rest of us
We do not all have the talent of a four-time world champion. We never will. But we can choose, every day, how seriously we take the parts of the work that other people skip.
We can choose to remain students of our own field rather than declare ourselves experts in it. We can decide to engage personally with the details that most of our peers consider beneath them. We can decide that the conditions around us are worth re-examining each year, rather than navigating on assumptions formed earlier.
These are not glamorous choices. They will not make the highlight reel. But they are the choices that, compounded over time, separate the operators who keep getting better from the ones who quietly plateau.
The Nürburgring result, whichever way it went, will be forgotten in a season. The habits that brought Verstappen to the start line are part of the story worth taking with us.
The story is not the championships. It is what someone does after they have already won them.
Yusuf Bodiat is a strategic advisor and writer based in Johannesburg. He is the founder of Pragmatic Thinking and the author of The Bottom Line: A CFO’s Blueprint for South Africa’s Turnaround.
