David Coulthard recalls remarkable Max Verstappen experience: 'I was five seconds slower!'

David Coulthard has recounted going head-to-head with Max Verstappen in a title-winning Red Bull, where he found the Dutchman was instantly five seconds a lap faster than him.

The 13-time grand prix winner was driving Sebastian Vettel's RB7 from 2011 at Imola, and used the experience to illustrate the difference between an "average person" and a racing driver.

Appearing on the Indo Sport podcast with Joe Malloy, previous comments were put to the Scotsman, where he had said that, being generous, the average citizen could last 10 laps in the car physically.

"And that's being incredibly kind," Coulthard replied. "And when I say the average person, that includes me nowadays.

"I, two years ago, did a filming for a little feature where we were at Imola, San Marino, and I went around the track in RB7, which would have been the Sebastian Vettel V8 world championship car.

"And I did one timed lap on a track that I've won the Grand Prix in '98 or '99 [1998], and then Max jumped in the car, Max Verstappen, and he did one flying lap, and I was five seconds slower!"

Living in a 'hostile environment'

Coulthard highlighted how the difference between him and Verstappen at the time was akin to a current professional tennis player facing a former player on court.

"Now, I was actually reasonably happy with that, because I hadn't been round Imola for, I don't know, more than a decade or more, and I don't drive... I haven't driven grand prix cars at that time for probably... I'd done demonstrations, and I do doughnuts, but not pushing on a racetrack for well over a decade," the former Williams, McLaren and Red Bull driver explained.

"So that just puts in perspective what it is to be at the peak of your game. It would be like putting Bjorn Borg on court with [Novak] Djokovic or something. Would he even win a point? Highly unlikely. You know, the sport just moves on."

He went on to reveal the extent to which his neck, which suffers the burden of the extreme amounts of G-force F1 cars produce, has changed since retiring from the sport at the end of the 2008 season.

"Physically, I've lost more than two inches in neck girth, and that's including the fact that I've got neck fat as a 54-year-old," Coulthard said.

"So that's just muscle. You look at the drivers, the necks come from their jaws and mine used to, and I've got quite a wide jaw. 'Cause you're supporting all that G and weight on your head."

But, despite the discomfort, he admitted to how addictive life as an F1 driver was - no matter what pain the "hostile environment" caused.

"So it's an extreme environment," Coulthard stated. "It's uncomfortable. It's fantastically uncomfortable. It's addictively uncomfortable when you're in the space of trying to win grands prix.

"But see, when you retire, and you know that your time is done - and I was lucky enough to retire on my own terms, rather than being kicked out of the sport - I didn't do any exercise for a year, and it was such a joy not to have neck pain, back pain, arm pain, head hurting because of the vibrations, your ears ringing because of the noise.

"It's such a hostile environment," he added. "But all of those things that I had become allergic to at the end of my career, they were addictive at the time, because I was like, 'I can take more of this pain than my competitor. That pain is going to make him stop. I'm not stopping'."