Veteran Red Bull engineer selects 20-win driver over Sebastian Vettel in his F1 dream team

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Picking your dream Formula 1 team can either be the work of a moment or an agonising choice between some of the greats from the championship’s history.

Some are lucky enough to have worked with the greats, including veteran Red Bull chief mechanic Paul Monaghan.

Monaghan started his F1 career in 1990 at McLaren where he worked alongside Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard, before moving to Renault in 2000 where he was race engineer for Jenson Button and latterly Fernando Alonso.

After a brief spell at Jordan, Monaghan moved to Red Bull in 2005 where he would go on to help engineer Sebastian Vettel to four Drivers’ and Constructors’ World Championships and most recently Max Verstappen.

With such a chequered history, who would he end up choosing out of the dream team? Speaking on the Beyond the Grid podcast, Monaghan was asked who would be in his dream F1 team if he had the chance to pick any drivers.

Paul Monaghan picks Mika Hakkinen over Sebastian Vettel

Monaghan earned the nickname ‘Pedals’ in the F1 paddock following his job in the design office McLaren, where he was tasked with repeatedly having to draw the pedal configuration for Gerhard Berger.

Despite working with some of the biggest names in the championship, the Red Bull engineer made a surprising omission when discussing his ideal F1 team lineup

“We’re going to need five or six cars now to not have a politically incorrect moment or something that people say to me ‘Well, you didn’t pick me!’ It’s a bit like doing the football sides at school, isn’t it?” said Monaghan.

“If I had to pick two, I’m going to go with three: Mika [Hakkinen], Fernando [Alonso] and Max [Verstappen]. “That’s quite a lineup, isn’t it?”

“I probably left Ayrton [Senna] out as well, haven’t I? So I’m running two teams, four cars. I’ve got Ayrton, Mika, Fernando, and Max. And that’s as far as I’m going to resolve it, because I don’t know how to resolve it.”

The reason for Mika Hakkinen’s wins compared to Sebastian Vettel

Other figureheads in F1 have struggled to pick their ideal F1 team, with former technical director Pat Symonds also picking Alonso in his line-up over Senna.

Out of all the drivers Monaghan has worked with, the one who won multiple titles with the fewest wins was Hakkinen. The 1998 and 1999 World Champion only managed 20 victories at a time when the calendar was considerably shorter than it is today.

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In both seasons there were only 16 races, which is nearly half of the 24-race calendar drivers must contend with in 2024.

The driver with the most victories is Verstappen who is currently on 61 wins, putting him third on the all-time list ahead of Vettel (53), while Senna is ahead of Alonso on 41 compared to 32 wins.

The driver with the most poles out of the group is Senna on 65, with Verstappen on 40 poles, Haikkinen on 26 poles and Alonso having only started from the P1 grid slot 22 times in his career.