His pre-season eye-rolling about the new direction F1 has taken for 2026 is the perfect encapsulation of he operates.
He doesn’t go out of his way to make the sport’s powers-that-be squirm, but he’s not going to be anything other than authentic, either. How you choose to take him is up to you. It’s been the four-time world champion’s modus operandi, ever since he became the youngest F1 driver to start a race in Melbourne 11 years go, aged just 17 years and 166 days.
It’s not always been smooth sailing with Verstappen – his unrepentant aggression in wheel-to-wheel combat was a constant source of annoyance to his rivals in his younger days and regularly tiptoed the tightrope of acceptability – but as his driving has matured, his level has only increased.
Consider 2025. Driving for a Red Bull Racing team that dropped teammate Liam Lawson after just two grands prix for underperformance, then saw high-profile team principal Christian Horner leave the team mid-season after over 20 years in charge, Verstappen was 104 points behind McLaren’s championship leader Oscar Piastri with 15 of last year’s 24 rounds in the books – a chance to become just the second driver to win five titles in succession after Michael Schumacher (2000-04) set to be lost as Red Bull floundered.
From a statistically hopeless position, Verstappen dug in, revelling in his new role of championship agitator. In the final nine races of the season, he won six. Piastri was usurped, but the Australian’s teammate Lando Norris managed – just – to deny Verstappen by a mere two points in the Abu Dhabi finale what would have been his finest title.
Typically punchy as he pursued the near-impossible – “if we would have been in the position of how dominant of a car [McLaren] had, the championship would have been over a long time ago,” he said at Yas Marina – falling short was an atypical outcome that, counter-intuitively, provided satisfaction he’d never felt.
Four-time world champion Max Verstappen does not hold back, on or off the track.Credit: Getty Images
The sport’s fastest driver of the 2020s, and the benchmark by which all others are judged, turned out to be arguably its best underdog, too.
“It’s always nicer to win, but honestly, [2025 is] probably a better feeling than what I had [in 2024],” he said, agreeing with a suggestion that last season was his best yet.
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“We were struggling for, I would say, a year. I hated the car at times, I loved it at times – a proper roller coaster – but I always tried to extract the most from it.”
At 28, Verstappen – once a pimply faced rookie without a road driver’s licence – is now in F1 middle age on a curve skewed by 44-year-old Aston Martin driver Fernando Alonso, and Ferrari’s seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton, 41.
When Verstappen first joined Red Bull Racing in 2016, Australia’s Daniel Ricciardo – then 27 – was his teammate. Formidable as Verstappen was even then – he won their first race as teammates in Barcelona that season – Ricciardo sees a driver who continues to evolve.
“Where he’s better now … he’s walked the walk many times, so he has that unconditional confidence and belief that he can pull something off, even when he’s not expected to,” Ricciardo told this reporter on the eve of Verstappen’s 200th grand prix start last year.
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“He’s also in a zone because of the last few years and how locked-in he is. He’s operating on such a level of calmness, composure, confidence – that’s the most impressive thing now. It’s a driving thing, but, ultimately, it’s a mental thing where he’s just so under control and unfazed.”
Eight years after Ricciardo and Verstappen last shared the same garage, Red Bull continue to search for a teammate who can contribute to the team’s constructors’ championship charge without being rendered as roadkill by Verstappen’s singular talent.
Second-year French driver Isack Hadjar, 21, is Verstappen’s sixth post-Ricciardo teammate in that span after Yuki Tsunoda, Lawson’s early season replacement last year, was tossed aside after failing to keep up.
Hadjar’s task – Verstappen has taken 93 per cent of the team’s wins, 94 per cent of the team’s pole positions and 78 per cent of its podiums since Ricciardo departed – is enormous, and one that’s been beyond Pierre Gasly, Alexander Albon and Sergio Perez even before Lawson and Tsunoda came and went.
Red Bull’s return to Melbourne this March with yet another new No.2 driver but without Horner and long-time motorsport adviser and Verstappen confidante Dr Helmut Marko, and with a new power unit partner in Ford as the team becomes its own engine builder only adds to the churn, yet strengthens Verstappen’s claim to being F1’s biggest difference-maker.
The comfort he surprisingly found from last year’s near-miss and life outside the cockpit – Verstappen became a father for the first time last year – balances the fire that continues to smoulder, igniting itself in sound bites where something grinds his gears.
“Teams go through changes in general … it’s been refreshing, maybe needed,” he mused of the new-look Red Bull for 2026.
“With Helmut … I’m in touch with him anyway, just about life. I shared so many moments with him, so of course it will feel a little bit different in the garage. But you also have to just look ahead, right?
“From where I started to now, a lot of things change. You try other challenges outside of Formula 1. That’s how I keep myself busy … keep myself fired up for here.”
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