Max Verstappen on Red Bull's Challenges and Future Aspirations

Max Verstappen sits down, feels the blast of hot air in Red Bull’s sweltering Monza hospitality, and immediately reaches for the fan.

“It’s too hot in here,” he says, nudging it our way.

The room is sticky, the temperature in the mid-30s, the air heavy. His mood matches it: no-nonsense, stripped of any attempt at diplomacy. Verstappen has never been one to sugar-coat. Right now, he has no interest in even trying.

This is the second race weekend since he signed a new two-year extension with Red Bull. On paper, it keeps him there until the end of 2030. In reality, the deal looks very familiar: performance clauses, flexibility, an escape hatch if the team can’t give him a car worthy of his talent.

He’s earning more. His freedom, though, remains intact.

“We are not in a title fight”

Ask Verstappen where his head is at this season and the answer lands with a thud.

“Of course it’s not where I want to be,” he says. “As a team we’re trying to just learn and understand a lot of things for next year. We are not in a title fight. We are just trying to find more performance.”

No dressing it up. No talk of “positives to take”. The car is wrong, and he knows it.

“Overall we’re just lacking a bit of performance. The car is not where I want it to be feeling-wise, and the through-corner balance is too hit and miss between entry, mid and exit.

“It’s just fundamentally something in the car that we need to try and work on for the next year.”

The worrying part for Red Bull? This isn’t a one-off blip. The issues have bled from one rules cycle into another.

“That’s exactly that,” Verstappen says. “There’s also things that we talk about within the team, like how can that happen, how can we fix it? That’s basically what we are doing now and trying to do now.

“Some people have left, new people have come in. With the new people, we are discussing what we can do about it. Is that just some changes, a different philosophy? All these kind of things.”

The dominance that once looked baked in has faded. The questions have not.

Why he stayed

Given that context, his decision to sign on again raised eyebrows. Why commit when the car is clearly short?

“It comes down to also feeling well within a team,” he says. “This is like a second family to me.

“The belief that you can turn things around, you can build towards hopefully a better future with other people, new people. And at the end of the day, it’s not only Formula 1 for me. There are a lot of things that I’m doing next year that Red Bull is involved in as well.

“I feel good here. So this, for me, is the right place to be.”

He insists Red Bull didn’t have to put him under a hard sell.

“I always said to them: ‘Don’t stress about it, just work on the car.’ Because the faster the car goes, the easier the decision is anyway.

“I can understand, of course, maybe sometimes they were a little bit worried. But at the same time, for me, I was just worried about here, what was going on.

“At the same time, I was very busy with my stuff also outside of Formula 1. So I never really spent a lot of time talking or doing different things or trying to go somewhere else.”

Yet he did talk. Mercedes last year. McLaren this year. Big names, big options.

“Of course, any kind of chat you take seriously,” he says. “They’re all very respectful chats. There’s nothing wrong with that.

“I felt that staying was, for me, the right choice. You have to follow your heart. I could have run away very early on in my Red Bull career and gone somewhere else to try and win. If you have a little bit of patience, you do end up winning. I feel like that’s my approach now as well.”

He could have chased the quickest car. He chose something else.

“I don’t mind the challenge also. I don’t have that desire or need to show in another car that I can win it, or whatever.

“It’s easy to run to the fastest car and then do it all again. But it’s not how I am. You cannot be the captain of the ship and as soon as there is something not working, you jump off the ship.

“It’s been a bit downwards from the dominant years, but I don’t mind also rebuilding it. It’s another challenge as well.”

Pure racing on the Nordschleife

For a man who has spent his career in the most polished, engineered environment in motorsport, the race he savoured most this year took him somewhere raw.

“Probably the Nordschleife,” he says of his Nurburgring 24 Hours debut. “It was super-cool to be able to do an endurance event with my team-mates, the guys that won with the car throughout the main season.

“We knew that we were going to be really strong. We peaked at the right time, but unfortunately the car retired. It was an incredible experience. And pure. Pure motorsport.”

His first stint there, carving from 10th to the lead in treacherous, drizzling conditions, turned heads.

“I was enjoying it. Not easy conditions. It started to drizzle. The track was slippery. Crashes. Code 60s.

“Some people were like: ‘Let’s see how he will do in the race under pressure with all these kinds of scenarios that he has never done before.’

“But I have done them a million times on the simulator. I have done so many laps and 24-hour races on the simulator. I never felt out of depth or whatever. I was fully zoned in. I just had a great time.

“Once I was in the race, you switch to another level. I was just in a zone. It’s really enjoyable.”

He wants to go back and win it. And that’s just the start.

“All the endurance races,” he says, when asked what else is on his list. “Eventually, of course also Hypercar. I don’t want to rush it. I want to do it in the right environment. On my terms. And competitive.”

The idea of Le Mans with Fernando Alonso has already been floated.

“We’ve talked about it,” Verstappen admits. “I mean, look at Fernando. He’s 45 and he’s still flying. Especially for Le Mans, with his experience, it could be a good option. It needs to fit our schedules. It needs to make sense. It needs to be on my terms. And there needs to be a real chance to go there and win it.”

“So unnatural. So not how it should be”

Back in F1, the subject that really lights the fuse is the engine rules. Verstappen has not hidden his disdain for the current hybrid era or what’s coming in 2026.

At Suzuka this year, he openly questioned whether it was “worth it”. What kept him from walking away?

“Hoping that it will be better in the future,” he says. “Accepting where we are at the moment. Still the love for the sport. Not at the moment the driving. But the love for the sport.

“I love competition, naturally. I just hope that in the coming years, towards 2030, it can only get better. And to start to make the best of it, because these are the rules for the next four or five years.”

He believes the current hybrid systems, and the way drivers must manage energy deployment, blunt the very thing that used to separate the greats.

“In the history of the sport, normally the driver that is the most committed, the latest on the brakes, earlier on throttle, committing in the high speed, they get rewarded, because you just gain that time in the corner.

“But now you’re constantly thinking about, ‘In this corner I might have to hold in a bit. Go later on throttle. Or brake earlier. Or lift off. And then I have more top speed.’ Stuff like that. It’s so unnatural. It’s so not how it should be.”

He offers a pointed example of how, in his view, the cars themselves are doing too much of the work.

“No disrespect. And I hope no-one picks up on this. But look at Yuki. He jumps in the Racing Bulls car at the Dutch Grand Prix. Never driven the car before. Immediately competitive.

“Liam jumps from the Racing Bulls to the Red Bull – immediately competitive. It’s because these cars are numb to your driver inputs.

“Of course, yes, you still have to do a good lap. And you still have to commit. The fastest drivers will always come out on top. But it’s really, really limited, like a choke hold or something. You’re held back.”

The sport has already accepted that it needs to tweak the balance between internal combustion and electric power, shifting towards a 60-40 split by 2028. Verstappen wants something far more radical for the next big rules reset.

“It has to go back to a V8, just for drivability already,” he says. “When you drive the old cars, you cannot imagine the difference in how the engine responds, or the drivability you get. And how terrible or horrible it actually is now compared to just having a V8.”

Even the previous turbo-hybrid era, which he dominated, doesn’t escape his criticism.

“Also horrible, the feeling compared to a V8. The V8 is so much better. It is so much more free, lighter. Cars are so heavy nowadays.

“It is better to just have a smaller V8 engine, much lighter. Try to really limit the battery size to maybe like a kind of push-to-pass battery. But you should not have it involved or any kind of proper normal performance running.”

And if he had his way, the turbo would go too.

“Ideally not, because that introduces turbo lag.”

So what keeps him here, in a formula he so clearly dislikes from a purist’s perspective?

“I have been lucky that the years before have been quite decent,” he says of his results. “Not how I wanted it to be with the battery side of things.

“But just the emotion of the V8, of the V10, back in the day, when I was a kid. You walk around, you hear these cars go out, you have goosebumps.

“Even if you go 300km/h compared to now sometimes 350, 360, it doesn’t matter.

“It is the emotion of the noise that you get from these cars, of the vibration. It is just another level. And I really hope that that thing will come back.”

“I am a winning machine when I need to be”

Verstappen knows the image: the relentless, unfeeling winning machine. The man who crushes championships with brutal efficiency. He doesn’t reject it. He just narrows its scope.

“I am a winning machine when I need to be,” he says. “But I can also switch off, and enjoy my life outside of racing.

“But anything racing-related, of course I am a winning machine. I demand a lot from the people in the team. They also expect me to perform and do the best job I can.

“That is what you get paid for at the end of the day. We have the same target. The same goal.”

He doesn’t apologise for being outspoken. He sees it as essential.

“Of course I can be very outspoken. But that is what I like. That is also with our culture.

“And that is how I approach my life also outside of F1, with my GT3 team. We do not hold back. At least for me, you need to be like that to really get the best out of everyone.”

Why does he cling so fiercely to that blunt honesty in a paddock built on politics and spin?

“I just want to be myself,” he says. “I know there are a lot of politics in Formula 1, and I understand also between the teams there are a lot of politics.

You will always speak for yourself in terms of where you think you might have an advantage or not as a team. That is normal. Also with the engines and the chassis, it is the same thing.

“When it is good, it is good. When it is bad, it is bad. You will hear it from me because that is how I like to operate. And I am not holding back from that.”

The fan in the corner keeps turning, fighting a losing battle with the Italian heat. Verstappen, locked into Red Bull’s future yet restless with the sport’s direction, looks every bit like a man ready to fight his own.