Max Verstappen sits down, feels the blast of hot air and grimaces.
“It’s too hot in here,” he says, nudging the fan towards him. No small talk. No softening of the edges. Just Max, in Monza, in the middle of a season he has no intention of sugar-coating.
Red Bull’s hospitality is sweltering, the Italian Grand Prix is a day away, and the four-time world champion has just committed his future to a team that has slipped from its once-crushing dominance. On paper, his new deal runs to the end of 2030. In reality, nothing fundamental has changed: the performance clauses remain, the escape routes are still there if Red Bull cannot drag itself back to the front.
Verstappen knows it. Red Bull know it. And he is in no mood to pretend otherwise.
“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. “We are not in a title fight. We are just trying to find more performance.”
The car, he explains, simply isn’t good enough. Not for the standards he has set, not for a driver who has built his reputation on extracting every last tenth from a machine that responds to his aggression.
“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.”
This isn’t a one-off blip. It’s a pattern that has stretched across different regulations, and that unsettles him far more than a single difficult campaign.
“That’s exactly that,” he says. “There’s also things that we talk about within the team, like how can that happen, how can we fix it?
“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.”
He knows 2024 is, competitively, a write-off. The focus is already on the next car. This year becomes a rolling test session, a laboratory under race conditions.
“Changes need to happen to the car for next year. We will not be able to change that for this year, but we just need to try and get a lot of learnings to do better next year.”
Staying put – and refusing the easy way out
Given all that, his decision to extend with Red Bull looks, from the outside, like an act of faith. Or stubbornness. Or both.
For Verstappen, it is about something more elemental: belonging.
“It comes down to also feeling well within a team. This is like a second family to me,” he says. “The belief that you can turn things around, you can build towards hopefully a better future with other people, new people.
“I feel good here. So this, for me, is the right place to be.”
The negotiations, he insists, were never a soap opera in his mind.
“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.”
He knows the team worried. How could they not, with rivals circling and performance dipping? He admits there were conversations elsewhere: with Mercedes last year, with McLaren this year. You don’t ignore calls from heavyweights.
“Of course, any kind of chat you take seriously. 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.”
And here comes the line that sums up his mindset more than any statistic.
“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.”
This is not a driver desperate to prove he can win in someone else’s colours. He has no itch to chase validation through a different badge.
“I don’t have that desire or need to show in another car that I can win it, or whatever,” he says. “If you have a little bit of patience, you do end up winning. I feel like that’s my approach now as well.”
Pure racing on the Nordschleife
If Formula 1 has left him frustrated this year, he found something closer to racing purity on a very different stage: the Nurburgring 24 Hours.
“Probably the Nordschleife,” he says, when asked to pick his favourite race of 2024. “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 opening stint, slicing from 10th to the lead in treacherous, drizzling conditions, felt like a live demonstration of his instincts. Chaos all around. Crashes. Code 60s. A track that punishes the slightest misjudgement.
“I was enjoying it. Not easy conditions. It started to drizzle. The track was slippery. Crashes. Code 60s,” he says, almost reliving it.
Some wondered how he would cope, thrown into an endurance classic he had never tackled in real life.
“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. He wants to win it. And the Nordschleife is just one line on a growing endurance wish list.
“All the endurance races. Eventually, of course also Hypercar,” he says of his future plans. “I don’t want to rush it. I want to do it in the right environment. On my terms. And competitive.”
Le Mans sits at the top of that list, and one idea keeps resurfacing: sharing a car with Fernando Alonso.
“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.”
“These cars are numb to your driver inputs”
If Verstappen lights up talking about the Nordschleife, his mood darkens when the subject turns to modern F1 power units.
He has not hidden his disdain for the current hybrid formula or the 2026 rules that push the electrical side even harder. In Japan, he openly asked: “Is it worth it?”
What kept him in?
“Hoping that it will be better in the future. 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 wants people to understand why drivers are unhappy. For him, the hybrid systems and battery management don’t just complicate the job; they distort it.
“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,” he says. “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 then reaches for an example that will sting a few engineers.
“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.”
He is not saying talent no longer matters. It does. Just not in the way he believes it should.
“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 case for a V8 revival
Formula 1’s power balance between internal combustion and electrical energy is already scheduled to shift again, with the split moving to 60-40 by 2028. The sport is edging its way through a political and technical minefield.
Verstappen’s own vision is far less nuanced.
“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 early turbo-hybrids, lauded in some quarters as engineering masterpieces, leave him cold.
“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.”
He would strip away even more.
“Ideally not,” he says when asked about turbos, “because that introduces turbo lag.”
This is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. For Verstappen, the sound and response of those engines are inseparable from what F1 should be.
“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”
To the outside world, Verstappen often looks like a relentless, almost mechanical winner. Turn up. Destroy the field. Repeat. He understands that image, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
“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.”
Inside the car, and inside the garage, the standards are unforgiving.
“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 brings that same edge to his GT3 team away from F1.
“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.”
No filter, by design
Verstappen’s bluntness has long divided opinion. To him, it is non-negotiable.
“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.”
So he stays. In a car he does not like enough. Under rules he does not respect enough. For a team he believes in enough to sign on until 2030, while openly pushing for an F1 that looks and sounds very different.
He will keep speaking his mind. The question now is whether Red Bull – and Formula 1 itself – can build a future worthy of that stubborn loyalty and that unforgiving standard.
