Tag Archives: Max Verstappen

Even before Isack Hadjar’s spectacular run to third place in the Dutch GP speculation was rife about what Max Verstappen could do if he was at the wheel of the VCARB 02.

The fact that rookie Hadjar finished the Zandvoort race in the wheel tracks of the World Champion only added to the intrigue.

Even Fernando Alonso joined in the fun, suggesting that the Dutchman would be fighting for the World Championship if he was at the wheel of the sister team’s car.

In theory Verstappen could have a run in an FP1 session just to get a feel for where the Faenza car is better or worse than his own, and he could provide both his own team and Racing Bulls with some useful feedback.

A straight swap could also allow Hadjar to have an FP1 session in a Red Bull, giving the main team a little taster of his talent ahead of any decision over next season.

You could also argue that it’s something that is more likely to be green lit with former Racing Bulls boss Laurent Mekies in charge than it would have been under Christian Horner.

However Max swapping over even for a single session could also be a very public admission that RBR hasn’t done a good enough job of late, as well as providing fuel for rivals who already think that there’s a little too much co-operation between the two teams, notwithstanding the fact that Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda have swapped back and forward.

An FP1 session would be one thing, but at the other end of the scale is the enticing but highly improbable prospect of Verstappen actually spending a whole weekend with Racing Bulls.

It’s a great idea for fans to ponder over, and it would be a huge PR story for the sport, and for the overall Red Bull organisation.

Even F1 boss Stefano Domenicali admitted it would be fun when joking about the suggestion with journalists after the Dutch GP.

However the Racing Bulls camp insists that even a test is not on the horizon for Verstappen.

“I guess we are joking about it, as everybody else does,” CEO Peter Bayer told me after Hadjar’s third place at Zandvoort. “But at the end of the day, we’re two teams that operate differently, and it’s not really a question. It’s more like a running gag for everyone.”

But couldn’t it be considered at the end of the year, when there are no championship positions at stake?

“The thing is in F1 always everything is at stake. It’s about making things predictable, not putting things in jeopardy. It’s not considered, it’s not discussed. It’s not happening.

“I think we’ve been working so hard to develop our identity, and to move Racing Bulls up. It’s not an option to me. It sounds like me flying to the moon. It’s just not something that will happen…”

Team principal Alan Permane also insisted that it’s not even on the radar.

“It’s not, honestly,” he told me. “We’re just focused on our own thing. That’s something that you guys chat about.

“Someone asked me at the weekend, is Max going to get in it for a P1 session? And of course, he’s not. We’re just focused on getting the most out of it, as Red Bull are focused on getting the most out of their car.”

Permane says it wouldn’t even be an option at the post-season Abu Dhabi tyre test: “Not really. I think what’s more interesting will be us learning about next year’s tyres, which is what we’ll do at that test at the end of the year. So there’s plenty of serious stuff to do.”

There is a precedent of sorts – back in 1994 Michael Schumacher had a test with Benetton’s then sister team Ligier, essentially get a feel for the Renault V10 he’d be using the following year.

However he refused to give the French outfit any feedback on what he thought about the chassis, much to the frustration of the engineers who had arranged the test.

The Hungarian GP had a thrilling conclusion as Oscar Piastri failed to dislodge leader and McLaren team mate Lando Norris, but it could have been even more intriguing had Charles Leclerc still been in contention.

We’ll never know if one or both McLaren drivers would have passed him without a fight had he not been slowed by a still mysterious issue in the last stint of the race that ultimately saw him drop to fourth, behind George Russell.

The Ferrari driver’s frustration was clear on the radio as he appeared to blame the team for the car becoming undriveable, apparently because of what he thought was an “aggressive” wing adjustment at the stop that he didn’t request.

Between getting out of the car and meeting the media he learned that wasn’t the case, and that an unidentified issue had been the cause.

As we know F1 cars can be incredibly sensitive to aero damage – in Hungary Oliver Bearman was forced to stop after he experienced similar symptoms to Leclerc, and afterwards the Haas driver had no explanation as to how any such damage had occurred.

After retrieving Leclerc’s from parc ferme the Ferrari crew found nothing visibly obvious in terms of aero damage that could have been responsible, and still had no answers as of Monday morning.

By chance Ferrari is doing 2026 Pirelli testing in Hungary this week. The team has the option to run the Leclerc chassis and potentially find out if there is a problem with it (or the Hamilton chassis or the spare with race-used LEC parts), although no decision had been made on its plans at the time of writing.

In the immediate aftermath of the race Leclerc was keen to retract some of the radio chatter that hinted at an operational or set-up mistake.

“First of all, I need to take back the words I’ve said in the radio,” he said when I asked him about the radio traffic.

“Because I thought that it was coming from one thing. But then I got a lot more details since I got out the car, and it was actually an issue coming from the chassis, and nothing that we could have done differently.

“I started to feel the issue in lap 40, or something like that. And then it got worse, laps after laps after laps. And towards the end, we were two seconds off the pace, and the car was just undrivable.

“Again, as I repeat myself, but this was an issue, and it’s an outlier. It shouldn’t ever happen again. But, I mean, I’m still very disappointed. We had one opportunity this year to win a race, which I think was this weekend.

“The first stint was perfect. The first laps of the second stint were really good as well. And I think we were in pace to try and win that race. The last stint was a disaster, when I started to have that issue on the chassis.”

When I asked if a kerb or gravel could have triggered something he said: “I don’t know yet how it was caused, but we will look into it.”

He added: “I think it was quite tricky. Otherwise I probably will have known, and they will have told me. Apparently it wasn’t as obvious on data. However, now we can definitely confirm that that there was a problem.”

Leclerc confirmed that he thought a front wing adjustment at the stop was responsible for the change in the behaviour of the car, which was so bad that he knew straight away that victory was likely to slip away.

“When I started to feel the issues, I didn’t really know where that came from. I thought it was from a change we did on the front wing at the pit stop being too aggressive.

“But then, of course, it got a lot worse, and then it seemed a bit off to me, but when I first felt the very strange behaviour of the car, I was okay, if this is staying, it’s going to slip away from us.

“It wasn’t very consistent, but yeah, basically every corner, it was doing something different.”

After the race team boss Fred Vasseur had no theories about what had gone wrong.

“Honestly, the situation was quite strange,” said the Frenchman. “We were under control the first 40 laps of the race, we are very in control the first stint, a bit more difficult the second one, but it was still manageable. And last stint, was a disaster, very difficult to drive, the balance was not there.

“And honestly, we don’t know exactly what’s happened so far. It means that we have to investigate something broken on the chassis side, or whatever. But it was at one stage I thought that we will never finish the race, we can be lucky in this situation to score points of a P4.

“It’s really frustrating for us, because that I think we did the first pole position of the season. The first two stints went pretty well, and we lost completely the pace and the path of the weekend.

He continued: “The first lap of the last stint, he lost something like one second at one stage and perhaps the message that also you interpret.

“He asked us if we didn’t do a mistake on the front wing, and adjust the front wing, but [we didn’t]. And we lost completely the pace, and then perhaps a bit snowball effect, but at the end of the day that I think from 38 to 43 we lost at least eight-tenths.”

For Leclerc it turned into one of those nightmare days, and in the course of his defence against George Russell he picked up a 5-second penalty for erratic driving.

It didn’t make any difference to his safe P4, but the penalty point was probably annoying.

“I knew I was on the limit,” he conceded. “I don’t have much opinion about it. I felt like I moved before braking and then I braked, obviously angling my car towards the apex, which is normally what I do, but I can imagine George being quite vocal on the radio. It’s normally the case.

“I don’t mind, especially on a race like this. If there was a safety car at the end of the race and I would have taken a five second penalty, I probably would have been a lot more frustrated. But it wasn’t the case.”

For Leclerc the real frustration was that this was the first opportunity in 2026 for Ferrari to win a full-length race, and while there are some tracks coming in the second half of the year that historically have been good for the Maranello outift, McLaren is going to be hard to beat everywhere.

“I think they are the strongest team out there,” he said. “And even today, they were very, very fast. I think on a track like this, what gave me hope of winning is that we were starting first, and with the dirty air, it’s a struggle to get past. I think Oscar had probably a bit more place than me, but couldn’t overtake.

“So I don’t think we are going into the second half of the season thinking that we can win anywhere.

“And that’s what makes the frustration even bigger, because we knew that this was one opportunity, probably over the season, and we had to take it. But unfortunately, with this issue, we couldn’t do much.”

For Max Verstappen the Hungarian GP weekend has been something of a nightmare this far, and his car was sliding so much that at one point in qualifying he said it was like driving on ice even on his out lap.

In the end he was almost relieved to have made it into Q3 and earned P8 – albeit with a couple of Aston Martins and a Sauber ahead.

Had Lewis Hamilton and Kimi Antonelli qualified where their cars should in reality have been, Verstappen would indeed have been edged out of the top 10.

In fact over the three practice sessions he was ninth, 14^th and 12^th – not where you would usually expect him to be.

“I mean, looking at the whole weekend, I think we are happy to be in Q3 because I’ve been more outside of the top 10 than,” he said when I asked him about qualifying.

“It’s been difficult. The whole weekend no grip, front and rear, and it was the same in qualifying. So for me, it was not really a shock. I just drove to what I already feel the whole weekend.”

He admitted that the team didn’t know what the issue was: “No, clearly not, otherwise, of course, we would have changed it already. But somehow, this weekend, nothing seems to work.”

Verstappen acknowledged that RBR also had a difficult Hungary last year, although not to quite the same degree.

“I think we still qualified very close to pole, like within a few hundredths, so I think we were a lot more competitive back then. But yeah, this weekend already, from lap one, it just fell off, and we threw the car around a lot, and nothing really gave a direction.

“And that of course is the biggest problem, because normally, when you use or you change a lot on the side of it will always give you positives or negatives, and now just nothing works.

“It’s like just going around in circles, and nothing gave you any kind of idea of what to do.”

He added: “There’s not been a single lap or a single corner that I felt good. So the whole weekend so far, it’s just been sliding.”

That sliding won’t help his tyres in race conditions. Normally you would expect an out-of-position Verstappen to make progress, but it could turn into a rear guard action.

“There may be a car a few cars in front of me that I can maybe battle with a little bit. But of course, also Lewis is still a bit further down the road, which I think he shouldn’t be there, right? So he will come through a bit.”

So is this the worst weekend he can recall over the past couple of seasons?

“I mean, we have had a few Singapore disasters. So yeah, I mean, it’s just not been a good one for sure…”

Not for the first time in 2025 Lando Norris heads into a race weekend keen to make amends for disappointment at the previous event, and with an urgent need to claw back some points in his fight with Oscar Piastri.

The Belgian GP was even more frustrating in that he did the difficult bit and beat his McLaren team mate to pole, only to lose out on the first lap to a combination of driving and technical issues.

Despite his best efforts on an alternative strategy with hard tyres he had to settle for second, losing another seven points to his rival.

Once again there followed a few days of soul-searching and discussions with the team and what he could have done differently or better.

“There’s hindsight of certain things,” he said when I asked if any lessons had been learned. “Nothing which means I would have won the race. There’s also things he probably could have done better too.

“So even if I had a mega last corner or mega Turn 1, still a pretty good chance he would have passed me anyway. So sometimes you’ve just got to accept that. As much as I would like to win them all, you can’t. A tough one to take, because I did a bad job.”

Norris stressed it wasn’t just down to him not getting it right as the first guy in line on the wet track.

“I didn’t have the best run, but at the same time then we had some, not problems, some let’s say incorrect settings with the battery, which meant he had a slight advantage of battery comparing to me, which certainly didn’t help.

“But I also didn’t do the best two corners. Whether that would have made a difference or not, hard to say. With the issue he probably would have passed me, no matter what. So yeah, a tougher one to take from that perspective.

“From the strategy and pit stops, tough to say. I don’t think a double stack would have been any better. I just had a slow pit stop. It was more the slow pit stop, and it was one of my lock ups in Turn 1, which cost me over a second and a bit. You put those two things together, it’s like four seconds of race time.

“So there’s things I could have done better, and then we as team and team could have done better, and that’s what we will try and work on.”

Spa underlined just how tight the battle between the two team mates is. There’s no margin for either to put a foot wrong over the course of a race weekend.

“I think it’s probably down to the least mistakes, I would say, more than anything,” he noted. “Not necessarily who is outright the quickest, or who can simply race better or make the best overtakes.

“I have some of my strengths, he has some of his, and it’s more down to the least mistakes. Especially because of the position we’re in as a team, we have a car that is you can say one of the best cars made in F1, and we’re first or we’re second more often than more not.

“And therefore it’s just kind of more between us, more than who qualifies first and sixth. We qualify first and second more often, and you can kind of just hold on in Turn 1, and then go from there.

“There’s not been many races where positions have swapped through a race, so therefore it’s more who can then make the least mistakes from that point next onwards.”

Asked if he had to drive at 100 percent to win the World Championship, or had learned that 99.8 might be enough, he made an interesting comment.

“I try and perform at 101 percent,” he said. “Sometimes that’s amazing. Sometimes that’s, I think, as good as you can get. And that’s what I feel is the optimum of what I and what I think a driver can achieve at times, and I do believe that.

“But also times I should drive at 95 or even 90 percent and that’s still enough to be on pole or P2 sometimes. I do regret trying to be so good at beginning part of the season, and now already I sometimes just settle for a 95 percent lap. And that’s that’s still good enough.”

Norris made huge strides last season as he experienced a winning car for the first time and found himself battling with the likes of Max Verstappen, as well as Piastri.

That process has continued this year, although his struggles to come to terms with the MCL39 have had an impact.

“There’s just always different situations, different moments along the way,” he said. “I think as a driver, I still feel better than I was. Doesn’t mean I always do a better job, because the car is quite different this year.

“I’ve had my tricky moments with the car and understanding how to drive it, just because, yes, it’s a McLaren, it’s got papaya on it, but it handles pretty differently to how it’s done in previous years. So I’ve had to just adapt to that, and it’s not suited me as well.

“But it’s just tough, and I’ve got to do what I’ve had to do, and I’ve needed to do a better job to get back to being as quick as I need to be, which I feel like I’ve done, and I’ve improved on.

“So I think [I’ve shown] my ability to improve on worst moments as a proof, or ability to improve on certain struggles that you might achieve during a weekend, or over a session or practice, whatever it is.

“Other than that, I think there’s just always going to be for everyone little things along the way that’s a new experience, or you didn’t expect, that you wish you could be better on. But I think that’s just life.”