‘Keep an eye on Gabi’: Verstappen says he flagged Bortoleto to Red Bull before F1 debut
Max Verstappen didn’t just meet Gabriel Bortoleto on the grid this year — he’d already been in his corner.
The three-time world champion revealed he urged Red Bull to track Bortoleto’s rise well before the Brazilian made it to Formula 1, crediting hours spent racing together online for a front-row view of the talent now shining at Sauber.
“I already said to the team before you even got to Formula 1: keep an eye on Gabi,” Verstappen said on the Pelas Pistas podcast. “But now we’re all here and let’s just see how it evolves.”
Bortoleto’s route wasn’t the straightforward academy-to-works-team story. A McLaren junior and the 2023 F2 champion, he found the door closed by Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri’s long-term deals. Sauber moved, pairing the rookie with Nico Hülkenberg for 2025 — and, so far, that looks like clever recruitment. The Brazilian’s poise has been one of the pleasant surprises of the season.
For Verstappen, their friendship started on sim rigs rather than in pit lanes. That, he says, offered more than just a good sparring partner on a Tuesday night.
“You get a sense of someone’s approach, their racecraft, how they think,” he said. “Gabi was quick, but also smart. That stood out.”
The natural follow-up: could they one day share a garage at Red Bull? Verstappen didn’t bite on hypotheticals, but he made his preference for Bortoleto’s trajectory crystal clear.
“I don’t even know how long I’m going to do it myself, you know?” he said. “I have a contract until ’28 but after that, nothing is agreed. So I hope, in general, for Gabi that he gets an opportunity within the next three, four years to be really competitive at the front and fight for podiums. If that’s in the same team, even better — it means we’re both fighting for the best positions.”
Verstappen’s endorsement carries weight inside the paddock, and his read on people tends to be unsentimental. This isn’t Max going all soft — it’s him seeing a racer with the right tools and temperament. And it fits a pattern: Verstappen keeps solid friendships in a sport that doesn’t make them easy. He clicked with Daniel Ricciardo and Lando Norris, among others, and insists you can separate the elbows-out aggression on Sundays from the off-track dynamic.
“You always have a healthy kind of competition, and you always will want to beat each other,” he said. “But the personality of the person, whatever you do off track, will decide if you can be good friends. We’ve seen in the past between other team-mates, it’s not been great. They couldn’t be friends anymore. They had some issues.”
Bortoleto doesn’t strike that note. He’s been measured on the radio, tidy in traffic, and quick enough to make people re-check their rookie assumptions. Sauber needed a reset after lean years; Hülkenberg brings the reference lap, Bortoleto brings the upside. It’s early, but there’s shape to that bet.
As for Verstappen, the 2025 season rolls on with familiar efficiency and the odd stray remark that sets the market twitching. Drivers talk, teams listen, and every now and then a champion quietly tells his team to keep tabs on a kid from São Paulo. Sometimes that’s just polite encouragement. Sometimes it’s foresight.
Right now, it looks like the latter.
