Verstappen shuts down Lambiase exit talk: “He was always staying”
Max Verstappen has swatted away a winter’s worth of whispers about Gianpiero Lambiase’s future, insisting his long-time race engineer was never on the market as Red Bull gears up for an 11th season of their most important partnership.
“He was always staying,” Verstappen told Sky. Asked if there was “never any question,” he doubled down: “Not to me.”
That’s about as emphatic as it gets. And it lands after months of paddock noise suggesting Lambiase — the dry, unflappable voice in Verstappen’s ear since 2016 — was weighing up a change of pace. The 24-race travel grind was said to be biting, Aston Martin and Williams were rumoured suitors, and Simon Rennie even stepped in for a couple of weekends last year in Austria and Belgium. Add in that headline-grabbing Abu Dhabi radio sign-off — “We showed them one final time who’s boss,” Verstappen shot back after Lambiase told him to hold his head high — and you had all the ingredients for speculation.
Final time? Not even close.
Sources familiar with the situation have indicated Lambiase will remain in his current Red Bull remit and stay paired with Verstappen into 2026. Which, for a driver chasing back the crown after last season’s two-point defeat to Lando Norris, might be the most valuable bit of continuity in Milton Keynes right now.
Strip it back and this is simple: Verstappen and “GP” works. It has since day one — Spain 2016, when the teenager jumped into a Red Bull and won on debut with Lambiase managing the furnace from pit wall to cockpit. The chemistry has always been a study in contrasts: Verstappen’s edge and feel on the limit set against Lambiase’s bone-dry one-liners and precise, data-first delivery. Christian Horner once called them Formula 1’s “old married couple.” It was meant lovingly, and it stuck because it’s true.
Together they’ve stacked up 71 wins and four World Championships, a strike rate born as much in their shared shorthand as in outright pace. That matters more than ever across a calendar that punishes mistakes, and into a 2026 rules reset where reading the room — tyres, traffic, energy, the game behind the game — will separate contenders from also-rans.
There’s also a more human thread here. Verstappen has spoken repeatedly about how personal this partnership has become. “Of course, he is my race engineer, but I see him as my friend,” he said late last year. “We have lived through so many emotional things together and fantastic achievements. I’m just very proud to be able to work with someone that good. A proper example of someone that never gave up this season, even through the difficult times.”
It’s worth pausing on that. The 2025 campaign didn’t end the way Verstappen wanted — six wins in the final nine races weren’t enough to stop Norris edging him to the title — and the whole year carried a bit of turbulence around Red Bull’s orbit. That’s when you find out what’s brittle and what isn’t. Lambiase didn’t blink. Nor did Verstappen. If anything, their radio exchanges grew more pointed and more productive. The odd spike of friction was just the sound of two people operating at the edge together.
From a competitive standpoint, keeping Lambiase is as strategic as any floor update. He’s more than a comforting voice; he’s the final filter for set-up direction, the pit wall pulse during live strategy resets, the translator between raw telemetry and what Verstappen actually needs to feel in the car to attack a stint. In the moments that decide championships — rain clouds hovering, tyres falling off a cliff, a VSC that might turn into a full Safety Car — that trust shortens decision time. And time is everything.
As for the what-ifs with Aston Martin or Williams, consider them parked. The travel toll is real across the grid, and few engineers carry Lambiase’s mileage at the front, but the magnetism of a title fight doesn’t release easily. Verstappen wants the title back. Red Bull wants its familiar, ruthless groove back. Lambiase is central to both.
So ignore the Abu Dhabi soundbite chatter, and the winter rumour carousel. Verstappen and Lambiase are still the axis around which Red Bull turns. The number on the nose may have changed hands last year, but in the cockpit-to-garage conversation that so often decides Sundays, nothing has.
And if you were wondering how Verstappen took those reports about his engineer being courted elsewhere? He’s already answered it the only way he knows how.
“He was always staying.”
