The Verstappen-to-McLaren chatter has found a new way to keep itself alive: float the idea of a straight driver swap and let the paddock do the rest.
The spark this time was Gianpiero Lambiase’s planned move from Red Bull to McLaren, due to be completed no later than 2028. On paper, it’s the sort of personnel shift that inevitably gets dressed up as a breadcrumb trail — particularly because 2028 is also the final year of Max Verstappen’s current multi-year Red Bull deal. Add in the sport’s constant appetite for seismic driver-market storylines and you’ve got the ingredients for the neatest possible theory: Verstappen lands at McLaren and Oscar Piastri goes the other way.
Juan Pablo Montoya has been the latest to push that notion into the open, arguing it would “make sense” and suggesting Mark Webber is uneasy about how things are playing out for his driver at McLaren. Montoya even framed it as the kind of storyline that can be deployed — by managers as much as anyone — to “stir up the pot” and apply a little pressure.
There’s a certain internal logic to the narrative, at least on the surface. Webber is closely tied to Red Bull’s world, having raced there himself, and Piastri is an asset any top team would at least consider. If you’re determined to draw straight lines between events, you can convince yourself that the pieces fit.
But the inconvenient truth for anyone hoping for an imminent blockbuster is that McLaren doesn’t sound remotely interested in unpicking what it already has — and it’s hard to argue with the rationale. Zak Brown, speaking in Miami, didn’t just wave away the proposed swap; he all but laughed it out of the room.
“I couldn’t be happier with our driver line-up,” Brown said, praising not only the pace of Lando Norris and Piastri but the way they operate as a pair. That point matters. Plenty of teams have signed two elite drivers over the decades; far fewer have managed to get them pulling in the same direction when something significant is on the line.
McLaren’s recent history is the context that makes the swap idea feel more like a fantasy draft than a likely plan. Last season, Norris and Piastri fought a title campaign that never turned toxic — no public sniping, no wall-building, no sudden “misunderstandings” on strategy radio that just happened to favour one side of the garage. Norris ended up on top and Piastri slipped back to third after leading mid-season, but the relationship held. Information flowed, and the team behaved like a team.
That’s not some fluffy, corporate-speak victory either; it’s competitive edge. When a team has two drivers operating at that level without turning every Sunday into a civil war, it saves points, time and political bandwidth. Brown’s line that this dynamic is part of what has made McLaren “so successful” isn’t marketing — it’s a statement of how rare functional harmony is when you’re dealing with world-class talent and world championship stakes.
So why does the Verstappen angle refuse to die? Because even Brown, while dismissing the swap idea, couldn’t completely shut the door on the broader question. He called Verstappen “a great racing driver” and admitted that if there ever were a genuine chance to sign him, it would be “a completely different discussion” given the level of talent involved.
That’s the tightrope every team boss walks when Verstappen’s name enters the conversation. You can be perfectly happy with your current set-up and still acknowledge that a multiple-time champion changes the conversation simply by existing. It doesn’t mean you’re shopping; it means you’re not naïve.
The other element here is money — and Montoya put his finger on the awkward part by asking whether McLaren would be comfortable paying what Verstappen would want. In 2026’s paddock, that isn’t a throwaway line. It’s the thing that makes the difference between “wouldn’t it be something” and “this is actually happening”.
For now, the reality looks far more mundane than the rumour mill would like: McLaren is content, publicly and emphatically, with Norris and Piastri. Red Bull, meanwhile, is staring at a future where its star driver’s contract timeline overlaps with a high-profile engineering move to a rival. That alone is enough to create noise for the next two seasons, even if nothing else changes.
And that’s the point. Big-driver stories don’t need to be true to be useful — to agents, to rivals, sometimes even to teams themselves. They just need to be plausible enough to keep everyone talking.
In Miami, Brown’s message was simple: McLaren isn’t swapping out a functioning, championship-calibre partnership because the paddock has decided it would be a fun storyline. If Verstappen ever becomes a real option, McLaren will weigh it — but not via the tidy little trade being imagined on the outside.
