Toto Wolff tips his cap to Verstappen: ‘He owes them’ — and that matters
Toto Wolff doesn’t hand out compliments to rivals lightly, but on Max Verstappen’s decision to stay put at Red Bull for 2026 and beyond, the Mercedes boss sounded almost approving. Integrity was the word he chose. Loyalty, the subtext.
“Max will have his reasons,” Wolff said when asked about Verstappen ending months of paddock noise by confirming he’ll stick with Red Bull. “What he said is he owes them, and it’s not the first moment you can walk away when the team doesn’t perform, beyond the contract.”
In a season where Verstappen has had to work harder than usual for his points haul, the four-time World Champion’s call to double down with the team that built his era is, in Wolff’s eyes, the kind of old-school commitment that still counts. And yes, it carried a hint of self-reference. “The integrity that he has shown to his team, and the integrity that I and the team have shown to our drivers, I think that’s important.”
For Mercedes, those drivers are George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, and Wolff’s made no secret they’re close to tying both down beyond this season. Russell, he says, is “outperforming the car,” and Antonelli remains the “long-term bet” — the teenage rookie being groomed through the rough edges of his first F1 campaign with obvious patience. If Verstappen was the fishing expedition, Russell–Antonelli is the Plan A.
Still, the Mercedes-Verstappen story has always had a what-if quality. Wolff revisited the origin story — the 2014 meetings with Jos and Max, the offer of a fast-tracked path, and the inconvenient truth that Mercedes had no seat to give with Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg locked in during the team’s title-gobbling years.
Wolff’s pitch back then was pragmatic: a free seat in Formula 2, a guaranteed step into Formula 1 the following year, and an escape clause if Mercedes couldn’t deliver. Red Bull, via Helmut Marko, came armed with something simpler and more seductive: race starts now. The Verstappens didn’t blink. The following decade wrote itself.
What’s interesting now is the context. 2026 looms large with a new power unit formula and aero reset. There are safer bets and riskier ones, but nobody truly knows which is which until the cars roll. Verstappen could have leveraged uncertainty and paddock power to try something dramatic. Instead, he did the unfashionable thing: he stayed. Wolff, who wanted him, respected the call.
It also plays well inside Mercedes. Praising a rival’s loyalty while preaching the same value to your own garage is tidy politics — and the right note as the team builds around Russell’s maturity and Antonelli’s raw speed. After losing Hamilton to Ferrari for 2025, Mercedes is rebuilding its identity around continuity and a long-term ceiling. Publicly coveting Verstappen only makes sense if you can then show the same faith in the drivers you actually have. Wolff did both.
And let’s be honest, the Verstappen-to-Mercedes talk had been running too hot for too long. With Max under contract through 2028 and Red Bull still a constant threat on Sundays, fantasy gave way to reality before the summer break. The noise quietened. The paddock exhaled. Everyone gets back to work.
There’s a line Wolff uses when he speaks about the Verstappens: an affinity with Jos, a shared bluntness, a mutual understanding born out of “similar tough upbringings.” It explains why even when they’ve been on opposite sides of the fence, the respect has remained. He lost Max once because he couldn’t put him in a car. He won’t make promises he can’t keep now either.
So, what does it change? Not much and quite a lot. Verstappen staying means Red Bull keeps its cornerstone as the sport resets in ’26. Mercedes pushes ahead with a clear, youthful axis. And the driver market — which threatened to detonate — shuffles into a more familiar pattern. The move everyone wondered about didn’t happen. The message, however, landed: loyalty still sells in Formula 1, especially when it’s backed by pace.
Wolff’s final word was half shrug, half warning. Things fall into place as they should today. Tomorrow is another game. In other words: enjoy the ceasefire. The next round starts in 2026.
