‘Sell your soul’: Verstappen takes aim at Piastri’s Monza call as McLaren’s title gamble gets a fresh postscript
Max Verstappen doesn’t do subtext. Asked whether he’d have followed McLaren’s team orders the way Oscar Piastri did at Monza, the three-time World Champion didn’t blink.
“Definitely not,” he told Blick. “If you do that once without a clear reason, you sell your soul. The team can then do whatever it wants with you. And let’s not forget: Piastri was in the middle of the title fight.”
That last point is the sting. In early autumn, McLaren had both drivers toe-to-toe for the 2025 crown. Piastri arrived in Italy 34 points clear of Lando Norris and looking the more complete threat over a run of Sundays. Then came the flashpoint: Norris, ahead before the stops, suffered a slow service and rejoined behind Piastri. The call came to restore the order. Piastri questioned it, then complied.
McLaren had made its philosophy clear all year: equal machinery, equal opportunity, play fair. The theory was tidy. The execution invited messy human reality. To some, Monza was the right correction after a pit stop lottery; to others, it was a line crossed in a live title fight.
We know how it ended. Norris converted the policy into a first World Championship, Verstappen stormed back to fall just two points short, and Piastri slid to third after looking, for a while, like the sure thing. In the paddock debrief, everyone has an opinion. Verstappen’s just happens to be the loudest.
It wasn’t the first time he’d poked the bear. As his own season turned from salvage job to near-miracle — 104 points down at one stage, then coming within a breath in Abu Dhabi — Verstappen suggested he’d have tucked the championship away already if he’d been driving the MCL39. Lando Norris bristled.
“There are a lot of things he doesn’t have much of a clue about,” Norris said at the time, throwing shade at what he called Red Bull’s “aggressive nature… and talking nonsense a lot of the time.”
Verstappen didn’t walk it back. “That statement is true,” he doubled down when asked again. “But I never actually interfere in my opponents’ internal problems. I can always give them a competitive response on the track.”
Strip away the bluster and there’s a familiar tension here. Drivers talk team, but they live for number one status — real or implied. Piastri’s decision at Monza — to follow the call in the heat of a championship lead — was the act of a soldier in a system designed to keep both sides of the garage happy. It also asked him to trust that the arithmetic would work out. It didn’t.
Verstappen, for his part, speaks like a man who’s earned the right to say no. He’s built a career on bending teams to his rhythm, not the other way around. And he’s riding a wave of credibility after transforming Red Bull’s late-season chaos — including the shock mid-year exit of Christian Horner — into a title push that left even neutral observers impressed. Peers and team bosses alike voted him their driver of 2025. The paddock noticed.
None of this means McLaren was wrong. It won the championship. You design a 22-race campaign, you set a code, you stick to it, you bring the big trophy home — and there’s no asterisk next to Norris’s name. That will matter in Woking long after the social clips of Monza have been buried by new controversies.
But Verstappen’s point lands in the place drivers feel most. The first time you yield without a rock-solid reason, you teach your team what you’re willing to accept. In that light, Piastri’s call was more than a position swap. It was a statement about who he wants to be inside McLaren, and what he expects in return. If he cashes that in later, no one should be surprised.
What next? A reset is barreling toward everyone. The 2026 rules overhaul is the kind that jumbles pecking orders and upends certainties. Verstappen is already eyeing another swing at the crown under the new chassis and power unit regs. McLaren, meanwhile, has to manage a champion in Norris and a star who feels he left one on the table. That’s delicate work even when the wind tunnel is your best friend.
It also promises something delicious for the rest of us. Norris versus Piastri, round two, with a year of scar tissue between them. Verstappen, back to hunting rather than being hunted, still taking the cleanest line to the microphone. The sport is better when the gloves are off — as long as the on-track blows land harder than the off-track barbs.
And if Monza 2025 taught us anything, it’s that the hardest calls don’t live on the pit wall. They live in the cockpit, in the split-second where a driver decides who he’s racing for: the team, the title, or himself.
