Red Bull thought it was serving up a neat bit of cross-category content: Max Verstappen, dropped into a Super GT car at Fuji in the rain, chasing down a benchmark lap like it was just another Tuesday. The footage was slick, the premise simple, and the punchline inevitable — Verstappen went quicker.
But the reaction from within Super GT has been less straightforward. João Paulo de Oliveira, a long-time series stalwart who’s been racing in Japan since 2006, has taken issue not with Verstappen turning up, but with how the story was framed once the cameras stopped rolling.
The eight-minute video, released by Red Bull last week, centres on Verstappen taking on a lap-time challenge against Super GT regular Atsushi Miyake. Miyake — a Fuji winner in 2024 and third in that season’s drivers’ standings — laid down a 1m44.075s as the target. Verstappen’s first effort landed within a tenth, before he knocked a hefty 1.785s off Miyake’s time on the next lap.
In isolation, it makes for a classic piece of motorsport theatre: world champion arrives, adapts instantly, delivers. Except De Oliveira isn’t buying the implied conclusion that Verstappen simply rocked up and drove nearly two seconds clear of a top-level GT racer on merit alone.
“In wet conditions where the track surface is constantly changing, lap times can fluctuate by nearly two seconds in just a few minutes,” De Oliveira wrote on social media. “Yet, the way it was presented — as if he were nearly two seconds faster than a Super GT driver after just a few laps — feels somewhat off.
“I believe that even in promotional material, respect for Super GT and its current drivers is essential.”
It’s a familiar tension whenever a global star is parachuted into someone else’s world for content. The edit needs a clean narrative arc, but racers tend to bristle at anything that compresses context — track evolution, tyre state, fuel load, conditions — into a neat “he was quicker” verdict. De Oliveira’s point isn’t that Verstappen can’t be fast in a GT car. It’s that wet Fuji can turn “two seconds faster” into a misleading headline if you don’t show what changed in the window between laps.
What complicates the backlash is that Miyake himself didn’t seem remotely offended. If anything, he looked like a driver who’d just had a rare chance to measure himself against a four-time F1 champion in identical machinery — and enjoyed every second of it.
“He’s a champion, a world champion,” Miyake said after Verstappen beat his time. “By sharing the same car, I was able to see just how amazing his driving was and that was extremely exciting.”
Verstappen, for his part, played it with the usual mix of candour and mischief. He stalled the car twice on the way out, then joked mid-challenge about the stakes. “You know these guys are racing these things the whole year round?” he said. “If I’m not beating him, I’m going to cut the corners…”
After setting the quicker lap, he admitted the conditions were already turning. “It was just getting a bit tricky to push,” Verstappen said. “After I saw my first lap, I was like: ‘I can do a bit better than that.’ So I did the 42 and then it really started raining and in some of the corners it was quite tricky.”
He’s also keen to come back and do it again properly — or at least, more comparably. Verstappen said he hopes to return to Fuji in 2027 to run the challenge in the dry. “I was just staring at the slick tyres,” he said. “Hopefully next year it can be done.”
The timing of all this matters, because Verstappen’s extracurricular racing isn’t a one-off PR day. It’s turning into a genuine second track running alongside his F1 career — and it ramps up again this weekend with his debut in the Nürburgring 24 Hours.
Verstappen confirmed the plan back in March, just a day after the season-opening Australian Grand Prix, and he’ll tackle the Nordschleife in a Red Bull-branded Mercedes-AMG GT3 alongside Jules Gounon, Lucas Auer and Daniel Juncadella.
He’s already had a crash-course in how unforgiving this world can be. In March, Verstappen, Gounon and Juncadella won an NLS race — then lost it after a tyre-related infringement, having used seven sets across qualifying and the race combined, one over the maximum of six.
More recently, Verstappen returned during F1’s extended break to contest Nürburgring 24-hour qualifying with Auer. The weekend was messy: a grid penalty after Auer caused a collision in the first qualifying session, then a tragic stoppage when the race was halted following an accident that claimed the life of veteran racer Juha Miettinen. In the second race the next day, Verstappen and Auer were in the fight before damage forced repairs; they ended up classified 39th.
All of which underlines the real story beneath the Fuji argument. This isn’t Verstappen dabbling for clicks; it’s Verstappen building mileage, learning procedures, and making the kinds of mistakes endurance racing will punish — sometimes in ways that have nothing to do with speed.
So yes, the Fuji video may have been edited to make the gap look more definitive than it really was. De Oliveira’s complaint is understandable, and Super GT doesn’t need to be treated as a prop in somebody else’s hero narrative. But the broader picture is that Verstappen is showing up, driving properly, and taking on disciplines that don’t automatically bend to his reputation.
And if his Nürburgring programme has proven anything so far, it’s that no amount of world titles can edit out the hard bits.
