Max Verstappen’s situation has drifted into a strange place for a driver who’s spent the last half-decade making F1 look brutally simple. The contract says Red Bull until 2028. The paddock conversation says “maybe.” And Verstappen himself has started to sound like someone weighing up more than just lap time.
Guenther Steiner, never one to overcomplicate a blunt truth, has narrowed the hypothetical escape routes down to three: Ferrari, McLaren or Mercedes. Not because they’re the only teams with ambition — plenty have that — but because they’re the only ones with the scale, structure and outright performance potential to offer Verstappen what he’d actually be leaving Red Bull for.
“In my opinion, Max can only go to three teams: Ferrari, McLaren, or Mercedes,” Steiner said, before getting to the real point: it’s not about where Verstappen might want to go, it’s about who would actually clear a seat.
That’s the part people conveniently skip when the Verstappen-to-wherever rumours flare up. Top teams aren’t running passenger line-ups in 2026. They’re built around carefully chosen pairings, commercial commitments, internal politics and long-term plans. Signing Verstappen isn’t just an upgrade; it’s an act of demolition on whatever harmony you currently have.
Steiner argues somebody would still do it, because Verstappen’s track record forces the question. Four world titles, a mountain of wins and the sense — even among rivals — that if you give him a car with a sniff of a championship in it, he’ll do the rest. Steiner even pointed to a familiar precedent: Ferrari moving Carlos Sainz aside once Lewis Hamilton became available. Drivers performing well can still be expendable when a once-in-a-generation name enters the chat.
But the 2026 twist is that Verstappen isn’t the reigning champion anymore. Lando Norris is, after McLaren surged to the top and ended Verstappen’s run. That changes the tone. You’re not just trying to buy the best driver on the market; you’re potentially taking him from a team that’s been his sporting identity, and you’re doing it at a moment when the competitive picture is less settled and more political than it’s been in years.
McLaren, for their part, have shown zero interest in turning their title-winning set-up upside down. Zak Brown has said he couldn’t be happier with what the team has and has no intention of changing it. Read between the lines and it sounds like a team that believes it’s finally built something sustainable — and doesn’t want the Verstappen-shaped shockwave that would follow.
Mercedes have also publicly poured cold water on the idea. Toto Wolff insists there are “not any Max discussions” and, like Brown, leans on contentment with his current pair. That might be sincere. It might be positioning. But it’s also an acknowledgement that the Verstappen pursuit is rarely “just” a signing; it becomes a gravitational event that drags everything else into it.
So you’re left staring at Ferrari — the one destination that always feels both plausible and impossible at the same time.
Ferrari’s complication is obvious: seats. Charles Leclerc has a multi-year deal that runs into 2027. Hamilton, who arrived amid enormous fanfare, is understood to have an option for a third season that only he can activate. If Hamilton takes it, Ferrari’s 2027 line-up is effectively locked. Which makes Steiner’s three-team menu feel, in practical terms, like a restaurant that’s already closed.
And that’s where Verstappen’s own words start to matter more than the contract noise.
He’s been unusually candid about his headspace, admitting he’s thinking about “everything inside this paddock” and questioning whether the grind still gives him what it used to. The calendar may be 22 races this time rather than 24, but the point isn’t the number — it’s the lifestyle and the emotional energy required to keep doing it at a level that satisfies him.
“Privately I’m very happy,” Verstappen said, before outlining the mental maths: is it worth it, or is life at home more appealing when you’re “not enjoying your sport”?
That line lands because it doesn’t sound like negotiation theatre. It sounds like fatigue. Not the performative, mid-season moaning you sometimes hear when a driver’s car is off the pace for a few weekends, but the deeper kind: the one that turns every compromise — media days, sponsor obligations, endless travel, the scrutiny — into a debit rather than a cost of doing business.
Verstappen insisted he still enjoys aspects of the job, particularly the people around him at Red Bull. But he also admitted that once he’s in the car, it’s “not the most enjoyable.” In modern F1, that can mean plenty of things — the way a car responds, the style required to extract lap time, the sense that you’re wrestling a package rather than driving it — but the subtext is hard to miss. If the act of driving stops being the release, everything else becomes harder to justify.
Steiner framed it as a straight choice for next season: stay at Red Bull or leave F1 altogether. That may be a touch too binary — contracts can be reshaped, options appear, motorsport careers rarely move in tidy lines — but it does capture the reality that the obvious lifeboats don’t currently have empty seats.
And maybe that’s the uncomfortable punchline to all this. For years, the Verstappen rumours have been treated as a story about power: which team can lure him, who can outbid whom, who can promise the best project.
In 2026 it reads more like a story about meaning. If Verstappen doesn’t believe the next phase of his career will be fun — really fun, the way racing was always supposed to be — then Ferrari, McLaren and Mercedes aren’t just competing with each other. They’re competing with a version of Verstappen’s life that doesn’t involve any of them.
