- Max Verstappen has confirmed for the first time that he held serious talks with both Mercedes in 2025 and McLaren in 2026 before deciding to stay at Red Bull.
- He signed a new deal through 2030 on the eve of his home Dutch Grand Prix, even as Red Bull has yet to win a race in F1’s new regulatory era.
- Verstappen says the decision came down to loyalty rather than results, calling Red Bull “a second family.”
Four time champion admits he almost left, in his own words
For most of this season, Max Verstappen answered every question about his future with the same practiced deflection. Asked directly about McLaren speculation at the British Grand Prix, he told reporters, “I’m not going to get involved in that. I’ve already said what I wanted to say. If something new happens or if something changes, you’ll hear it from me and not through the grapevine or from someone else writing about it, right?”
That silence made sense at the time. Multiple people inside the paddock had told reporters that Verstappen and McLaren were deep into a lengthy negotiation for him to leave Red Bull, the team he has driven for starting in 2016. Now, months after signing a contract extension that runs through 2030, Verstappen has finally said what actually happened, in an interview with BBC Sport that reads less like a driver guarding his negotiating position and more like one being honest about how close he came to walking away.
What he actually said about Mercedes and McLaren
“Of course, any kind of chat you take seriously,” Verstappen said. “They’re all very respectful chats. There’s nothing wrong with that. I felt that staying was, for me, the right choice. You have to follow your heart.”
The admission covers two separate courtships. Verstappen spoke with Mercedes in 2025, before Kimi Antonelli’s rise made that seat far less obviously available, and then with McLaren through much of this year, as paddock sources described the talks moving into their closing stages. Both times, he chose to stay. “I could have run away very early on in my Red Bull career and gone somewhere else to try and win,” he said. “If you have a little bit of patience, you do end up winning. I feel like that’s my approach now as well.”
Why loyalty won out over a faster car
The timing of Verstappen’s decision makes it harder to explain away as simple contract theater. Red Bull has not won a single Grand Prix under Formula 1’s new regulatory cycle. Verstappen has reached the podium four times, but he trails championship leader Kimi Antonelli by 140 points with ten race weekends still to run, a gap that would have most drivers at least keeping one eye on the exit. McLaren, by contrast, entered this year’s silly season as the sport’s dominant constructor, exactly the kind of team a driver chasing a fifth title might be expected to pursue without hesitation.
Verstappen described the choice as being about more than lap times. “It comes down to also feeling well within a team. This is like a second family to me,” he said. “The belief that you can turn things around, you can build towards hopefully a better future with other people, new people. And at the end of the day, it’s not only Formula 1 for me. There are a lot of things that I’m doing next year that Red Bull is involved in as well. I feel good here. So this, for me, is the right place to be.”
Antonelli’s rise changed the calculation
Part of what makes Verstappen’s Mercedes admission notable is timing. The conversations he describes happened in 2025, before Kimi Antonelli had won a single Grand Prix and before anyone in the paddock seriously expected the young Italian to be leading the 2026 championship by 140 points. Had Verstappen chosen Mercedes then, he would have arrived to find the seat he wanted occupied by a teenager who went on to become the man currently beating him for the title, a twist neither of them could have predicted at the time. It is the kind of near miss that only becomes visible in hindsight, and Verstappen’s account suggests he has thought about it more than his public deflections over the summer ever let on.
How he handled Red Bull’s own nerves
Verstappen also gave a rare look at how he managed the pressure from inside Red Bull’s own walls while the talks with rival teams were happening. “I always said to them: ‘Don’t stress about it, just work on the car.’ Because the faster the car goes, the easier the decision is anyway,” he said. “I can understand, of course, maybe sometimes they were a little bit worried. But at the same time, for me, I was just worried about here, what was going on. At the same time, I was very busy with my stuff also outside of Formula 1. So I never really spent a lot of time talking or doing different things or trying to go somewhere else.”
That last detail counts for more than it first appears. A driver who spends real time negotiating elsewhere tends to let it show in small ways, distraction in debriefs, a shift in body language around team personnel. Verstappen’s account suggests he kept the two tracks of his life, the contract talks and the actual racing, deliberately separate, treating the car’s performance as the only argument that could actually move him rather than a bargaining chip to wave in front of his own team.
A decision announced at the most symbolic possible moment
Red Bull chose to announce Verstappen’s extension on the eve of the Dutch Grand Prix, his home race, in front of the orange army that has followed him from his teenage debut onward. It was a deliberate piece of stagecraft from a team that understood exactly what was riding on the announcement after a season of speculation, and it worked. What had been rumor for months became certainty at the one race on the calendar built entirely around Verstappen himself.
Whether that certainty holds through 2030 depends on a Red Bull car that still has not won under the current rules. Verstappen’s own history suggests patience over panic, the same approach that eventually turned an underpowered early Red Bull into four consecutive championships. He arrived at the team in 2016 as a teenager thrown into a top seat mid-season, inherited a car that spent years chasing Mercedes and then Ferrari, and waited until 2021 for his first title. That wait, and the way it ended, appears to be doing a lot of the work behind his current thinking.
It also puts Red Bull on notice in its own way. Verstappen did not describe his extension as blind faith. He described a team he trusts to turn things around, not one he is certain already has. The distinction gives Red Bull’s leadership every incentive to treat the next two seasons as an audition of their own, delivering the competitive car that makes Verstappen’s decision look easy in hindsight rather than merely loyal.
For McLaren and Mercedes, the confirmation closes one door but opens a different set of questions. Both organizations now know exactly how close they came, and both will enter the next round of driver market movement aware that Verstappen’s patience has a limit somewhere, though nobody, including Verstappen himself, appears to know exactly where that limit sits. For now, the only number bigger than Verstappen’s word is Antonelli’s 140 point lead, and the ten race weekends left to close it.
Sources:
- https://www.planetf1.com/news/max-verstappen-confirms-serious-talks-mercedes-mclaren
- https://www.crash.net/f1/news/1104050/1/max-verstappen-admits-serious-talks-mclaren-and-mercedes-red-bull-f1-stay
- https://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/49878411/max-verstappen-admits-mclaren-mercedes-talks-following-heart-red-bull-stay
