- Max Verstappen says scans show his lower back discs have worn down to almost nothing, and he takes pills to manage the pain across each race weekend.
- He lifts himself out of his seat before two of the roughest bumps at Circuit of the Americas, joking he will need “a new spine” after the United States Grand Prix.
- Lando Norris says he takes headache tablets before every session at the Texas circuit, while Lewis Hamilton insists he likes the bumps and the character they add.
A Body Breaking Down in Real Time, on Camera
Max Verstappen described his own spine the way a mechanic might describe a worn-out part. He told ViaPlay he has had scans done and that the discs at the bottom of his back show almost nothing left between the bones. That is not a throwaway complaint from a driver looking for sympathy. It is a four-time champion naming the exact physical cost of a career spent absorbing g-forces, curbs, and now the broken pavement at Circuit of the Americas, where this year’s bumps turned a routine lap into something closer to an endurance test for his lower back.
To get through the United States Grand Prix weekend, he has taken to physically lifting himself off the seat before the two worst sections of the Austin circuit, the exit of Turn 1 and the run through Turn 19. Without that adjustment, he said, those parts of the lap are simply impossible to take at speed without real pain. He is managing the discomfort with pills, a detail he shared without much drama, as though popping painkillers mid-weekend has become a normal part of his routine rather than an exception.
“A New Spine” and a Track Boss Who Agrees With Him
Verstappen called the track surface “unacceptable” and “out of control” before the race weekend even got underway, then turned to dark humor to make the point land. He said he would probably need to order a new spine after the weekend, or else become a version of Robocop just to survive the bumps. It is the kind of line that gets repeated in highlight reels, but underneath the joke sits a driver who has spent more than a decade in cars with almost no suspension travel, built to be stiff and low for speed rather than comfortable for the person steering them.
Bobby Epstein, the boss at Circuit of the Americas, did not dismiss the complaint. He acknowledged the track has a real problem at the dip near Turn 1 and said the rest of the surface is in good shape by comparison. He also conceded that the specific dip is harder to repair quickly than an ordinary bump would be, which means Verstappen and the rest of the grid could well be managing the same issue again next year unless the track finds a fix before cars return.
He Is Not the Only One Hurting
Verstappen’s complaints landed with extra force, given he was not alone in making them. Lando Norris, the reigning world champion, said he now takes headache tablets before every session at COTA, calling it something close to a requirement rather than a precaution. He said plainly that without them, he cannot drive properly, a startling admission from a driver at the peak of his sport about what it now takes just to get in the car and perform.
Oscar Piastri raised a different concern tied to the same stretch of track, warning that the bump at Turn 1 could turn into a genuine overtaking hazard once the field was running close together in race conditions. He compared the sensation to hitting a motocross jump, a comparison that says plenty about how far the surface has degraded from what a Formula 1 car is designed to handle.
Not everyone in the paddock sees the bumps as a problem worth fixing. Lewis Hamilton, at 41, pushed back against the complaints and said he actually likes the bumps, arguing they give the circuit character that a perfectly smooth track would lose. It is a rare moment of genuine disagreement among the sport’s biggest names about a safety and comfort issue, rather than the usual strategy or penalty debates that dominate most race weekends.
Pain Management While Chasing a Title
The timing makes Verstappen’s physical strain harder to separate from the championship fight playing out around him. Kimi Antonelli, the 20-year-old Mercedes driver leading the standings into the closing stretch of the season, has openly called Verstappen’s recent form “very scary,” a reflection of just how sharp Verstappen has looked on track even while describing his own back as falling apart off it. A driver managing real spinal damage is still fast enough to worry a title contender twenty years younger than him, which says as much about Verstappen’s threshold for pain as it does about his driving.
That contrast, a body wearing down while the results stay sharp, has defined much of Verstappen’s recent stretch of races. He has not used the back issue as cover for any dip in form, and he has not asked for sympathy either. He raised the complaint about the track surface in the same breath as the joke about needing a new spine, treating both as facts of the weekend rather than excuses for whatever happens on Sunday.
A Sport That Rarely Slows Down for Anyone
Formula 1 cars have gotten stiffer, lower, and faster through the hybrid era, and the toll on drivers’ bodies has climbed with every regulation cycle. Verstappen has raced in the series from the age of 17, racking up well over two hundred grand prix starts in cars built with almost no give in the suspension. The discs in his lower back have absorbed years of curb strikes and high-speed compressions that most of us will never put our bodies through even once.
What makes this moment notable is not that an F1 driver has back pain. Plenty do, quietly, without ever mentioning it in a television interview. It is that one of the sport’s most dominant competitors described the damage in such specific terms, named the exact two corners where it hurts most, and then kept racing anyway, confident enough in his own tolerance for pain that a scan showing worn-out discs barely slowed him down. The track will likely be smoother next year. Verstappen’s back, by his own account, is not getting any better on its own.
Drivers rarely volunteer this kind of detail about their own bodies. The culture around Formula 1 rewards toughness and punishes any hint of weakness, which makes Verstappen naming a specific diagnosis, in his own words, an unusual break from the sport’s normal guardedness. He did not present it as a complaint about unfairness. He stated it as a fact about what fourteen seasons of racing at the highest level does to a spine, delivered with the same flat tone he might use to describe a gearbox issue.
There is also a generational angle worth sitting with. Hamilton, at 41, is racing against drivers two decades younger who grew up on simulators built around the same stiff, low-ride-height philosophy that has defined cars from the start of the hybrid era onward. Verstappen is only 29, not old by any ordinary measure, yet he is already describing spinal wear that sounds closer to what a driver might expect near the end of a long career. If a driver in his physical prime is already picking apart his own discs on a scan, the toll on bodies racing into their late thirties and beyond is not likely to get any lighter as regulations keep pushing cars lower and stiffer in search of lap time.
For now, the fix on offer is not medical. It is a patch of resurfaced asphalt at Turn 1, a problem Epstein has already acknowledged and one the series will expect solved before everyone returns to Texas next season. Whether that is enough to spare the next generation of drivers the same scans Verstappen described this week is a separate question, one that nobody at Circuit of the Americas has an answer for yet.
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