Max Verstappen’s contract extension will have allowed Red Bull and Formula 1 bosses a collective sigh of relief this week.
Verstappen’s new deal, confirmed Thursday, increases the likelihood he will be a one-team man -- something he told late Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateshitz he always wanted to be -- and almost certainly means he will stop lobbing quite as many grenades at F1’s new engines every time he steps in front of a TV mic. And even if he does, the fact the obvious threat of him quitting has gone will dramatically lessen the impact of those criticisms going forward.
Verstappen has essentially decided that, as much as he might hate F1’s “anti-racing” hybrid engines, there are enough good things on the horizon -- quite a few million more, you could say -- to keep him around beyond 2028, when his old deal had run to.
And as Verstappen said while talking about his new deal at Zandvoort, the idea of walking away for good always felt like the more realistic option than turning his back on Red Bull.
“I think I was closer to retiring than changing teams,” he joked on Thursday. “I never felt that desire or need also to change [to another team] to try and win somewhere else. If I feel well within the team here, why should I? Because I know that they do everything for me, and they know that I do everything for them once I’m on the track and trying to get the results.”
While a big moment for F1 given the PR nightmare of the new engine regulations, the deal was a even louder endorsement of Laurent Mekies, the man tasked with steadying the ship after he replaced long-time Red Bull boss Christian Horner last year. The news was also a major relief to a team that had seen the classic “brain drain” of top talent which many dynasty F1 operations face at some point -- key pillars of the team Helmut Marko, Adrian Newey, Jonathan Wheatley and Rob Marshall had all left over recent seasons, but there were a host of other names at different levels who had opted to seek employment elsewhere. Verstappen’s long-time race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase was one of them -- he will join McLaren no later than 2028.
The rumours of Verstappen leaving had been nauesating at times. There was his famous yachting holiday with Mercedes boss Toto Wolff last summer and Wolff’s public declarations of interest and then more recently sensational stories about a swap deal for him and McLaren’s Oscar Piastri. His old contract had been packed to the gills with performance-related exit clauses which had made the question of him leaving at the end of every year a real possibility if performance metrics were not met.
Red Bull brass had grown frustrated by the existence of these clauses but it gave Verstappen an easy out if he ever felt Red Bull, the team he has won 71 races and four world championships with, had lost its title-winning pedigree. Clearly, that is not the case. Verstappen’s decision to extend his stay will no doubt have been financially lucrative. Sources have told ESPN his new deal could be in the region of $110 million a year when bonuses are taken into account, up from around $60 million a year on his old deal. It was a clear sign that he believes Red Bull can continue its culture of sporting excellence in the post-Horner, post-Marko, post-Newey era.
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Although results in 2026 have been slow so far, and Verstappen has been as vocal about Red Bull’s competitiveness as he has about F1’s new hybrid engines, he still thinks he can add to his four world championships with the company that signed him as a teenager in 2014. Red Bull are not on top of it yet, and disagree with the FIA’s decision to mark its internal combustion engine as the best this year under the complicated ADUO rules, but the company’s in-house engine project has fared far better than most thought it would having been built from the ground up from 2022 onwards.
Team boss Mekies referenced how important a statement Verstappen’s new deal was on Thursday and gave a hint at why Verstappen remains the focal point of everything Red Bull does.
“If there is one word that comes to mind -- in fact I think the first message we exchanged when it was [confirmed] -- is what a demonstration of trust Max has put in the team by making this decision. We don’t take it lightly. With that trust comes a huge amount of responsibility in living up to being able to give him the best package for the years to come. But certainly if one thinks about the role Max has in the team, it is much more than the driver.
“We have been saying it many times -- he is the central point of the team, he is the one we always refer to for all the strategic decisions we are making, and to know that he’s going to be with us in order to build that next winning cycle is phenomenal. So I think more globally, if one thinks to what are the pillars you need to have in order to open that winning cycle again, well, certainly the driver side is done now. We have said many many times that we trust we have the best talents in Milton Keynes, and that’s the second pillar. And certainly the third pillar is the number of strategic decisions that has been made that we trust will give us a competitive advantage.”
That quote not only sums up why only Red Bull were realistically going to meet Verstappen’s lofty financial demands, but also why stories of him switching teams had to be taken with a pinch of salt. While it is always compelling to imagine drivers making big, shocking moves, the reality was Verstappen was never going to get from another team what Red Bull have given and what Mekies promised it will continue to give him in Formula 1, both in terms of money and in terms of his position and importance internally.
Mercedes fleetingly talked to Verstappen about a move last year, but it never felt like they came to anything real: Wolff seemingly has cooled his interest now he knows he has the next Verstappen in Kimi Antonelli on the books, while George Russell will likely stay for the foreseeable.
As for McLaren, the team most recently linked to the Dutch superstar, it was unlikely boss Zak Brown was ever going to front up the kind of money he would have needed to both ditch PIastri and sign Verstappen, let alone give Verstappen the kind of influence and power behind the scenes as he would get from Red Bull, with reigning world champion Lando Norris already embedded as team leader.
Many in the paddock will openly refer to Red Bull as Team Verstappen -- his new deal reinforces that it has and will continue to be that into the 2030s. And why not? If you’re going to build an F1 operation around anyone, you do it around the sport’s most talented race driver. As for those pesky exit clauses, Verstappen refused to elaborate on Thursday whether his new deal includes any or not -- Sergio Pérez joked he wanted to know for his own sake -- but sources have told ESPN that the removal of them was one of the key requirements of any new deal on the Red Bull side.
Verstappen would unlikely have made such a strong statement of commitment to the team while fighting to keep those in. While no deal in F1 is watertight, the length of the deal and the positive vibes of Red Bull’s announcement mean there will be no reason for F1 fans and media to talk about Verstappen going elsewhere for the next two or three years at least.
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As Verstappen himself confirmed, retirement did cross his mind earlier this year when he first grappled with F1’s new engines, which feature a near-50/50 split between convention internal combustion power and electrified battery components. The new engines and the energy harvesting and deployment now required have completely changed the way F1 drivers approach qualifying and the racing.
Verstappen has been the most vocal critic of the new formula -- he said at the Chinese Grand Prix that any fan enjoying the new races doesn’t understand what racing is about. He took part in the 24 Hours of the Nürburgring away from F1 this year to scratch his pure racing itch. The new contract does not mean he has simply decided he actually loves F1’s electric racing cars -- but he certainly has more reasons to tolerate them, several million more, a cynic might say. Even as recently as Belgium and Hungary he was still complaining about them, although after joking someone might “shoot” him if he carried on, he had to stress that Formula 1 had not told him to keep his mouth shut about how he really feels.
In deciding to stay for longer, Verstappen pointed to the tweaks coming up -- F1’s engines will be more 60/40 in favour of internal combustion power by 2028, while this current engine has been so unpopular F1 rulemakers are already strongly considering a return to V8 engines by the end of the decade, right in time for Verstappen to be considering his next contract renewal.
“I have to say, after the first few races [of 2026] I said to Laurent [Mekies], Red Bull team principal] don’t come to me with any kind of questions about the future because I didn’t even know if I wanted to stay in F1,” Verstappen said.
“But honestly we always kept it very open and I know, I mean I love racing and I think I had a lot of very good discussions with F1 but also with the FIA and I think we are slowly working towards something that becomes better and better. Also from my side, of course, I accepted the situation that I think we’re all in and just trying to make the best of that. I think also with the year that I signed to it again opens up the door maybe when potentially the V8s come in to look at that again as well.”
F1 boss Stefano Domenicali -- who has had regular conversations with the four-time world champion about his concerns -- will have been as relieved as Mekies and Red Bull to see Verstappen put pen to paper. Losing the best racing driver of his generation simply because the sport had chosen an engine formula so detrimental to what he considered to be true racing would have been a horrible look PR-wise for a sport which has desperately tried to control the narrative around the new engines.
Whether Verstappen’s extension was more about Red Bull and the financials than it was about the current Formula 1 cars is an open question, but F1 won’t care. The sport can say one of, if not the biggest, names on the grid committed to stay in F1 long term despite apprehensions about the new formula. Domenicali has been telling fans lately to stop complaining about the battery management and yo-yo racing that has come with it -- no doubt we will hear him using Verstappen’s extension as a show of faith that things can and will get better.
What does it mean for the wider driver market?
Verstappen’s new deal was great news for Red Bull and F1, but less good news for fans who live for the constant drama of the news cycle known as the “driver market” in F1 -- the sport’s equivalent of the transfer market or free agency. Verstappen’s deal might have killed the driver market as we know it for the next couple of years -- when you dig into it, his deal might have ended the chance of any legitimately shocking F1 driver moves among the sport’s biggest teams for the next couple of seasons, and could have created a static, wait-and-see situation lower down too.
Let’s explain why. The Dutchman’s new deal follows the trend of F1’s top drivers and top teams looking for increasingly long stability when it comes to their contracts. The pathway into any of F1’s Big Four teams is looking increasingly difficult for anyone not already there. Verstappen is now committed to 2030, and Red Bull looks set to continue to promote from within. At the Monaco Grand Prix Charles Leclerc committed to an even longer stay -- sources have told ESPN his extension with Ferrari runs until 2031 or 2032 -- while Lewis Hamilton has a contract for 2027 and has already talked about wanting to keep racing if his form stays at its 2026 level.
Haas driver and Ferrari junior Oliver Bearman looks set for a long wait for his opportunity there. Championship leader Antonelli is out of contract at the end of the year but will clearly end 2026 with a huge deal of his own as well, while Russell can expect to be at Mercedes for the foreseeable too. McLaren has Norris until 2027 -- but well-placed sources have told ESPN he will likely end up committing into the next decade like Leclerc and Verstappen have done at their teams -- while Piastri is locked down until the end of 2028. Verstappen’s new deal will have been a blow to a lot of drivers around the grid hoping that he would switch teams and cause a massive domino effect up and down the grid.
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It’s perhaps why Williams was able to kick off the week with the announcement of deals for Alex Albon [for 2027] and Carlos Sainz [on a multi-year extension], who both would have caught wind on the vine that Verstappen and Red Bull had thrashed out the extension terms over the summer break. Both drivers had been privately worried they had been sold a turkey by James Vowles after watching the team miss the start of preseason testing and then struggle to ninth in the first half of the season when their team boss had promised big things under the new regulations. Both spoke on their renewed belief in the project on Thursday’s media day, but their deals can also be seen as kicking the can down the road in what is an incredibly static year from a driver market perspective. The wait-and-see mindset is one a lot of drivers are going to have to take.
Another team which fell short of big expectations this year, Aston Martin, is unsure about its own driver lineup into 2027, but sources have told ESPN Fernando Alonso will continue with the team unless Honda’s Zandvoort engine upgrade is a complete dud. Even then, he’s run out of legitimate options that might make him competitive again before he retires. With Lance Stroll seemingly on a lifetime contract at his dad’s team, and with Verstappen now closing off the final path to a front-running car any time soon, the likes of Pierre Gasly, Sainz and others have to wait to see the progress F1’s newest manufacturer team Audi makes over the next season or so. It might well be a force to be reckoned with in future, but like Aston Martin, moving there right now is a gamble and might require a degree of patience anyway.
So Verstappen has his deal, Red Bull have its man, Formula 1 can rest easy -- but one drawback of Thursday’s news is driver market chatter going forward is going to lack a lot of its usual intrigue around the top teams.
