JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — When Max Verstappen won last year’s Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, then the second round of the Formula One season, on-track success was the one sure thing Red Bull could count on.
Significant off-track turbulence followed in the wake of the investigation into allegations made against team boss Christian Horner by a female employee — the grievance was ultimately dismissed, a decision then upheld on appeal. An internal power struggle then played out while Verstappen kept delivering on the track, dominating F1 with a rapid, reliable car.
Red Bull returns to Saudi Arabia this weekend on calmer waters. But on track, the team is scrambling for answers over an underperforming car that has already caused Verstappen’s championship defense to grow fragile.
“At the moment, we’re not the quickest,” Verstappen said in a news conference on Thursday, admitting it was “very tough to fight for a championship” without the quickest car.
The Dutchman only sits eight points back from early leader Lando Norris in the standings. And he was subject to paddock-wide praise only two weeks ago for one of the best performances of his career in winning the Japanese Grand Prix.
But a tough race last weekend in Bahrain, where, to quote Verstappen, “everything that could go wrong, went wrong,” as he struggled to sixth place and ran last at one point, served as a Red Bull wake-up call. A race-long brake issue combined with a continual car handling balance problem (a hangover trait from last year’s car) left Verstappen powerless to finish any higher.
Post-race, Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko admitted in an interview with Sky Germany that “the concern is great” within the organisation over Verstappen’s future. “We need to create a foundation with a car so that he can fight for the world championship,” he said. Marko has been one of the most influential figures throughout Verstappen’s F1 career, and his views are important to the 27-year-old.
Now the paddock has reconvened in Jeddah, with Verstappen appearing in the FIA’s pre-event news conference, it was natural that Marko’s comments and the poor Bahrain result would again raise many questions over his Red Bull future. Verstappen has a contract to race for the team through to 2028, but given the presence of performance-related escape clauses in all top driver agreements — something Marko himself has acknowledged — that is now hardly a sure thing.
Verstappen’s future was a recurring subject through the first half of last year when he was linked with a possible switch away as the management drama unfolded within Red Bull. The only time he hinted there was real doubt he would continue with Red Bull came when Marko’s position faced scrutiny at the 2024 Jeddah race. This prompted Verstappen to indicate he could not keep racing for Red Bull if Marko were not there. One day later, Marko’s future was secure again.
Verstappen’s camp then spoke with Mercedes boss Toto Wolff in the summer, only for both sides to decide against seriously pursuing a deal. Mercedes’ lead driver in 2025, George Russell, sits three points behind third-place Verstappen in the drivers’ standings.
Verstappen didn’t wish to spend much time discussing his future in Thursday’s news conference. “I just keep working, keep trying to improve the car,” he said. When David Croft from Sky Sports F1 asked Verstappen if Marko was “getting the wrong end of the stick” and wasn’t thinking of leaving Red Bull, Verstappen smiled and told him to “just focus on commentating, I’ll focus on driving. Then you don’t need to think about any other scenarios.”
Verstappen positioned it all as being outside noise. “Honestly, a lot of people are talking about it, except me,” he said. “I just want to focus on my car, work with the people in the team. That’s the only thing that I’m thinking about in Formula One at the moment. I’m very relaxed.”
Relaxed, maybe. But so long as there is this lack of performance from the car, meaning Marko has reason to air such concerns as he did after the race in Bahrain, and there isn’t a step forward to get Verstappen back into the thick of the lead battle consistently, then the paddock will keep talking about his future. Understandably, a driver of his caliber not having the car capable of fighting for a championship breeds those questions. Verstappen himself even indirectly fueled talk of a possible Mercedes switch last year by failing to shut it down definitively until Austria, three months on from the early-year Red Bull management power struggle and with his Wolff talks set to play out privately anyway.
The ‘where’ of a Verstappen Red Bull exit is the other side of the discussion. Russell has been outstanding so far this season for Mercedes, and talks over a contract renewal for the British racer to stay beyond this year were always planned for the summer. So long as that agreement is not finalized, then Wolff’s previous interest in Verstappen makes the links obvious. (At the season-opening Australian GP, Wolff said Verstappen was not back on his radar.)
The other team that would be linked with picking up Verstappen is Aston Martin, which categorically denied a report in January that it was planning a big-money swoop for his services. The additions of Adrian Newey, design guru behind Verstappen’s title-winning cars, and the Honda engine power arriving next year make the project attractive. Still, both Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll are contracted for next year at the team.
Alonso, speaking alongside Verstappen in the news conference, said any rumors linking Verstappen with Aston were “very good for the team,” speaking to the quality of the project it is building. Although he said he’d welcome Verstappen as a teammate, he admitted it was “unlikely to happen.” Stroll’s father, Lawrence Stroll, owns the Silverstone-based team, and Alonso has previously stated he wanted to support Lance to a place where he could fight for a championship.
In the same news conference, Verstappen was also asked about an exchange between his manager, Raymond Vermeulen, and Marko that was spotted and reported by Sky pit lane reporter Ted Kravitz after the race in Bahrain. Kravitz said on the broadcaster’s F1 podcast that Vermeulen seemed “particularly irked” and believes this was linked to Red Bull’s pit stop issues in the race.
Verstappen claimed the conversation was “about everything” and that “people can always see (such things) their own way,” but added that Horner had joined Vermeulen and Marko for the conversation given their united frustration over how the race had unravelled.
“We all care at the end of the day,” Verstappen said. “We care about the team, we care about the people, we care about results. I think that’s quite normal.”
Verstappen has always been a big team player and is well-liked within Red Bull for that reason: his care is genuine. He has always taken a fairly straightforward and pragmatic approach toward its relative on-track performance. At Monza last year, he admitted that both 2024 championships could slip away unless the team could remedy its car struggles. His points buffer at the top of the drivers’ standings built thanks to his dominant early wins, including in Jeddah, combined with some excellent displays through the back end of last year, meant he could hang on despite the Red Bull car slipping back in the competitive order. In the constructors’ championship, Red Bull was beaten by both McLaren and Ferrari.
The outlook is different for Verstappen now, given Red Bull’s deficit to McLaren and the dual threat of Norris and Oscar Piastri winning three of the first four rounds at the top of the championship in 2025. He acknowledges the challenge the car struggles would leave him without a points buffer this time, but noted just how much of the season remains still to run and how his own swing in form last year proved how things can quickly change.
“It’s still a very long road,” Verstappen said. “We were sitting around this time last year, race five, and it was all looking great — and then we all know how the season ended up. So yeah, I’m hopeful that we can still improve things, and we’ll see what we get.”
With fewer low- and medium-speed corners and a less abrasive track surface, the Jeddah circuit shouldn’t expose the weaknesses of the Red Bull car quite as severely as Bahrain did one week ago. After winning two weeks ago in Japan, Verstappen said a good weekend this time would be finding a level of performance somewhere between the last two races — two extremes on the spectrum.
Yet so long as Red Bull doesn’t have the car capable of fighting against McLaren (not even as the quickest car, simply good enough for Verstappen’s undeniable talent to do the rest), the hope Verstappen maintains will be tested. Especially if his championship outlook grows bleaker.
Red Bull knows a response is needed to get back in the fight against McLaren. But if it fails to register one, the questions over Verstappen’s future are unlikely to go away.
(Top image: Mark Thompson, Clive Mason / Getty Images)
