Max Verstappen's Formula 1 Struggles: A Champion's Loyalty and Challenges
Max Verstappen sits down, eyes narrowed, voice clipped. The heat is suffocating in Red Bull’s hospitality unit at Monza, the fan in the corner barely stirring the air, and he nudges it towards us with a curt verdict.
“It’s too hot in here.”
He’s not just talking about the room.
This is Verstappen in a stripped-back, no-frills mood. No charm offensive. No softening of the edges. On the eve of the Italian Grand Prix, with Red Bull no longer dictating terms to the rest of the grid, the four-time world champion is taking aim at almost everything: his car, the regulations, even the very feel of modern Formula 1.
He has just signed a new two-year extension that, on paper, keeps him at Red Bull until the end of 2030. In reality, the deal changes very little. The performance clauses remain. The escape routes are still there if the team’s slump hardens into a long-term decline.
But he stayed. And he did it with his eyes wide open.
A champion stuck in the midfield
Verstappen doesn’t pretend the season has met his standards.
“Of course it’s not where I want to be,” he says. “We are not in a title fight. We are just trying to find more performance.”
He talks about “learnings”, about gathering data for 2026, but there is no attempt to sugar-coat the core problem.
“Overall we’re just lacking a bit of performance. The car is not where I want it to be feeling-wise, and the through-corner balance is too hit and miss between entry, mid and exit.
“It’s just fundamentally something in the car that we need to try and work on for the next year.”
This isn’t a one-off blip. The issues have been bubbling under for longer than this regulation cycle, and Verstappen knows it.
“That’s exactly that,” he says when asked how worrying it is that the problems have spanned different rulesets. “There’s also things that we talk about within the team, like how can that happen, how can we fix it?
“Some people have left, new people have come in. With the new people, we are discussing what we can do about it. Is that just some changes, a different philosophy? All these kind of things.”
The dominant, untouchable Red Bull era has given way to something more fragile, more human. And Verstappen, rather than run from it, has chosen to stay inside the storm.
Why he stayed: loyalty, leverage and a new kind of challenge
So why commit to a team that has slipped from its peak and might not get back there quickly?
“It comes down to also feeling well within a team. This is like a second family to me,” he says. “The belief that you can turn things around, you can build towards hopefully a better future with other people, new people.”
He is clear: this is about more than just Formula 1.
“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.”
He insists he never pushed for reassurances or dramatic promises.
“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.”
The paddock knows he spoke to Mercedes last year and McLaren this year. Those conversations were real, not leverage games.
“Of course, any kind of chat you take seriously. 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.”
Then comes the line that tells you exactly how he sees his role in this project.
“You cannot be the captain of the ship and as soon as there is something not working, you jump off the ship.
“It’s been a bit downwards from the dominant years, but I don’t mind also rebuilding it. It’s another challenge as well.”
He could have chased the quickest car, he says. He chose not to.
“I don’t have that desire or need to show in another car that I can win it, or whatever. It’s easy to run to the fastest car and then do it all again. But it’s not how I am.”
The pure joy of the Nordschleife
If Formula 1 is currently a grind, Verstappen’s eyes light up when the conversation turns to the Nurburgring 24 Hours.
“Probably the Nordschleife,” he says when asked about his favourite race of the year. “It was super-cool to be able to do an endurance event with my team-mates, the guys that won with the car throughout the main season.”
They knew they had a package to fight at the front. They did, until the car retired. The disappointment doesn’t dim the memory.
“It was an incredible experience. And pure. Pure motorsport.”
His first stint became an instant highlight reel: starting 10th, slicing through the field, taking the lead in treacherous conditions.
“I was enjoying it. Not easy conditions. It started to drizzle. The track was slippery. Crashes. Code 60s.”
There were plenty of doubters waiting to see how a grand prix star would cope in that chaos.
“Some people were like: ‘Let’s see how he will do in the race under pressure with all these kinds of scenarios that he has never done before.’
“But I have done them a million times on the simulator. I have done so many laps and 24-hour races on the simulator. I never felt out of depth or whatever. I was fully zoned in. I just had a great time.
“Once I was in the race, you switch to another level. I was just in a zone. It’s really enjoyable.”
He wants to go back and win it. That much is clear. And that’s only the start.
“All the endurance races,” he says of his bucket list. “Eventually, of course also Hypercar. I don’t want to rush it. I want to do it in the right environment. On my terms. And competitive.”
The idea of Le Mans with Fernando Alonso has already been floated.
“We’ve talked about it,” Verstappen admits. “I mean, look at Fernando. He’s 45 and he’s still flying. Especially for Le Mans, with his experience, it could be a good option.
“It needs to fit our schedules. It needs to make sense. It needs to be on my terms. And there needs to be a real chance to go there and win it.”
A champion at war with the rulebook
Back in F1, Verstappen’s frustration is not just about Red Bull’s form. It runs deeper, into the heart of the current hybrid era and the direction the sport has taken.
He has been one of the loudest critics of the 2026 engine rules and, earlier this year in Japan, he openly questioned whether it was “worth it” to stay.
What changed?
“Hoping that it will be better in the future. Accepting where we are at the moment. Still the love for the sport. Not at the moment the driving. But the love for the sport.
“I love competition, naturally. I just hope that in the coming years, towards 2030, it can only get better. And to start to make the best of it, because these are the rules for the next four or five years.”
He wants people to understand why drivers have pushed back against the current power units and battery management.
“In the history of the sport, normally the driver that is the most committed, the latest on the brakes, earlier on throttle, committing in the high speed, they get rewarded,” he says.
“But now you’re constantly thinking about, ‘In this corner I might have to hold in a bit. Go later on throttle. Or brake earlier. Or lift off. And then I have more top speed.’ Stuff like that. It’s so unnatural. It’s so not how it should be.”
Then he delivers one of the most damning assessments you will hear from a top driver about modern F1 machinery.
“No disrespect. And I hope no-one picks up on this. But look at Yuki. He jumps in the Racing Bulls car at the Dutch Grand Prix. Never driven the car before. Immediately competitive.
“Liam Lawson jumps from the Racing Bulls to the Red Bull – immediately competitive. It’s because these cars are numb to your driver inputs.
“Of course, yes, you still have to do a good lap. And you still have to commit. The fastest drivers will always come out on top. But it’s really, really limited, like a choke hold or something. You’re held back.”
F1 has already accepted it needs to rebalance the internal combustion engine and electric power by 2028, moving to a 60-40 split. Verstappen wants the next big reset, around 2030, to go much further.
“It has to go back to a V8, just for drivability already,” he says. “When you drive the old cars, you cannot imagine the difference in how the engine responds, or the drivability you get. And how terrible or horrible it actually is now compared to just having a V8.”
Even the previous turbo-hybrid era doesn’t escape.
“Also horrible, the feeling compared to a V8. The V8 is so much better. It is so much more free, lighter. Cars are so heavy nowadays.
“It is better to just have a smaller V8 engine, much lighter. Try to really limit the battery size to maybe like a kind of push-to-pass battery. But you should not have it involved or any kind of proper normal performance running.”
And yes, in his ideal world, the turbo goes too.
“Ideally not, because that introduces turbo lag.”
What he craves is emotion – the visceral hit that hooked him as a child.
“I have been lucky that the years before have been quite decent,” he says of his results. “Not how I wanted it to be with the battery side of things.
“But just the emotion of the V8, of the V10, back in the day, when I was a kid. You walk around, you hear these cars go out, you have goosebumps.
“Even if you go 300km/h compared to now sometimes 350, 360, it doesn’t matter.
“It is the emotion of the noise that you get from these cars, of the vibration. It is just another level. And I really hope that that thing will come back.”
The “winning machine” who refuses to play politics
From the outside, Verstappen can look like a cold, relentless points-gathering machine. Inside, the picture is more nuanced.
“I am a winning machine when I need to be,” he says. “But I can also switch off, and enjoy my life outside of racing.”
The standards, though, never drop when the visor goes down.
“Anything racing-related, of course I am a winning machine. I demand a lot from the people in the team. They also expect me to perform and do the best job I can.
“That is what you get paid for at the end of the day. We have the same target. The same goal.”
He knows he can be “very outspoken”. He prefers it that way.
“That is what I like. That is also with our culture. And that is how I approach my life also outside of F1, with my GT3 team. We do not hold back. At least for me, you need to be like that to really get the best out of everyone.”
So he will keep calling it as he sees it, even if that jars with the political theatre that often surrounds Formula 1.
“I just want to be myself,” he says. “I know there are a lot of politics in Formula 1, and I understand also between the teams there are a lot of politics.
“You will always speak for yourself in terms of where you think you might have an advantage or not as a team. That is normal. Also with the engines and the chassis, it is the same thing.
“When it is good, it is good. When it is bad, it is bad. You will hear it from me because that is how I like to operate. And I am not holding back from that.”
He stands up, gives the fan one last glance, and heads back into the heat of a paddock he no longer dominates, but still shapes. The car is not where he wants it. The rules are not what he believes they should be. The future of the sport, in his eyes, hangs on whether F1 can rediscover its soul.
He has chosen to stay and fight for that. The question now is whether Formula 1 is willing to fight for it too.
