Hot-housed by his father, Jos, Red Bull’s Flying Dutchman is accelerating towards becoming the greatest (and richest) Formula One driver in history. Can anyone catch him?
In 2016 Max Verstappen pulled off an audacious blocking move at 200mph (320km/h) on the Kemmel Straight at Spa, the notoriously dangerous Belgian racing circuit. Looking on, a normally taciturn Niki Lauda, the veteran former Formula One driver, said incredulously: “He needs to see a psychiatrist.” To which Verstappen responded: “If I go, we might as well go together.”
According to Ernest Hemingway, only mountaineering, bullfighting and motor racing are real sports. Other sports, where it’s less likely you could die, are just games. Hemingway would have regarded Max Verstappen as one of the greatest sportsmen of all time. Or the craziest.
“You need to have a bit of sense of humour, right?” motorsport’s bad boy says as he arrives at Freddy’s, a canalside bar in Amsterdam. “The older generation of drivers, they’re quite outspoken and straightforward, but I like that because that’s how I am as well. I speak my mind. When somebody says something to me, I’ll say something back to him.”
Not holding back sums up Verstappen’s approach on the track. No driver has made such an impact in so short a time as the three-time world champion. Just 17 years and 166 days old when his car roared away from the grid at Melbourne, Australia, he became the youngest driver to compete in F1. (F1′s controlling body brought in the “Verstappen rule” soon after, raising drivers’ minimum age to 18 to stop them skipping steps on the junior racing ladder.)
In 2016 in Barcelona, aged 18, he won his first grand prix, the first Dutch driver to do so. His first championship was clinched on a dramatic last lap in Abu Dhabi in 2021, when he was 24. And he swept the board in the 2023 season, winning a record-breaking 19 of the 22 races, including 10 in a row.
He’s paid a reported £40 million ($83 million) a year by Red Bull Racing — plus performance bonuses. When I ask the 26-year-old if he can confirm this figure, he says with a grin: “Maybe. I’m not sure.” His contract runs until 2028, generous by the short-term standards of F1. What happens after that? “I’m not in a rush to decide. These kinds of things might change in the coming years.”
In sweatshirt and slacks, he looks relaxed and tanned, having flown from his Monaco home in his Dassault 900E jet, which was previously owned by Richard Branson. He moved to the low-tax enclave when he was 18, just after his first F1 race win.
He has the look of a young Steve McQueen around his cool blue eyes. When he is serious he purses his lips, but when he’s at ease his face breaks into an easy smile. He is 5ft 11in, tall for a racing driver. Folklore has it that he’s so focused on winning he skips meals to limit his weight and to sharpen his senses, but there are no signs of emaciation. Trim but not thin. “It’s true that when I’m at home I don’t eat breakfast. But during a race weekend I do eat a little bit of breakfast. Just a two-egg omelette with some cheese, avocado.” More hipster than hair shirt.
At home in Monaco’s Fontvieille district he has a gymnasium for daily strengthening exercises, though he tries to avoid adding muscle mass. It’s all so wholesome that the Dutch brewer Heineken has hired him as the ambassador for its nonalcoholic 0.0 lager (slogan: “When you drive, never drink”). Lewis Hamilton has his own booze-free drink too, called Almave. It’s a far cry from the days when F1 cars were plastered with adverts for whisky and fags, and James Hunt, world champion in 1976, glugged champagne and chain-smoked Marlboros.
Verstappen’s £13.4 million ($27.8 million) apartment looks across the yacht-filled harbour to the Mediterranean. “I don’t own it, I only rent it,” he says, acknowledging that nothing in F1 is permanent. In spare moments he jet-skis and drives his enviable collection of cars, which includes a £2.5 million ($5.1 million) Aston Martin Valkyrie and a £145,000 ($301,000) NSX, a gift from Honda, the engine manufacturer for his Red Bull team.
He shares his home with the Brazilian model Kelly Piquet, his 35-year-old girlfriend, and her four-year-old daughter, Penelope. The couple have two cats, Jimmy and Sassy, named after two Monaco nightspots — “brother and sister”, he explains. Piquet, the daughter of the three-time world champion Nelson Piquet, with 1.4 million of her own followers on Instagram, has described Verstappen as her “arm accessory”, pre-empting any comments suggesting the opposite.
The couple got together in 2021 after Piquet split up with the Russian driver Daniil Kvyat, who is father to Penelope. “I’m not the father, that’s not the aim,” Verstappen told Time magazine. “It’s always very important that she has a good relationship with her own father, which she has. But I see her every day when I’m at home. We get on very well. She’s very cute.”
If there’s a gene for speed, Verstappen surely has it. The young Max was in an electric off-roader by two, a petrol-powered go-kart by four and was racing on a full-sized circuit by seven. His mother, Sophie Kumpen, is Belgian, but he prefers to compete using the Dutch nationality of his father. Jos “the Boss” Verstappen, 51, was also an F1 driver. He grew up in a mobile home in Montfort, near the Belgian border, and as a youth salvaged wrecked cars at his grandfather’s scrapyard and raced them. Later Jos excelled in F3, the third-tier series, and won podium places in F1 but found himself overshadowed by an exceptionally quick teammate in the Benetton team. His name was Michael Schumacher.
His mother was one of the best kart racers in the world as a teenager, competing against Jenson Button, who went on to win the 2009 F1 world championship, and Christian Horner, now the team principal at Red Bull Racing — Max’s boss. “She was very good,” Verstappen has said, “but then she got married to my dad.”
“I think you definitely need this kind of natural ability and talent for racing,” Verstappen says. “But of course it will not bring you all the way to the top. I owe a lot, of course, to my dad. But I think when I grew up it was not so much that I was, like, ‘I want to do what my dad is doing.’ It was just I grew up in that environment where I was always at the racetrack because of my dad.”
The racing father begets racing son theme is a familiar one in motorsport: Graham and Damon Hill, Nelson Piquet and Nelson Jr, Michael and Mick Schumacher, Gilles and Jacques Villeneuve. In Verstappen’s case the relationship may have been even closer, or possibly more controlling. His parents split when he was nine. It was an upsetting time and he went to live with his father while his younger sister, Victoria, was raised by his mother. In the years that followed Jos devoted himself full-time to making his first-born a champion. Possibly trying to shake off his own troubled past — which included being sued for assault after a quarrel with another man at a racetrack in 1998 — he became young Max’s coach, mechanic, chauffeur and sponsor. Verstappen recalls his father driving him in a van to countless karting competitions at circuits across Europe. Verstappen estimates they covered more than 80,560km a year.
In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that experts in any skill must practise for 10,000 hours to achieve excellence. “It’s not enough,” Verstappen says. “I didn’t count [the hours] but it was way more than 10,000, for sure. It’s also that you grow as a person. It’s not like you say, ‘I need to do 20,000 hours,’ because you might learn a lot at 15,000 or 35,000. There are moments in your career that make you realise stuff or make you a better driver.”
Once, in 2012, when father and son argued over a mistake that cost Max a karting championship, Jos abandoned him at a service station near Naples. He later relented and went back to collect him, but the rest of the 17-hour journey home was spent in silence. Years later Jos justified his strictness, saying: “Losing has to hurt.”
Verstappen won’t say at what age the student finally overtook his teacher, diplomatically saying that “the balance shifted over time”. Asked who his racing idols are, he cites only Jos.
“I still played and had a lot of fun, but I also needed to understand that what we were doing was serious,” he has said. For a while he was home schooled with a private tutor. He claims to have fully read only two books. One is Aussie Grit: My Formula One Journey by Mark Webber, the former Red Bull driver. The other is the autobiography of Johan Cruyff, the Dutch footballer and manager. Cruyff visited Verstappen before the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona in 2016. This turned out to be Verstappen’s first grand prix win and Cruyff’s last public appearance before he died later that year of lung cancer, aged 68. “We knew he was very sick,” Verstappen said later. “I think he was very proud to have a Dutchman in F1.”
When Verstappen moved to Monaco, out of his father’s shadow for the first time, Jos lamented the hole in his life. “I have always put everything aside for Max’s career,” he says in Unstoppable, a 2023 biography of Verstappen by the journalist Mark Hughes. “[When] he departed to Monaco then you lose something and I do find that difficult.”
Verstappen’s “go for broke” racing style has breathed life back into Formula One. Netflix’s hit documentary series Drive to Survive, which launched in 2019, has also played a big part. Viewers aged 16 to 35, including more females, account for three quarters of F1′s recent growth. Subscribers to F1′s YouTube channel have risen more than 3,000 per cent to 9.6 million since 2017, with revenue for the sport up 44 per cent to £2 billion ($4.1 billion) over the same period. The official F1 TikTok account now has 7.7 million followers and the F1 hashtag has had 88.4 billion views. More than 100 million viewers watched the new kid on the block win his first driver’s championship in 2021, flying past Lewis Hamilton on a controversial last lap in Abu Dhabi. (Hamilton has not won a race since.)
There are plenty who don’t like what Verstappen gets up to on the track, though. Kimi Raikkonen, the Finnish driver whom Verstappen carved up at Spa in 2016, is in no doubt. “[Verstappen’s] only interest was in pushing me off the circuit completely,” he fumed. Hamilton, 39, agrees. “I’ve avoided collisions on so many occasions with the guy,” he said. When Verstappen and the seven-time world champion slammed into each other at Monza in 2021, forcing both drivers out of the race, rivalry spilt over into outright hostility. At one point, appearing to forget his intercom was broadcasting to the world, Hamilton yelled, “This guy’s f***ing crazy, man.”
Verstappen insists, a bit unconvincingly, that any friction with Hamilton is not personal. “I don’t need that kind of rivalry,” he says. “Of course we want to beat each other, but honestly, once we’re in a private setting it’s like just normal guys.”
Jenson Button, winner of 15 grands prix, has said he has never seen anything quite like Verstappen’s talent: “I think he is the fastest driver that has ever driven an F1 car. I really do. I think he is unbelievably fast.” Oscar Piastri, the Australian McLaren driver and Verstappen’s rival in the current series, said: “It’s a very different feeling when you’ve got Max Verstappen in a Red Bull behind you because you know it’s going to be a matter of when he comes past you, not if.”
Yet reckless drivers seldom last long in F1 — certainly not the nine seasons Verstappen has already been racing. Does he think about the risks when he’s reaching speeds of up to 230mph (370km/h)? “I’m aware of the dangers,” he says. “But I try not to think about that too much. You cannot be afraid in a car. If you’re afraid in a racing car, it’s just not going to work out.” He looks genuinely puzzled when I ask if he feels fear. “I don’t really like snakes,” he says. “You wouldn’t see me putting a snake around me just for fun. Big hairy spiders, I really don’t like. Sharks, I don’t like sharks. So you won’t see me swimming two kilometres or whatever off the coast in certain countries.”
He certainly shows no fear when speaking his mind. He was admonished for comments about the razzmatazz surrounding the Las Vegas Grand Prix in November, where drivers were paraded on stage and Kylie Minogue performed in a racing suit. “For me, you can skip this,” Verstappen told reporters. “We are just standing up there, looking like a clown.” Verstappen easily won the race. “I guess they [F1 bosses] still make money if I like it or not, so it’s not up to me. But I’m also not going to fake it, I just always voice my opinion on positive things and negative things. That’s just how I am.”
Amazingly Verstappen was haring round an F1 track before actually having a regular road licence. So in 2015, having just turned 18, he flew straight from the Japanese Grand Prix to sit his test in Belgium — in an Opel. He raced off through traffic in characteristic style and immediately incurred a penalty. “The examiner told me to go right and I went left,” Verstappen says defiantly. “Then I didn’t give way [to pedestrians at a crossing]. He was not very happy. I argued with him because I thought they were not actually at the crossing. So I was, like, “But they’re not there yet, so why should I stop?”
And he still passed? “I did, yeah, luckily. It would be quite embarrassing if I hadn’t. I think he was nice to me.”
Possibly the examiner didn’t want to incur the wrath of the Orange Army. Verstappen’s entourage of fiercely loyal fans have emerged as a phenomenon in their own right as they follow their hero from race to race, sometimes filling entire grandstands with a sea of orange. At last year’s Dutch Grand Prix I joined their throng as Verstappen cruised to victory at Zaandvoort. At one point the weather got so bad the race was suspended. The orange-clad supporters shrugged off the rain, singing Verstappen’s name to the tune of Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. Afterwards, in the bars of Amsterdam, there were rousing renditions of Super Max!, a song dedicated to Verstappen by the Dutch band the Pitstop Boys. Tales of Verstappen’s achievements grew more colourful as the — very much alcoholic — beer flowed.
What is it that makes Verstappen so fast? The joke among the Orange Army is that he’s a robot, a racing Frankenstein’s monster combining the rebelliousness of James Hunt, the overtaking genius of Gilles Villeneuve, the daring of Ayrton Senna, the flat-out speed of Jochen Rindt; the mechanical precision of Schumacher.
Sceptics claim it’s more about the car than the driver. It’s true that Red Bull’s car, the RB19, seems quicker than its rivals, and Verstappen’s teammate, the Mexican Sergio Perez, did finish second behind him in the 2023 driver’s championship. But could any other driver drive it like Verstappen? Alex Albon, a Thai-British driver who raced alongside him for a season and a half between 2019 and 2021, said the Red Bull car was set up to suit Verstappen’s style. Albon compared driving the RB19 to playing a computer game. Steering in the Red Bull car was so sensitive “that if you blew on the wheel the car would turn”.
Indeed, Verstappen may be the first of a new generation of driver who has succeeded in blending the skills required for computer gaming with real-life racing — as a boy he used to play his PlayStation in the back of the van on his long drives with Jos. Alongside the gym in his Monaco apartment is a racing simulator rig, a sort of mock-up F1 cockpit. He runs his own esports team, Team Redline, which uses the popular F1 game made by EA Sports, one of his sponsors. Straight after our interview he will compete in Player 0.0, an international e-racing tournament sponsored by Heineken — managing only a third-place finish. “I have a lot of passion for it and also I want to see these sim racers come through the ranks and hopefully one day get into the real world of racing.
“I have a stat somewhere showing how many people race as me in the game, which is quite cool,” he says, proudly. (There have been 832,000 race wins in F1 23 by “Max Verstappen”.) “It’s something you never think about when you’re a little kid — that one day you will be in a computer game and people will race as you.”
For £79.99 ($16.60) players can buy the F1 game plus the “Max Verstappen race wear pack”, which includes a virtual helmet and suit. Side hustles like this — Verstappen also has deals with the AlphaTauri fashion brand and the streaming service Viaplay — mean modern F1 drivers can make more in a single race than James Hunt made in a career. Hunt signed on as lead driver for McLaren for US$200,000 ($328,000) and ended up with barely a penny to his name. After retirement he turned his hand to breeding budgerigars.
Will Verstappen’s need for speed continue when the need for cash runs out? Horner, the Red Bull principal, believes his star driver won’t be racing for as long as veterans such as the Spaniard Fernando Alonso, who is still driving for the Aston Martin F1 team at 42. “He probably can’t imagine himself driving for that length of time,” Horner said recently. “I doubt he will. Max knows his own mind. He’s his own person. He has his own strength of character and I think while he’s motivated and committed he’ll continue in F1, but if he loses that motivation I don’t think he would stay around that long. Will he be racing when he’s 42? I very much doubt it.”
After flying home to Monaco he’ll jet to Red Bull Racing’s headquarters in Milton Keynes to check out progress on the new RB20 F1 car, set to be unveiled on February 15. He can’t wait for the start of the new season in Bahrain next month.
Can he maintain his scorching pace? “It cannot always be like this, I know that,” he says cautiously. “The season we’ve had has been probably the best single season performance in F1, in terms of stats and records. So I know that it will be very hard to try and do better than that. I think I just have to manage my expectations from now on. That’s just something that you have to keep telling yourself.”
Is he aiming to overtake Hamilton and Schumacher and reach eight world titles? “If it happens, it happens. But you need to be lucky to be in a great car for a longer period of time. You’re very dependent on the material you have.
“When I won my first title, I said, everything that comes next is a bonus because, realistically, in F1, I’ve achieved everything that I wanted to achieve. Being on the podium, having a pole position, winning a championship. These kinds of things were my dream to achieve in Formula One. From now on, I’m just, yeah, trying to stay on top.”
Written by: Nick Rufford
© The Times of London
