Max Verstappen Admits to ‘Serious’ Talks With McLaren and Mercedes Before Choosing to Stay at Red Bull

• Max Verstappen has confirmed for the first time that he held serious talks with both McLaren and Mercedes before signing a new Red Bull contract
• The deal, announced ahead of his home race at Zandvoort, extends his stay at Red Bull through the end of 2030
• Verstappen also addressed his ongoing frustration with Formula 1’s hybrid engine rules, which he has previously called “anti-racing”

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For the First Time, Verstappen Admits He Looked Elsewhere

Max Verstappen has confirmed he held serious conversations with both McLaren and Mercedes before putting pen to paper on a new Red Bull deal last month. It is the first time the four-time champion has publicly acknowledged discussing a move with either rival team.

The admission closes off months of speculation that trailed him through the middle of the 2026 season. That speculation had a foundation in fact: his previous contract, scheduled to run until 2028, contained escape clauses that made a switch elsewhere possible. Red Bull’s new deal, announced ahead of Verstappen’s home race at the Dutch Grand Prix, overwrote that agreement with one running through the end of 2030.

Respectful Chats, No Hard Feelings

Asked directly how serious his discussions with McLaren and Mercedes had been, Verstappen did not dodge the question. “Of course, any kind of chat you take seriously,” he said. “They’re all very respectful chats. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

That measured answer fits a driver who has spent his entire career at one team and clearly wanted to present the talks as ordinary business rather than a crisis of loyalty. Verstappen is not saying the interest from elsewhere wasn’t real. He is saying it never came close to shifting his plans.

A Career Built on Staying Put

Verstappen has been with Red Bull for his entire Formula 1 career. The team signed him to a developmental deal in 2014 before handing him a debut with junior outfit Toro Rosso the following season. He memorably won on his first appearance for the senior Red Bull team after replacing Daniil Kvyat at the 2016 Spanish Grand Prix, then spent five seasons chasing the front of the grid before his first championship arrived in 2021. Three more titles followed in a row.

He pointed to that early patience as the reason he chose to sign a new deal rather than test the market this time around. “I felt that staying was, for me, the right choice,” Verstappen said. “You have to follow your heart. I could have run away very early on in my Red Bull career and gone somewhere else to try and win. If you have a little bit of patience, you do end up winning. I feel like that’s my approach now as well.”

It is a pointed answer given where Red Bull currently sits. Verstappen has gone winless through the opening rounds of 2026, a run unlike anything he has produced in years, though he has still collected five podium finishes, including one at Monza, and sits inside the top six of the drivers’ standings. McLaren and Mercedes, by contrast, have spent the year fighting at the front, which is exactly why speculation about Verstappen jumping to either team refused to go away.

Instead he chose to bet on Red Bull rebuilding around him, the same wager he made as a rookie waiting for his first taste of the front row. It is a bet that will not pay off quickly. A car capable of fighting for wins again is not something Red Bull can promise for next season alone, and Verstappen has now tied himself to that rebuild through 2030 regardless of how long it takes.

The Engines He Still Doesn’t Love

Part of the uncertainty around Verstappen’s future had been tied to his open dislike of Formula 1’s new hybrid engine rules, which lean heavily on energy management and deployment rather than pure combustion performance. He has labelled the new formula “anti-racing” and previously compared the feel of the current cars to a video game rather than a race car.

Formula 1 is making adjustments to the engine rules for 2027 and 2028 aimed at reducing how much the power unit leans on the electrical side, and Verstappen is holding out hope those changes bring the driving experience closer to what he wants. “Hoping that it will be better in the future,” he said. “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.”

He was careful to separate his frustration with the current cars from his feelings about the sport itself. “I love competition, naturally,” Verstappen said. “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.”

That single line, “towards 2030,” lines up almost exactly with the length of his new contract. Whatever changes Formula 1 makes to the power unit rules over the next two seasons, Verstappen has committed to being on the grid to feel the difference himself, rather than walking away and finding out secondhand whether the sport he loves comes back to the version he wants to drive.

Committing Through the Rules He Dislikes

That final line is the crux of the situation Verstappen has signed up for. His new contract runs almost exactly across the period in which Formula 1 plans to tweak the engine formula he has criticised all year, which means he will experience both ends of the experiment: the current rules he has struggled to warm to, and whatever comes after 2027 and 2028 if the changes land as intended.

For now, the McLaren and Mercedes conversations remain exactly that: conversations. Verstappen has made clear he does not regret having them, and just as clear that he never seriously considered following through. Red Bull, for all its struggles this year, remains where he wants to be.

What the Admission Changes

Verstappen going public with the talks does not rewrite the story of his 2026 season, but it does confirm what many in the paddock had long assumed: that his contract situation was never as settled as Red Bull liked to present it. The team spent the year fending off questions about his future while quietly aware that rivals were circling, and Verstappen’s own admission now puts that on the record rather than leaving it as paddock rumour.

It also changes how his new deal should be read. This was not a driver with no other options settling for the only offer on the table. Verstappen had genuine interest from two teams currently ahead of Red Bull in the pecking order and chose to stay anyway, which makes his patience argument harder to dismiss as simple loyalty talk. He is gambling four more years of his prime on a team he believes will eventually get back what it has lost.

Both McLaren and Mercedes have obvious reasons to want him. McLaren has built the strongest all-round package on the grid this season and would have offered Verstappen a genuine shot at reclaiming the title he lost last year. Mercedes, meanwhile, has a young championship leader in Kimi Antonelli but has never been shy about pairing its best young talent with proven winners, and a four-time champion walking into their garage would have reshaped the entire driver market overnight. Neither approach got close enough to change his mind.

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Written by

Jack Renn

Jack Renn is an editor at F1 Chronicle and a veteran motorsport journalist with 25 years of experience covering Formula 1 and international motorsport. A member of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS), the global body representing accredited sports journalists, Jack has spent his career reporting from paddocks and press rooms across the F1 calendar. His work spans race analysis, technical insight, and in-depth features, giving readers authoritative coverage grounded in decades of firsthand experience at the highest level of the sport.

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