Max Verstappen Says Zandvoort Crash ‘Could Have Been a Lot Worse’ as His Final Home Race Ends on Lap One

• Max Verstappen crashed out of the Dutch Grand Prix on the opening lap after losing control on a still-damp Turn 14 at Zandvoort
• The Red Bull driver walked away unharmed but says the impact “could have been a lot worse” given how many cars were running close behind him
• The result likely marks the final Dutch Grand Prix of Verstappen’s career, with Zandvoort dropping off next year’s F1 calendar

Max Verstappen’s final home grand prix lasted less than one lap. The four-time world champion lost control of his Red Bull at the banked Turn 14 at Zandvoort, sliding into the outside barriers in front of a packed crowd and triggering a red flag before the Dutch Grand Prix had properly begun.

Verstappen walked away from the wreckage unharmed, but the car was left with a wheel torn off and carbon fibre scattered across the track. He later said the crash “could have been a lot worse,” pointing to the number of cars running close behind him at the time.

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What Caused the Crash

Verstappen was running seventh when he took the inside line through the final corner, a section still carrying moisture from pre-race showers. He explained to Sky Sports F1 what happened in the moment.

“It was of course still quite wet in that corner. As soon as I was going through the corner, I could see a little bit of a dry line coming, and I thought from that point on I could accelerate again, but it suddenly then accelerated a lot,” he said.

“It caught me out, simple as that. I tried to correct it but couldn’t. And then you hit the wall, but it could have been a lot worse because there were a lot of cars behind me as well, but luckily that all went well.”

Asked at the television pen how he felt given the size of the impact, Verstappen said he believed he had caught the SAFER barrier rather than a solid wall.

“Good. I think I still hit the SAFER barrier maybe, potentially. But I think also a more frontal impact with the barrier is actually a bit better than a sideways one, so from that sense all okay,” he said.

A Difficult End to a Difficult Weekend

The crash closed out what Verstappen called a disappointing few days for Red Bull. He had finished sixth in Saturday’s sprint and sat half a second off the pace-setters in both qualifying sessions across the weekend.

“This weekend, of course, was disappointing,” he told formula1.com. “I think disappointing pace, and a disappointing end to the weekend. I think you can sum it up like that.”

Sky Sports F1 pundit Nico Rosberg, the 2016 world champion, broke down the corner that caught Verstappen out.

“It’s wet, dry, it’s a mix of everything. It’s incredibly difficult on slick tyres to drive through this high-speed, fast corner. It’s the hardest thing in the world,” Rosberg said. “Max is clearly tighter than everybody else and when you look more closely it looks like the dry patch is offset about 50 centimetres from the inside. I think he just put a bit too much throttle down and you’re gone. He’s the greatest driver out there, one of the greatest of all time, that just goes to show how difficult it is in these conditions. Probably that was Max’s mistake.”

Red Bull’s Pace Problem

The result followed Red Bull’s most difficult weekend of the season so far. The team had competed at the front across four races in July, picking up three podiums, but arrived at Zandvoort without a major upgrade, bringing only a new front corner to the car.

“If you look on average the whole season we have been fourth fastest, I think this weekend really highlighted that,” Verstappen said. “We’re a little bit behind, we want to be closer. Maybe at the next race in Monza we are, but I don’t know. We’re getting towards the end of the season, you also have to look at next year. I think there are a few things on the car we are looking at that can only be changed next year, to really find a lot more performance.”

Team principal Laurent Mekies admitted there was nowhere to hide from the numbers.

“Performance-wise I think there is nowhere to hide. It was a very difficult weekend. It seems we have made a bit of a step back compared to where we were before the summer break,” he said. “Of course we will never know what the real pace of the car would have been with Max. It’s fair to say session after session it looked more difficult than it was in Budapest or Spa or Austria.”

A Farewell Verstappen Didn’t Want

Lando Norris went on to win the race after the red flag restart, beating Kimi Antonelli and George Russell to the chequered flag and extending Antonelli’s overall championship lead to 59 points. None of it involved the driver the Zandvoort crowd had come to see most.

Zandvoort does not have a contract to host a grand prix beyond this year, meaning this was likely the last Dutch Grand Prix of Verstappen’s career at his home circuit. The crash arrived just days after he agreed to a contract extension that keeps him at Red Bull until at least the end of 2030, ending months of speculation over a possible move away from the team.

Verstappen had hoped to give the tens of thousands of fans who traveled to the North Sea coastal circuit a result to remember him by. Instead, his weekend ended before the first lap was complete, in front of the crowd he has raced for every year of Zandvoort’s return to the calendar, which began in 2021.

The Contract News Still Stood Out

Formula 1 president and chief executive Stefano Domenicali said the timing of Verstappen’s contract extension, announced on the Thursday of the Zandvoort weekend, gave the farewell event something to celebrate even as the race itself ended badly for the Dutchman.

“The news of Max staying at Red Bull for the next few years is a cherry on the cake for this weekend,” Domenicali said. “It’s great news, very proud and happy because Max is a World Champion, a world-class person that has a great personality in the sport, and I cannot see Formula 1 without him.”

Domenicali added that he expects the news to sharpen Red Bull’s focus on closing the performance gap that defined Verstappen’s weekend. “Really very happy that this news now is official and all this talk that has been happening so far will be out of place,” he said. “And now I’m sure that the focus for the team is to be as good as possible to give Max the best car that they can.”

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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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