Why 2028 is becoming Max Verstappen’s prime year for an F1 move. If he can wait

Twelve months ago, Max Verstappen waited until the end of July to put a firm end to speculation about his Formula 1 future by publicly stating he would remain at Red Bull.

“I think it’s time to basically stop all the rumors,” Verstappen told reporters at the 2025 Hungarian Grand Prix. “For me, it’s always been quite clear I was staying anyway.”

As clear as it may have been for Verstappen, it wasn’t to the outside world. Red Bull’s form had dwindled through the early part of the year, making thoughts of a championship challenge distant.

There’d been internal change with the departure of long-serving team principal Christian Horner earlier that month. And links between Verstappen and Mercedes were refusing to go away, especially after its team principal, Toto Wolff, hinted at conversations between the two sides about a potential move.

Still, Verstappen chose Hungary to put the rumors to rest prior to the summer break.

One year on, it’s easy to draw parallels heading into the Belgium-Hungary double-header that will lead the 2026 season to its summer break. After Verstappen’s unlikely title tilt in 2025, Red Bull’s form has dipped again and Verstappen admitted to feeling “fed up” with the team’s recent issues, specifically the two rear wing failures in two race weekends across the Austrian and British races.

This time, recurring links between Verstappen and a potential move to a rival team have centered on McLaren. This chatter has persisted despite McLaren Racing CEO, Zak Brown, stating at the British GP his conversation with Verstappen’s management “didn’t go anywhere.”

If anything, the situation now seems even more difficult for Verstappen than in the summer of 2025. He is winless so far this season and sits a lowly seventh in the standings. This position would comfortably trigger an exit clause in his contract that otherwise runs to the end of 2028.

His race engineer and key source of support at Red Bull, GianPiero Lambiase, will join McLaren at a so far unspecified point in the next 18 months. And Verstappen is simply not enjoying the new cars that rely heavily on engine electrical power, which he called “anti-racing” in preseason testing and led to him considering his immediate future on the grid.

The prospect of a four-time world champion being unsettled will naturally attract the attention of rival teams as the driver market starts to gather steam for 2027. And the weeks before and after the summer break are always prime time for ‘silly season’ discussions. This is because teams prefer to have driver deals in place well ahead of a new year, to make plans with their car design staff and marketing teams.

Yet with so few teams having an easily viable route to sign Verstappen for next year, this makes 2028, not 2027, appear the better year for him to assess his options for his next move. Be it signing a new contract with Red Bull or looking elsewhere.

Ever since the Austrian GP weekend last month, McLaren has been at the center of recent speculation after it emerged a conversation took place with Verstappen’s camp.

McLaren is coming off the back of a double title win in 2025, and has created a strong senior management structure that features some previous Red Bull figures — including chief designer Rob Marshall and sporting director Will Courtenay. The upcoming appointment of Lambiase into a senior role only provides more reason why McLaren could appeal to Verstappen.

As for the talks that Verstappen’s camp initiated with McLaren, it’s an understandable move to want to explore future options, much as it is for the team to be open to having that conversation to understand the lay of the land of the market going forward.

It’s similar to the kind of discussions that Wolff alluded to having with Verstappen’s camp last year. Team bosses want to know what the chessboard looks like.

But Brown has been adamant that he’s committed to both Lando Norris, the world champion, and Oscar Piastri, who finished third in the championship last year, for the foreseeable future. Both are under long-term contracts at McLaren, with Brown saying at Silverstone that he has “got my two drivers.”

Verstappen has been linked repeatedly to Mercedes throughout his racing career, and spurned the chance to join its ranks when he was a teenager to join Red Bull and get fast-tracked into F1 for 2015. But, lately, those links have cooled.

In October, George Russell signed a new, multi-year contract that secured his Mercedes future, while Kimi Antonelli, 19, has been a revelation this year, winning five races in a row and taking a commanding championship lead.

He’s had an edge over Russell, who has still won twice and sits only 25 points off the championship lead with 13 races slated to finish the season.

With drivers first and second in the championship, surely satisfying any performance requirements within their contracts too, Wolff and Mercedes have zero need to consider any dramatic driver line-up changes going into next year.

Ferrari is in a similar position. The team announced ahead of June’s Monaco GP that Charles Leclerc had signed a new, multi-year contract, while Lewis Hamilton has stressed he does not need to give thought to opening talks about his own extension due to there being time to run on his existing deal.

More significantly, Hamilton has also rediscovered much of his old magic this year and is currently the most serious non-Mercedes contender for the championship, as he sits 32 points behind Antonelli with Ferrari looking stronger around its recent car upgrades.

It all adds up to seemingly leave Verstappen without a serious alternative to Red Bull at the front of the grid for next year, without some sudden seismic change. That is assuming he even wants to continue to race in F1 with these cars, although the tweaks inbound for next year to slightly reduce the reliance on electrical engine power have seemingly soothed his complaints.

Yet, in another 12 months, that driver market picture could have changed again.

It would take another year out of the various multi-year deals currently in place at the leading teams, perhaps making some more amenable to considering a change. Verstappen would then importantly have gained greater clarity on the pecking order, and know where he’d be best placed to spend the final part of his prime years in F1.

That could be where he is right now. Red Bull proved its ability to develop a seemingly poor car well through the full length of last season, clawing Verstappen back into title contention and coming within two points of a remarkable comeback.

It desperately needs to make that kind of progress again if it is to get back to regularly challenging Mercedes and Ferrari, the current leading teams.

Verstappen’s manager, Raymond Vermeulen, told Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf in an interview last month that although the goal was to “see this adventure through together with Red Bull,” the Dutchman was “not born to compete in the midfield.”

It’s therefore clear that Verstappen wants to be in a car that lets him do what he does best: win.

Max Verstappen and his manager Raymond Vermeulen, right, at the 2026 Australian GP. (Mark Thompson / Getty Images)

So would waiting another year really be satisfactory, biding time to see what doors open? It would be tough for Verstappen to digest, naturally, given his desire to be at the very top.

That motivation isn’t fueled by the need to chase records or statistics, which have never provided Verstappen any fulfillment, but instead it’s about his hunger to be the very best. That is what keeps him going in F1.

Of course Verstappen’s camp will be eager to explore various options for the future to make that happen, given there are now ‘only’ two-and-a-bit years left of the seven years he agreed with Red Bull in his last contract renewal, which was announced in early 2022.

Verstappen’s stock has only risen in that time, as he’s added three more titles after his 2021 breakthrough, putting him in a powerful negotiating position. And the biggest teams would be remiss not to keep an eye on what Verstappen will be doing going forward.

Because Verstappen still carries a spark that no other driver quite replicates. He proved that at his dominant peak in 2023, when he won 19 out of 22 races, and in the harder moments in 2024 and 2025, when he made the difference for Red Bull.

And whether it is for 2027, 2028 or well beyond, no driver market force is more powerful than the availability of an all-time great. Only when Verstappen shuts that down again, as he did in Hungary last year, will it stop being such a focus point for the paddock this season.