Just a few months ago, Max Verstappen was absolutely at the top of his game and in a buoyant mood. Despite missing out on a fifth straight F1 World Championship by a couple of points, he finished 2025 more than happy with the way he had recovered from a bad start to the season. His Red Bull Racing team had worked hard to improve a car that was no match for the McLaren in the first part of the year. As it grew better, he made the most of it—and while he lost out in the title race, he knew that he personally could do no more.
We’re only a couple of races into 2026, and his mood could not be more different.
Verstappen has made clear his dislike of the new breed of cars and the sort of racing they produce, from the very start of testing. And now, on top of that, he knows that the Red Bull RB22 is not competitive—and is so far off where he wants it to be that he doesn’t anticipate a repeat of the dramatic surge to the front that we saw last year. And it’s as much about the car as the new Ford-backed Red Bull power unit, which was always going to have some question marks around it.
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There appeared to be some promise in initial testing, perhaps because everyone had relatively low expectations for the power unit given that the obvious challenge inherent in creating it from scratch. In fact, the package looked decent on its very first day in Barcelona, and despite some hold-ups that cost track mileage both there and in the two subsequent Bahrain sessions, the new power unit seemed to have got off to an encouraging start. However, as teams reached the first race weekend in Melbourne and others began to show their hands, things didn’t look quite as good, notwithstanding an impressive P3 on the grid for team newcomer Isack Hadjar.
Verstappen himself crashed hard at the start of qualifying, seemingly caught out by the sort of power unit-related quirk that has caused a few incidents for various drivers. From his P20 starting slot, he got away badly due to a battery issue. He worked his way up to sixth place at the flag—a respectable gain, but still not where we expect Verstappen to be. Worryingly, Hadjar stopped with a power unit issue.
In China last weekend, the team appeared to lose its way completely. In Friday’s sprint qualifying Verstappen was P11, P9, and P8 across the three sessions, having survived a trip through the gravel. Then in sprint itself, he lost a lot of places with another sluggish start when the power unit again let him down before eventually recovering to P9.
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In main qualifying later that day, he could not do better than P8. Asked for his expectations for the race after that, mhe made his feelings clear: “Not really a lot, to be honest,” he said. “I mean, we changed a lot on the car, and it makes zero difference. So the whole weekend we’ve been off. The car is completely un-driveable. I cannot put a bit of a reference in. Every lap is survival.”
Comparing it with Melbourne, he added, “Maybe on that track, it was a little bit better. Now the balance is really disconnected. I cannot push at all, because the car doesn’t let me. So that’s why also I don’t really feel in control of the car.” Quite an admission from someone who is arguably the greatest driver of his generation.
If he was hoping for better fortune in Sunday’s main race, he was to be disappointed. The absence of the McLarens gave him a boost of two places, but as in the sprint, he didn’t get away well, and he was swallowed up by the field. “I had no battery in Melbourne,” he noted later. “And here, the two problems are the same. I just have no power. When I release the clutch, the engine is not there.”
He was on the fringes of the top six and fighting with the Alpine of Pierre Gasly when he retired with a power unit issue, which team boss Laurent Mekies later described as a “coolant fault.”
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Once again, Verstappen didn’t hold back in his description of the behavior of his car. “It was expected, but again, the start of course was a big problem, the same as yesterday. The rest of the race was, again, the same as yesterday—just a lot of [tire] graining. Can’t push, terrible pace, terrible balance, like yesterday. So yeah, a very bad weekend for us.”
It was a remarkably candid description of where things are at right now at Red Bull. What’s more, he seemed downbeat about the chances of turning things around any time soon. “For me, it’s not a surprise that we are not close to Mercedes or Ferrari or McLaren, but this weekend was particularly bad. I hope we can be, of course, a little bit more competitive.”
“After Japan, of course, we have a few extra weeks to put a bit more performance on the car,” he added. “But at the same time, others also put performance, right? So it’s really not where we want to be. I know everyone is, of course, trying their best, and I think they are as frustrated with it as me within the team.”
It’s been a long time since Verstappen has sounded so completely let down by his car; in the recent past, when he’s not been happy, it was still usually good enough to score a decent chunk of points. This is a different level of disappointment, and it’s compounded by his dislike of the new rules and the racing that they produce.
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“If someone likes this, then you really don’t know what racing is,” he said on Sunday. “It’s not fun at all. It’s playing Mario Kart. This is not racing.”
His views contrast with those of George Russell and Lewis Hamilton, who have at least seen the positive side and have enjoyed the fights at the front of the field. Verstappen insists his take hasn’t been colored by his own competitive situation. “This has nothing to do with racing,” he said. “And I would say the same if I would be winning races, because I care about the racing product. It’s not about being upset with where I am, because I’m actually fighting even more now. So you get to understand what you have to do and what it is about even more. But for me, yes, it’s really a joke.”
One of the biggest names in the sport is unhappy with his day job, while at the same time showing unbridled enthusiasm for his sideline GT efforts at the Nurburgring. The obvious fear now is that sooner or later, he will walk away—and at a time when F1 is working hard to convince the world that all is well with the new regulations, it can ill afford to lose one of its star attractions.
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