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Max Verstappen Confirms He’s Staying at Red Bull for Another Season
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- Max Verstappen Confirms He’s Staying at Red Bull for Another Season
(Rudy Carezzevoli)
Max Verstappen will not be leaving Red Bull after all—at least not until after next year at the earliest.
The four-time Formula 1 world champion said Thursday ahead of this weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix that it was time to "stop all the rumors." Previously, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff had publicly said that he would like Verstappen to drive for him amid some unrest at Red Bull this year, including the firing of its longtime CEO Christian Horner . The saga took on additional legs as Red Bull has struggled this season to compete with the faster McLaren cars and while the team has had trouble finding a reliable teammate for their star driver, with Yuki Tsunoda now occupying that seat .
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Verstappen himself has had little to say about the situation, though it has also been rumored that he's been unhappy as far back as last year, when the now-fired Horner was accused of inappropriate behavior by a Red Bull employee. With Horner now gone, though, perhaps Verstappen is feeling better about continuing.
"It's quite interesting to follow all that and the amount of nice stories that came out of it. But I've never really said anything about it because I was just focused on talking to the team about how we can improve our performance, future ideas for next year as well," Verstappen said in Hungary on Thursday . "But it's time to stop all the rumors, and I've always been quite clear that I was staying anyway. That was also the general feeling in the team because we were always in discussions about what we could do with the car. When you're not interested in staying, then you also stop talking about these kinds of things, and I never did."
Max Verstappen at the Belgian Grand Prix
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There are big regulation changes afoot for Formula 1 in 2026, including a change to the power unit. Red Bull will also start making its own engines for the first time then, which could give Verstappen an extra push in his quest for a fifth Drivers' Championship. But Red Bull also isn't the only team licking its chops for 2026, with Aston Martin and Adrian Newey liking their chances to compete, and McLaren is assumed to be again returning strong. Ferrari and Mercedes will also regroup, while F1 will add an 11th team with Cadillac .
Verstappen's contract runs to 2028 on paper, but for a driver of his stature it is de facto a rolling year-to-year sort of agreement, since any team in the grid would love to have him as a driver and be more than willing to pay for the privilege. That means that next year, whether he likes it or not, there will be more rumors about whether Verstappen is staying at Red Bull, and, in all likelihood, Verstappen might reassess then.
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