With Lewis Hamilton and George Russell locked into new seasons through contract options, the driver market’s biggest “what if” shifts again—this time, the Max Verstappen-to-McLaren rumours look increasingly hollow to those watching how leverage is actually bei
On the surface, Formula 1’s two most coveted seats appear already taken. No slick team announcements. No press releases backed by grip-and-grin photos with the team boss and key sponsors.
The reason is less dramatic and more revealing: no fresh contracts have been signed. Instead, options already written into existing agreements have been exercised. From a legal standpoint, there’s nothing new to announce—just the quiet confirmation of what teams had already planned to secure.
Lewis Hamilton is the clearest example. He held an option in his favour that would guarantee him a third season with Ferrari. The seven-time world champion met the performance clauses set out in the agreement he signed in January 2024, triggering the contract extension automatically.
Mercedes has now gone through the same mechanism with George Russell. After the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona. the Brackley-based team exercised the option in Russell’s contract. securing their partnership through 2027. Russell will therefore contest his sixth season with the Silver Arrows and. for the third consecutive year. will be teamed with Kimi Antonelli.
What’s striking is what didn’t happen. Unlike 12 months ago, Mercedes’ decision to keep Russell was not shaped by Verstappen’s potential availability on the driver market. At the precise moment when circumstances might have encouraged a disruption. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff—who pursued Verstappen for more than a decade—chose not to upset the balance that is currently allowing Mercedes to achieve the best results realistically possible.
The Verstappen rumours don’t just persist—they cycle.
As Mercedes and Russell were finalising the continuation of their partnership. reports began circulating about McLaren’s supposed interest in Verstappen. The story is one the sport knows too well: every time the exit clauses in Verstappen’s contract could allow him to leave Red Bull. rumours inevitably surface linking him with another team.
Sometimes it’s triggered by “Team Max” being seen around the paddock; sometimes it’s linked to quiet words from Dutch media outlets. In recent years, Mercedes had been the team most frequently mentioned. Now, with Brackley seats already filled, the same pantomime has shifted to McLaren.
It’s possible there has been contact. Teams gather information, just as drivers’ managers do, to build a full picture of all available options. And when the name on the table is Verstappen, no team stays indifferent.
McLaren’s Zak Brown summed up the idea with a grin rather than a warning. Speaking to Sky TV, Brown said: “if for some strange reason someone slipped on a banana peel getting out of the [bath] tub, then yeah of course, Max is a four-time world champion.”
Yet for many watching the sport close-up, the “McLaren interest” framing lands with scepticism—not because it’s impossible for conversations to happen, but because the timing looks too convenient for ‘Team Max’ to be anything other than the biggest beneficiary.
That dynamic has repeated itself in the past. During previous rounds of speculation linking Verstappen with Mercedes, media reports strengthened the negotiating position of his manager, Raymond Vermeulen. That push helped him secure increasingly favourable financial terms from Red Bull. and the result was a package described as the healthiest stipend of any F1 driver.
So when the latest reports of McLaren interest surfaced at the perfect moment for ‘Team Max’, it did not feel like progress toward a transfer. It felt like leverage doing what leverage does.
Three weeks before these latest rumblings, Verstappen, his father Jos, along with Vermeulen met in Austria with Chalerm Yoovidhya, Red Bull’s majority shareholder, and Mark Mateschitz, the son of the company’s founder.
In the paddock, the message reads clearly: the Verstappen camp knows it is bargaining from a position others can’t easily match—built on performance, yes, but also on the simple fact that Red Bull cannot afford to lose its leading figure as the sport prepares to judge a new era.
The negotiating leverage now comes not only from what Verstappen continues to deliver on the track. but from the departures that stripped away key figures from the championship-winning era that produced six world titles between 2021 and 2024. Christian Horner, Adrian Newey, and Helmut Marko have all left.
Today, Verstappen is the face of Red Bull far more than anyone else among the group’s more than 1,500 employees. His departure would carry a devastating impact on the credibility of the new technical and sporting project that has emerged after those exits.
That understanding is shared at the top. Red Bull’s senior leadership knows exactly what Verstappen represents, and that’s why it is hard to imagine his next agreement resembling a conventional driver contract. In the paddock there is well-sourced talk that equity in the team is on the table.
If it happens, the deal won’t just be another signature on paper. It would be confirmation of the extraordinary negotiating power a driver has attained—one that allows Verstappen to dictate terms beyond the reach of anyone else in the Formula 1 paddock.
And in the driver market as it stands right now, only Red Bull is portrayed as ready and able to offer him those terms—meaning the McLaren narrative may still be loud, but it doesn’t look like it’s steering anything toward a signed outcome.
George Russell Lewis Hamilton Ferrari Mercedes Kimi Antonelli Max Verstappen McLaren Zak Brown Toto Wolff Red Bull Raymond Vermeulen Chalerm Yoovidhya Mark Mateschitz