Toward the end of Max Verstappen’s first season in Formula 1—a season in which he’d become, at 17, the youngest-ever driver to compete in racing’s top series—he returned home to the north of Belgium to take his road test for his driver’s license. Despite winning in every racing category from seven years old onward, he hadn’t been in much of a hurry to drive normal cars, but it was getting to be a little silly. There was a break in the 2015 schedule, and a tight window to take the test before jetting off to a stretch of races in Asia. “The driving instructor was actually very strict,” he told me recently, before clarifying, “which is very good—it should be like that! And I wasn’t nervous but just a bit like: I really need to pass this test. There was a bit of pressure on it.”
Verstappen ultimately passed but nearly received a fatal infraction when he failed to cede the road. “Yeah, I didn’t give way twice,” he confessed, laughing knowingly.
Verstappen, from earliest racing days, has been known for an aggressiveness that lives—mesmerizingly or maddeningly, depending on where along the paddock one sits—right on the limit. “Max’s best form of defense is attack,” the Red Bull Racing team principal, Christian Horner, likes to say. Verstappen’s lead rival over the past few seasons, the seven--time world champion Lewis Hamilton, has put it slightly differently: “Max is kind of do-or-die. It’s like you’re either crashing or you’re not going by.” In other words: Max is not giving way. Ever. “I think he pushes it to the limit and probably beyond,” Hamilton added.
“I don’t think you can go fast if you have fear inside you,” Verstappen told me last year. And that tactical fearlessness goes a long way toward explaining his competitive edge and recent domination, which includes back-to-back world championships in 2021 and 2022. At 25, he has won more Grand Prix than all but five racers in F1 history and is already comfortably regarded within the company of the best half-dozen or so to have ever done it. Hamilton. Schumacher. Vettel. Prost. Senna. He can win from anywhere on the starting grid—not just the front of the pack. And it is when he is chasing that his proprietary ownership of the racing line is on most ecstatic display. That sense that he is destined to go past you, as though by fate’s decree, has seemingly contributed to a near-pathological certainty that he is never at fault. It can contribute to the impression that Verstappen, Horner, and Red Bull are working the refs and squeezing every last advantage. Which is why it might amuse race fans to learn that despite those infractions at his road test in 2015, Max managed to talk his way out of it.
“I argued that the other people were still far enough away that it wouldn’t have made sense to stop,” he explained, smiling. “And he was like, ‘Okay, I’ll let you get away with it.’ ”
When Max and I met in person recently, it was amid another dizzying stretch of races, of continent-crossing and ocean-spanning. Max, understandably, needed a pick-me-up. We were at the Red Bull Racing headquarters, in Milton Keynes, England, where there are—perhaps obviously, perhaps unbelievably—Red Bulls available by the dozens at all points of the compass. Someone offered Max one, and he accepted, but only if it was “very cold.” That Max Verstappen drinks Red Bull answers the first question in my notebook.
Up close, Max is taller than many drivers (five feet eleven). He stands stock straight, has a face that rests stern and serious. He has insouciant blue eyes and naturally pursed lips that contribute to his rap as a cold-blooded killer. (Very cold.) But he’s also quick to laugh, so long as there’s time for it, which there often isn’t. The 2022 F1 season ran from February to November and included 22 races and approximately 240 hours of air travel for all involved in the global series. Max, who grew up across the border from the Netherlands, has always raced under the Dutch flag, like his father before him, but has lived since his 18th birthday—the day after passing that test for his driver’s license—in Monaco. I spent much of this year tracking his private jet around the map, from Monaco to Milton Keynes to race weekends and back again. The pace is madness.
While on the track or in the garage, while being interviewed in a scrum of beat reporters at a race, or reacting to those who crowd him while strolling through the paddock at any given Grand Prix, Max often appears unfazed by anything and everything that has transpired, whether he’s just won a race, crashed out, or been the source of controversy. He can spark to a fight, but in general seems to have to manually jolt himself to enthusiasm, as though he’s been encouraged to act like he cares about more than his own business. It is another of those obvious aspects of his competitive edge. There is greatness in sports—and then there is terrifying indifference. There are those who reach the summit and are shocked to arrive—and then there are those who regard their arrival as predetermined destiny, hardly worth noting.
Max’s arrival at the summit was validated at the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix—the final race of last season, and a sporting event for which a reported 108 million people tuned in worldwide. The season had been as thrillingly back-and-forth as anything in F1 history, and the rival camps—Red Bull/Horner/Verstappen versus Mercedes/Toto Wolff/Hamilton—had been at each other’s throats all year. Verstappen and Hamilton had crashed with each other on three occasions. And Horner and Wolff had spent seemingly every moment of every press conference for the second half of the season waging PR war against the other, spinning the public narrative, and generally just complaining a lot. It wasn’t particularly sporting on either side, the amount of bitching and moaning. But that was the context into which the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix began, with little moments between Max and Lewis during the race leading one or the other to exclaim over the radio that once again, the stewards (F1’s referees) were always giving the calls to the other guys.
Earlier that summer, at about the one-third mark of the season, I had asked Max about his expectations for the rest of the year. He was sanguine. Despite being the youngest driver to ever win a Grand Prix (at 18, in his debut race with Red Bull), 2021 was the first time he’d had a car that could win a championship. Formula 1 is much more like team sports than it is like individual sports because so much performance is determined by the car that the engineers and mechanics build and maintain in the in-between moments external to a race.
“It’s just a bit more of a satisfying feeling knowing that you go into a race weekend having a good shot at it every single weekend,” Max told me in June 2021. “Hopefully, from this conversation onward, we will win a lot more and end the season on top.”
As the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix unfolded, Hamilton and Mercedes were pulling away with the race, and practically sealing another title—what would have been Hamilton’s record-setting eighth world championship. I recently asked Max if there was ever a point in Abu Dhabi, with 10 laps remaining, 8 laps, 7…that he allowed himself to accept that all was lost. “Yeah, I was like, it might not happen,” he said. “But I just kept on pushing till the end, you know? And even if it wouldn’t have worked out, it would’ve still been an amazing season.”
Of course, what happened next is known by race fans—and probably sports fans alike who have never seen a race. With five laps remaining, another car crashed, causing a mandated slowdown (yellow flag) that brought all the cars much closer together (no passing is allowed under yellow, but drivers can close up the gaps). Without getting into the perplexing and controversial intricacies of what did and didn’t transpire, the race director permitted the race to resume for just one lap, and with Verstappen right behind Hamilton. Verstappen had fresh tires—an advantage in a sprint—and when the race restarted, Verstappen had to make just one pass before the line.
I, like Max, do not show an abundance of enthusiasm during tense sporting moments. But I will never forget springing to my feet and screaming at my television at what I was witnessing. The confusion that led to that moment was like nothing I’ve ever seen in sports. The sudden realization by the teams, then the drivers, then the announcers, then the fans, that this was how this season-long duel was going to settle itself—and then, in roughly 99 seconds, it was finished? It was astonishing. Hamilton spoke for many of the hundred million watching, no doubt, when he said to his team over the radio: “This has been manipulated, man.” Verstappen, meanwhile, let out a cry that sounded like a pure exorcism of the 24 years of total commitment, dedication, torment, and pleasure that had led him to that moment.
“It was all very emotional,” he told me recently. “A lot of things flash back from all the years. I’m not really an emotional guy, but my in lap was pretty emotional.”
After he stopped his car, cut his engine, unbuckled his straps, and removed his steering wheel, Max made a beeline for one person in particular. I asked him if he remembers what his father said to him as he slammed his forehead into his son’s helmet and screamed in his ear.
“Yeah,” he said. “ ‘We did it.’ ”
That “we” is the whole story in many ways, at least this whole story. The “we” began as it does for all fathers and sons, at once, but it welded itself unbreakable the moment Max got into the car.
Jos Verstappen, who raced in Formula 1 between 1994 and 2003, was known as an aggressive driver who made too many mistakes and was often unlucky. He had zero career wins, two podiums. When it came to his firstborn son, the project, from day one, then, was to build a driver with all the upside of that fearless style but with all of the downside, all of the liability, ironed out. Jos was like someone who learned a second language later in life but desired fluency for their child. “After he finished with Formula 1,” Max tells me, “he basically dedicated the rest of his career to make me a better person—and to make me faster than him.”
Max was on a quad bike by two, in a go-kart by four, racing by seven. Between the ages of 7 and 11, Max says, he won 68 or 69 of the 70 races he entered. For all the intensity of that record, it is not wholly uncommon in racing, given that many former drivers lead their kids into the sport and to success in early days. But, I suggest to Max, lots of former drivers try to replicate their success in their children—and none of them become Max Verstappen. Why not? “I think it’s pretty simple,” Max says. “Yes, a lot of drivers have tried to do it. But I think my dad has gone way beyond.”
Ordinarily, he explains, a father would outsource most of the raw work on the kart to a team, while standing by to give encouragement and advice. But when Jos retired from racing, he turned to Max’s go-karting days full-time. He was, Max says, his mechanic, his engine tuner, his chauffeur, and his coach. “A lot of drivers, yes, they were great drivers themselves, but they didn’t really have a lot of knowledge about how to set up a go-kart or how to make an engine,” he says. “They all do their own thing in their own right to try and support their son, and they will always, of course, try to give them their best guidance. But I think our way was way more extreme than others. We did everything ourselves.… We were not dependent on anyone.”
When Max was 12, his parents split, his younger sister going to live with his mom, and Max with his dad, the better to focus on the only thing worth focusing on. Max went to school Monday through Friday, with Jos in their workshop at home from the moment he dropped Max off at school till their time on the track in the afternoons, and often again after dinner till nine or 10 at night, Max says. On weekends, they would pack up a custom Sprinter van, with space for four go-karts, toolboxes, and a bed in the back, and make the long drive from the north of Belgium to southern Europe, most often Italy. Max says it’d be just an hour after school got out on Fridays before they’d be in the van, where he’d pass the time playing PSP or taking in the scenery or nagging his dad, “asking him a million questions—to the extent where he would tell me to shut up,” Max says. A lot of times he’d just sleep in the back. A 10-hour drive overnight, and he’d wake up an hour before arriving in the morning, ready to race. Max estimates they put at least 80,000 kilometers on the odometer each year during those karting seasons in Europe.
At the track, Jos and Max did things a little differently. While the other kids would put in their practice runs and then go off to play, Max says, Jos would call him back to the garage: “I still played and had a lot of fun, but I also needed to understand that it was serious, what we were doing, because we were working toward something. Of course, from 7 to 11 years old it intensified quite a lot, but he wanted me to be there to see what he was doing. Do you see a crack somewhere? Do you see a problem with the go-kart? I’d see him take everything off the go-kart, then put it back on, so I’d understand the mechanics behind it. All these kinds of things that he was trying to explain to me because he wanted me to understand that it’s not a joke, it’s not that we’re here for fun. Because we are working toward trying to reach the top.” That attitude was the difference, Max says, between him and his competitors. “I was just a lot more on it, in terms of just being more professional about it. That definitely came from my dad, because if he wasn’t my dad, I would also be running around, playing, having fun. And I need that kind of push.”
When Max began to attract the attention of teams in Formula 1, the powers that be were drawn to the single-mindedness, the commitment, and the advanced maturity that had been developed in him so young. Helmut Marko, the head of Red Bull’s driver-development program, says that when he meets young drivers, he often spends just 20 or 30 minutes sussing them out. With Max, whom he met at 16, they talked for a couple hours. When I ask Max about that first meeting, he remembers it well. “I’m quite a geek with races. Like, I know a lot about any kind of racing, so that helps a lot to answer questions,” he says. “But my dad had also drilled into me that I needed to know about my sponsors as well: what they do, what they’re involved in, how many employees they have, how many shops.”
That story reminded me of an anecdote that the 23-year-old McLaren driver Lando Norris shared of his first meeting with Marko, in 2016. Norris had just taken pole in a junior series race in Monaco, and Marko invited him onto the Red Bull barge in the Monte Carlo harbor. After bullshitting a little bit, Marko asked Norris if he knew how much his car weighed, and Norris honestly had no idea. “Well, Max would know,” Marko responded, according to Norris. “Max knows everything about the car.”
That Build-A-Bear approach to crafting Formula 1’s greatest driver from scratch is not without complication, of course. Emmanuel Agassi, Earl Woods, Richard Williams, LaVar Ball—these are men who set out to create champions, and overwhelmingly succeeded. And though loved by their children, they are regarded more uncertainly by those outside the cocoon, for the intensity of many of their tactics and the boldness of their dreams.
In that sense, Jos Verstappen is no different. With tremendous commitment and total devotion, he has given his son the opportunity to make a reported $50 million a year driving the most extraordinary race cars on earth, while ascending to the pinnacle of a global sport. But the man at the center of this particular plot has left a choppy wake behind him.
On and off the track, reports have occasionally surfaced of alleged aggression or violence—most notably an incident in 1998 at a karting track in Belgium that left a 45-year-old man with a fractured skull. Jos and his father, Frans, were found guilty of assault, and each was given a five-year suspended jail sentence after reaching an out-of-court settlement with the victim.
Jos was also a passionate and determined manager of Max’s career—and a seriousness of purpose pervaded their relationship during Max’s karting days. It is that context within which sit some of the stories from Max’s teenage years. Like this one, from 2012: Max was 14 for most of the 2012 season, and had moved up into the “shifter” category of karting, the first division with a multi-gear transmission. Jos’s best friend had three boys, two of whom were older than Max, and Jos helped coach the two older boys in part, Max tells me, so that his father would be better prepared for the moment that Max moved up. In 2012, Jos had built the best car, Max says, and it was not really a question of whether Max would win that final race of the season, but by how much. Max had a slow start, and needed to pass the leader, and went after him way too early, way too aggressively, and crashed. “Basically, I fucked up,” he says, reflecting. “I misjudged the place where I wanted to pass the guy in the lead, and—too much risk. I could have waited one more lap, two more laps, and I would’ve passed the guy, and I would’ve just taken off and that would’ve been it. But, yeah. So I crashed. And that was it, no world championship.”
The mistake lingers—and informs his racing to this day. But for Max, the day is just as memorable for what transpired on the ride home. “My dad, he put so much effort into it over the years to that point. So that if I got there it would all be ready to go. And that’s why he was so angry,” he says. In the van, “I kept trying to get into a conversation with him about why I did it and what I thought of the situation. But then at one point he was like, ‘Max, if you don’t shut up now I’m kicking you out.’ And, of course, I didn’t think he would do that. So I kept on talking, trying to talk to him. Next fuel station he stops and he’s like, ‘Get out.’ ” Max chuckles. Then repeats it. “ ‘Get out.’ ” He got out and called his mom, who’d come to Italy for the race, and had left the track after them. But Jos ultimately returned to pick him up. “So we drove 17 hours back home, we didn’t speak. Of course we ate, but no contact. Luckily, he paid for my food, though.”
At home, Max figured they’d return to the routines of Jos in the workshop and Max at school. “But we didn’t speak for, like, a full week,” Max says. “Like, he was so upset with the whole situation, and not talking to me at the same time. I felt terrible, of course, with everything. But in a way it also helped me a lot, because I started maybe to think more about what an outcome of a race can do to you, and how we have to handle a race. You have to be more patient.”
Jos has said that winning came so easily to Max for so long that he really wanted him to feel the pain of losing at times. It had to hurt, Jos has said, to understand the consequences of mistakes. “My dad, of course, kept telling me: ‘It’s going great, but you will lose. It’s not gonna be great forever,’ ” Max tells me. “But it helps a lot later on—like now, in Formula 1. You learn to lose, to give it its place. Because you have to accept that you cannot win every race.”
From that week of silence on, Max says, “I really started to understand the importance of being patient in the race. I think I needed a hard reset at the end of that year to be better the year after.” In 2013, “we won everything.” And there’s really been no turning back.
I begin to change the subject and Max cuts me off. “I mean, it sounds horrible. Like, it sounds a bit horrible. Like, some people probably cannot deal with that kind of behavior, but I needed it. I was that type of character, probably, who needed this kind of treatment.”
I start to shift again, but he stops me to clarify further: “Of course, from the outside it sounds sometimes a bit harsh. But I’m very happy that I had that kind of treatment.”
At one point during my time at the Red Bull factory this fall, Christian Horner burst through a door like the Kool-Aid man and looked around hammily at Max and a film crew. “Sorry, have I crashed into something very serious?” There were big laughs. Vibrations at Red Bull were high frequency with another title in sight.
Horner has said of Max: “He’s still the same guy that turned up at the team as a 16-year-old.” I asked Max what that means to him. “Over the years, you mature a lot,” he said. “But I think the basics stay the same. That will to win. Even when you win a championship, nothing changes.”
Verstappen’s world championship in 2022 was practically a foregone conclusion after it was clear, early in the season, that Red Bull had produced the superior car on the grid under the new regulations. A report in October found Red Bull’s 2021 budget—some of which was used to develop that superior 2022 car—in breach of the cost cap. The FIA ultimately fined RBR $7 million for the overspend, adding credence to the cries from competitors that Red Bull often bends the rules and receives only the lightest wrist slaps. (Red Bull, for its part, accepted the fine—but Horner maintained "not one penny [of the overspend] was spent on performance.")
Regardless, Max and Red Bull were back on top. But neither driver nor team took their domination for granted. “I have achieved everything I wanted in Formula 1,” Max told me. “But now I want to try and do it again and again and again, as long as you can, because you never know how long your car is going to be competitive for, or how long you’re going to be around for.”
While at the Red Bull Racing facility, I was given a tour that at times felt like the one in Jurassic Park, gazing as we were through glass at science guys in white coats who were surreptitiously scheming. A new steering wheel. A carbon-fiber wing. Engineers. Mechanics. Strategists. More than a thousand people in a high-tech office park on the outskirts of a commuter town, working tirelessly and expensively—for what? Glory. That Champagne bath on the other side of the world, in Abu Dhabi last December or Suzuka this October. Hundreds of the best of the best, all rowing in the same direction. It’s pretty inspiring. And rare. In many ways, that sense of purpose and pride articulates the appeal of F1 as much as a screaming engine down a high-speed straight.
At one point at RBR, I watched Max sidle up to Horner and his engineers for what was described to me as a bit of “Max time.” He was buoyant, in his most preferred environment. And it was a vivid reminder that a title for Max is a title for many, many people who are not Max. He is the steward now—of his family, his team, and his sport.
Which is what has made his absence from F1’s most essential marketing tool—the Netflix documentary series Formula 1: Drive to Survive—so palpable. That is, the sport’s ascendant star has been largely missing for the past two seasons from the product that has done more than anything in recent years to juice fandom. On Drive to Survive, most of the drivers are interviewed in regular sit-downs or in constructed scenes at races or at home, where the crew follows them into quasi-real-life situations where the driver and a friend or spouse talk about the state of affairs. But Max opted out after feeling like too many liberties were being taken with fabricated drama.
When we first spoke, in 2021, he told me why. “I understand they want to bring more fans to F1—and it works,” he said. “But a lot of the scenes are literally copy-pasted, even with sentences, things that had been said that I know have not been said at the time. Or, like, shots. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, of course, to get someone who doesn’t understand Formula 1 energetic about it. But if you are a die-hard fan, it’s not realistic.”
The season of the show about 2021, then, has intimate interviews with everyone but the guy who won. (As a creative solution, the season frames the principal rivalry of Horner versus Wolff as the more essential battle—which, admittedly, is frothier. They both love to talk, love to preen and provoke, like the most garrulous politicians.) But this summer, Max and Netflix seemed to reach a détente. When Max and I last spoke, days before he clinched his second world championship, he had just come from a sit-down interview for the show’s new season.
“It’s just good to understand what we both want from each other, right?” he told me. “And I think the interview we did was good, so… I just wanted to keep it real. You know, no fake stuff. No overhyped things. Because that’s not how I am. I just want it to be to the point, and my opinion, and how I see things. Of course, we still need to see the end product, but it all sounds good.”
Max had long been the chosen one. Predestined for greatness. An inevitable multi–world champion. And he held the keys now. He had the leverage to do whatever he wanted—but he also had the responsibility to be this moment’s face of the sport, and to drive the sport forward. “I know it’s important for Formula 1. So we came to an agreement and I’m very happy about that.”
Despite his former frustration with Drive to Survive, Max is a fan of other sports documentaries on Netflix. He likes “to see how other people are operating,” he told me. Not surprisingly, one that resonated was The Last Dance. “Of course, not everything about that is 100 percent true, because it’s a documentary and some things for sure are a bit hyped up,” he said. “But I did like the spirit of Michael Jordan, how he was pushing it, how he was driven to win.”
As delicious as comparisons to Jordan’s competitiveness might be, it would be a mistake to think that Max is looking to emulate anyone else. He grew up in a room, like a lot of kids, with pictures of cars on the wall. He had a life-size cardboard cutout of his dad, from his F1 days. But no posters of other drivers, of heroes: “I never really had someone that I looked up to. Like, ‘I really want to be like this guy’ or whatever. I just wanted to be myself. That works the best.
“If you start copying people, you can only be as good as them,” he said. “You cannot be better.”
Daniel Riley is a GQ correspondent.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December/January 2022 issue of GQ with the title “Mad Max”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Mikael Jansson
Styled by Kate Phelan
Hair by David Harborow at Streeters
Skin by Erin Green at Bryant Artists
Tailoring by Laima Andrijauskaitė
Set design by Samuel Overs at New School
Produced by Samuel Aberg
