The four-time world champion says he isn't going anywhere - but in Shanghai, he made clear that Formula 1 is no longer the only place he's looking for joy
There was a moment in Max Verstappen‘s Thursday press conference ahead of Formula 1’s Chinese Grand Prix that didn’t announce itself as significant.
The four-time champion was asked whether the pleasure he gets from driving is directly related to speed. It’s a reasonable assumption about a driver who operates at the very edge of what a Formula 1 car could do.
“Not really,” Verstappen answered, “because then the pleasure would be still very high here, right, because it’s the highest speed.”
It’s a small but telling distinction in the context of Verstappen’s disillusionment about the new regulations.
Verstappen admits he is not disengaged because his car is slow. He’s disengaged because of something more fundamental, which is the experience of driving and the way the challenge now presents itself to him.
That he can separate those things so cleanly and articulate them so precisely suggests he has spent considerable time thinking about it.
When Verstappen was asked whether he still wants to remain in Formula 1, he was unambiguous.
“I don’t want to leave, really,” he said, while also acknowledging the tension openly: he doesn’t enjoy driving the car right now, but he values the people around him at Red Bull.
What is perhaps the most telling thing about his current stance is that his life doesn’t require Formula 1 at all costs.
He will be competing in the Nürburgring 24 Hours later this year, with the Spa 24 Hours and Le Mans a stated ambition beyond that.
“I think I don’t need to be only a Formula 1 driver,” he said. “I can also do other things. And I don’t want to do them when I’m 40 years old, so now I think this is the perfect age to do it.”
Verstappen will race in the 24 Hours of Nürburgring later this year
Verstappen was careful to frame all of this as addition rather than substitution, but the language he uses to describe his other activities and the contrast with how he describes his Formula 1 situation is telling.
“I’m combining stuff to find other stuff that I find really fun as well,” he said. “I have a lot of distractions at the same time. Positive distractions, I would call it.
“But at the same time, it’s a bit conflicting because I don’t really enjoy driving the car, but I do enjoy working with all the people in the team and from the engine department as well.”
Distractions from what, exactly, goes unasked. The answer, in the current context of his disillusionment, is implicit.
When Verstappen describes what specifically draws him to racing outside Formula 1, he doesn’t reach for the obvious answers about cars or circuits.
“It’s a bit of a different environment as well that you’re in in the paddock,” he said, “Probably a little bit more old-school, less political, which probably I enjoy a bit more. Yeah, I can probably be a bit more myself.”
The specific problem with 2026
Verstappen has made it clear, many times, that the source of dissatisfaction concerns the new regulations and how the driving is not just about pushing the car to the limit but about managing energy and complex systems.
“I wish I had a bit more fun at the moment, of course, here,” he said plainly.
Verstappen said he is in discussions with the FIA and FOM about potential improvements, stopping well short of detailing them publicly, but clear that he hopes to see meaningful change soon, not in some distant regulatory cycle.
“I definitely hope not for the next few years,” he said when asked if the current situation is something he’s resigned to. “I hope already for next year we can already make a decent improvement.”
The nature of that dissatisfaction becomes clearer when Verstappen addresses what driving pleasure actually means to him.
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It is worth being precise about what Verstappen is and isn’t saying, because the temptation when a champion expresses dissatisfaction is to reach for an exit narrative.
He isn’t providing one, but he is doing something almost as significant: describing, with unusual candour for someone in his position, a championship that is no longer his sole source of meaning.
“I’ve been doing this already for a while,” he said, “and I’ve achieved everything that I wanted to achieve.”
The framing of that sentence doesn’t sound like a man who still has unfinished business in Formula 1. It sounds like a man who is there because he still loves racing, still values the people around him, and still hopes the product improves. Not because the championship itself is calling to him with the same urgency it once did.
That shift is not nothing.
Whether Formula 1 addresses it before the “positive distractions” start to feel more essential than the main event is a question that won’t be answered in Shanghai.
But it’s being asked every time Verstappen is more animated talking about a GT car on the Nordschleife than about his prospects for the Chinese Grand Prix.
