Max Verstappen has his eyes on the prize at F1 Melbourne
He is the pre-eminent driver of his generation, already considered an all-time great by many. We meet the father-to-be ahead of Formula One powering into Melbourne next week.
A billion pounds is a lot of money in anyone’s language – indeed it’s nudging two billion in ours – and yet that’s how much is reportedly being dangled in front of Formula One driver, and four-time world champion, Max Verstappen, like a particularly shiny and tempting carrot.
But how can he be worth that much, I hear you splutter? Sure, you can’t manage a 160km/h baseball pitch, or nail most of your shots from behind the three-point arc in the NBA, but most of us can drive a car. He’s just got to sit there, right? One steering wheel, two pedals, and $2 billion?
Here’s the thing, you quite simply could not physically drive a Formula One car, let alone race one. It’s not just the speed – hitting 200km/h from a standing start in four seconds before maxing out at 375km/h – it’s the physical punishment.
To drive his Oracle Red Bull race car, Verstappen has to literally lie down, as if he’s in a particularly fast bathtub, with the pedals where the taps would be. While the G-forces, which can exceed six times gravity under braking, apply brutal pressure to his whole body, during long corners his head is out there in the rushing air, pulling five Gs, which means it effectively weighs approximately 25 kilograms, or the same as an eight-year-old boy.
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This is why Formula One drivers have necks like sequoia trunks. When Lewis Hamilton started racing he had a 14-inch collar; it’s now 18 inches.
That notional bath that Verstappen is in is also full of very hot water, because his carbon-fibre sarcophagus can reach 50°C (at one scorching event in Qatar in 2023, drivers reported vomiting in their helmets from the heat) and during the course of the race he can lose as much as five per cent of his body weight in fluids. That loss also affects mental function, according to Formula One experts, with each kilogram you sweat costing you, temporarily, as much as 10 per cent of your brain power.
Which brings us to that steering wheel, which is not only covered in two dozen buttons also but features dials that allow the drivers to shift the brake balance in and out of the corners they are approaching at more than 300km/hour.
Verstappen, 27, describes it as being, “Like a rollercoaster that shoots off, but faster than you think, whilst having a steering wheel in your hands with all the buttons,” before mentioning that “the weather conditions massively affect driving the car”. His vehicle has more than 1000 horsepower, but no traction control at all other than his right foot, so in the rain it’s like strapping a whirring chainsaw to each boot and attempting to ice skate.
“Of course, it would be nice if the weather was always good, but that is what makes F1 exciting and fun as a driver: to adapt and push to the limits,” he explains following the shoot, captured at The Maybourne Riviera hotel above his home in Monaco. “It can be tough to train for such extreme conditions, especially for a race like Qatar a few years ago, but it is definitely something you try to get used to.”
I was once unfortunate enough to be a passenger in a Formula One car for a few laps of the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne, where this year’s season will kick off with the Formula 1 Louis Vuitton Australian Grand Prix 2025 from March 13 to 16 (and where Verstappen became the youngest F1 debutant ever, aged 17, at his first race in 2015).
The G-forces in the middle of a long corner felt like I was being hit hard, sideways, by an angry rhinoceros and I seriously thought about taking my finger off the Dead Man’s Button they make you hold; because if you pass out you will let go and that will notify the driver to slow down. Staying conscious is tough; thinking about actual racing and tactics on top of that sounds impossible. I was unwell for hours afterwards.
Verstappen’s job, then, is not easy, but he’s already been well compensated for risking life and limb, with an estimated net worth north of $300 million. Last year he bought himself a $22 million superyacht, and he recently added a new $80 million private jet to his collection of toys.
Fortunately, he doesn’t have to buy his own watches, courtesy of being a friend of TAG Heuer, adding that he wears his statement timepiece, a TAG Heuer Monaco, “both on and away from track”.
“Of course, it would be nice if the weather was always good but that is what makes F1 exciting and fun as a driver: to adapt and push to the limits.” – Max Verstappen
“It is customised with my name and has the years of my first three championships engraved, which is extra special. They are engraving the fourth at the moment,” adds Verstappen who is expecting a child with his partner, Brazilian model Kelly Piquet.
Antoine Pin, chief executive of TAG Heuer, recognises the synergies between driver and brand, but also what it takes to achieve a champion’s mindset such as Verstappen’s.
“[TAG Heuer] has been with Formula One for almost 60 years now … because from the very beginning, Jack Heuer [the last member of the brand’s founding Swiss family to manage the manufacture] realised this intensity. These Formula One drivers, they are the knights of modern times in a way. They’re going for fight, they’re going in duels, they’re ready to face death.”
And so, we come to what makes Verstappen so special that a rival team, Aston Martin, is reportedly negotiating a $2 billion deal to lure him away from Oracle Red Bull for the 2026 season. It sounds fantastical, except that Aston already poached Red Bull’s brilliant race-car designer Adrian Newey who – alongside charismatic team boss and Mr Ginger Spice, Christian Horner – engineered much of his success and is paying him a rumoured $60 million a year.
Formula One cars are ground-bound fighter jets – they have so much downforce that they could drive upside down on the roof of a tunnel above a certain speed – which means designing them to maximise the flow of air, and thus their speed, is vital. Which is one of the things that will make this year’s season so interesting.
With Newey gone, and thus the chance his Red Bull will not be the fastest car on the grid, will Verstappen be able to maintain the utter dominance that has seen him win the past four Formula One World Drivers’ Championships?
What is undeniable is that he is the driver of his generation, and some would suggest he is already an all-time great, but his seemingly unrelenting will to win has been known to tip over into conflict. In boxing terms, Verstappen is a combination of Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, or to put it in more local parlance, he’s the Tony Lockett of Formula One – fantastically talented, but likely to flatten you if you annoy him.
His fans, which include much of his native Holland, would say he simply hates being overtaken and will go a lot further than most drivers to stop it from happening. In last year’s Mexican Grand Prix he was hit with two penalties after tangling with McLaren driver Lando Norris (the teammate of Aussie hopeful Oscar Piastri, who nine-time Formula One Grand Prix winner Mark Webber describes as our best chance in decades of being a world champion).
Norris went so far as to call Verstappen “dangerous” after the race, former world champion Damon Hill accused him of driving like Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races, and respected commentator Martin Brundle also lashed out.
“I know that Max doesn’t care what anybody thinks, but it saddens me when he drives like that,” Brundle said. “He’s a multiple champion, has more driving talent in his little finger than most of us ever had, but his legacy will be tainted by this sporting attitude, and that’s a shame.”
A few races later, Verstappen reportedly had a fiery encounter out of the car with another rival, Mercedes driver George Russell, who said the champion threatened to deliberately crash into him and to “put me on my f***ing head in the wall”. Verstappen’s response to the ensuing media firestorm was to tell Dutch television that Russell could “get lost” and that “I meant everything I said”.
Despite this, Norris has previously described Verstappen – often seen sharing private jets between races with other drivers – as a good friend. “Of course, at times it can get a bit tense on track but off the track, that shouldn’t matter at the end of the day,” Verstappen explains. “I have good relationships with the drivers on the grid. We always try to do the best we can on track to get the best possible result, but the main thing is that we can talk about it afterwards.”
If you want to win in Formula One, you need the best – and perhaps the most ruthless – driver. And clearly Aston Martin wants to win, but $2 billion still sounds like a lot until you consider the global financial clout of the sport. Formula One received a huge boost from the success of brilliant Netflix series, Drive to Survive, which turned each season since 2019 into a highly watchable sporting soap opera (Verstappen refuses to take part in the show directly, and won’t answer questions about it). The ratings hit has driven the popularity of F1 in the US – which had previously been the one global holdout – through the roof and led to the adding of two new American races, in Miami and Las Vegas, to the circuit. It also drove an increase in income from the many acres of advertising splashed all over the cars and the drivers. As of this year, the Formula One Group has a market cap of $39.6 billion, an impressive rise from when the sport was bought by Liberty Media in 2014 for $7.3 billion.
With new drivers on the grid this year, including Australian Jack Doohan, the son of motorcycling legend Mick, and New Zealand’s Liam Lawson, there will be thrills and spills aplenty. But one driver remains the hot favourite and the hot-headed man to beat. Put your billions on Max Verstappen.
This story is from the March issue of WISH.
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