Two years ago Max Verstappen was the most coveted free agent in Formula 1. Guenther Steiner’s answer to where he goes now, delivered on the Up To Speed podcast in mid-August, is that no top team obviously wants him, and Mercedes least of all.
“At Mercedes, I think they’ve now found the next Max Verstappen. So, maybe they don’t need the real Max Verstappen at the moment,” Steiner told the podcast.
The standings back him up. Verstappen is sixth in the 2026 drivers’ championship on 109 points, without a race win from 11 starts and 110 behind the leader.
That leader is Andrea Kimi Antonelli, the 19-year-old Italian in the other Mercedes. He has 219 points, six wins and six pole positions, including a run of five consecutive victories through the Monaco Grand Prix.
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Nowhere left to trade up
Steiner walked through the top of the grid and ruled it out door by door.
“If Max goes somewhere, obviously he wants to go somewhere which is better than Red Bull, and there are not many teams around better than Red Bull,” he said.
“The seats are filled at Ferrari.”
Only McLaren, in Steiner’s reading, would even meet the standard, and even that route he doubted.
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“McLaren until a few races ago, it’s like, are they really better than Red Bull? Because I think Red Bull has got one advantage. They’ve got their own engine now, which is an advantage,” he said.
“If you have got the works engine, I mean McLaren is doing very well having a Mercedes customer engine. But in the end, [McLaren] would be the only possibility [for Verstappen], and I don’t know if that possibility even exists.”
Antonelli up, Verstappen down
Antonelli is no longer a novice. This is his second season in Formula 1, and the pace has flipped the market Verstappen once dominated. His maiden win came at the Chinese Grand Prix in March, and he followed it with lights-to-flag victories in Japan and Miami, becoming the youngest driver in F1 history to win three consecutive races.
Verstappen is heading the other way. He is on course for his first full winless season as a Red Bull driver, in a car widely reported to be off the pace of the front-runners.
Verstappen is contracted to Red Bull for 2026, and Steiner’s argument is that Mercedes would not have needed him anyway.
The next round is the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort on Sunday, 23 August, the final Dutch Grand Prix on the F1 calendar.
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