The question in Thursday’s drivers’ press conference was straightforward: with the FIA having declared a Heat Hazard for the Malaysian Grand Prix, how exactly had Max Verstappen prepared his body for a race where track temperatures could pass 50°C?
Verstappen’s answer was not.
“I think I had four or five months of very intense preparation. Yeah, deep mental preparation of not giving an F…!”
He kept going, deadpan, before easing into something closer to a real reply.
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“It’s hot, but it’s also hot in Monaco and it gets very humid there as well and if you really want it hot, you go into the sauna or a steam room. I do that sometimes. You just need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable, but that’s the case for everyone. It’s hot, sweaty and you need a few more underwears, I guess! But just go with the flow.”
The room laughed. The clip travelled.
A paddock the Dutchman hasn’t seen since 2017
Sepang is back on the calendar for the first time in nine years, slotted in to replace the Bahrain Grand Prix after the conflict in the Middle East forced a last-minute venue switch. For Verstappen, that meant walking into a place he barely remembered.
“I walked into the paddock and I had no idea where I had to go,” he said. “So it’s been a long time.”
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The FIA has declared a Heat Hazard for the weekend, with air temperatures forecast above 31°C, humidity pushing the perceived temperature into the mid-thirties, and rain probabilities of 50% on Friday, 40% on Saturday and 30% on Sunday.
A winless year, but still box office
The humor landed because the context is anything but light. Verstappen sits sixth in the standings after 15 rounds, with 163 points, a little more than half of championship leader Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s 302-point tally. He has not won a race since the 2025 season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, and a first winless year since he joined Red Bull now looks genuinely possible.
He has not pretended otherwise.
“We’re anyway not fighting for the championship, so for us it’s a big learning curve,” he told reporters at Sepang, framing the rest of the year as development work for 2027.
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“It’s true that we are scoring quite a few podiums now, but I want to win.”
He has seven podiums this season, including runner-up finishes in his last two starts in Madrid and Baku. In Azerbaijan he fell short by less than two tenths of a second.
Why fans fell for the clip
The video spread quickly on social platforms and spilled into Reddit threads, where the overriding reaction was affection, not analysis.
“He’s the most relatable guy on the grid and just seems like a regular dude you can grab a beer with,” one fan wrote. Another, in the same thread: “I try to channel some Max at work some days.”
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A third pushed back on the obvious reading. “I know we like to say Max doesn’t care, but he very clearly does.”
That was perhaps the sharpest observation of the lot. Verstappen’s shrug is a performance, not a position. A driver who genuinely did not care would not have been within two tenths of a win in Baku, nor racked up seven podiums in a car his own team concedes is a long way off the Mercedes benchmark.
Lights out at Sepang is on Sunday, 5 October.
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