Max Verstappen at Mercedes and Carlos Sainz at Red Bull? Possible, perhaps already in 2025, when Lewis Hamilton will get behind the wheel of Ferrari. The 2024 World Championship has just started but the driver market is already going crazy, fueled not only by rumors and indiscretions but also by the declarations of particularly talkative team principals. Toto Wolff, number 1 of Mercedes, does not hide from Fox Sports Australia that Verstappen is a dream of the Silver Arrows: and in the end the marriage with the “extraordinary” Dutch driver, world champion for the last 3 years, “at a certain point has to happen.”
“We have a free seat, the only one in the top teams, unless Max decides to leave. At that point, the seat will no longer be free with us,” says Wolff, clarifying that if Verstappen decides to leave Red Bull early , compared to the contract expiring in 2028, Mercedes would fall on the world champion. Everything, says the team principal, “depends on what Max does”.
“I had seen him in his Formula 3 days and he was excellent. I have a good relationship with his father, we spoke at the time at my house in Vienna and said: ‘What can we do?’. I couldn’t offer him a Formula 3 steering wheel. 1. I told him ‘let’s do Formula 2 together, fully financed. I guarantee you a car next year – explains Wolff -. He told me ‘I have an offer from Red Bull for Toro Rosso now’. It was done, I wouldn’t have could compete” with that proposal. Then “halfway through the following season”, in 2016, Verstappen “conquered the wheel of Red Bull”. The rest is history. For Wolff, signing the world champion would be the closing of a cycle: “It’s a relationship that has to happen at some point, but we don’t know when.”
If Verstappen were to leave Red Bull at the end of the current season, in an unlikely but not impossible scenario, the winged team would have to find a suitable replacement. And Carlos Sainz would also find space on team principal Chris Horner’s agenda. The Spaniard, who gave Ferrari their first victory of the year in Melbourne, knows that in 2025 he will have to find a new team to make way for Hamilton. Can the Iberian suit Red Bull? “Based on a performance like the one in Australia, no possibility can be ruled out,” says Horner, convinced that Sainz “just wants to take his time to decide.”