Is this the year the unthinkable happens? The idea of Max Verstappen joining Mercedes was only ever fanciful last season, but with the big F1 2026 rule changes on the horizon this year could be the moment of truth.
How would Verstappen to Mercedes shake up the F1 2026 driver market? Who would Red Bull pick to replace him? And with Andrea Kimi Antonelli the face of Mercedes’ long-term future, where would Max’s move leave his old sparring partner George Russell?
Step 1: Max Verstappen to Mercedes
Is the empire really crumbling? Or did it just suffer a little wobble in 2024?
The future of Max Verstappen largely hinges upon the answer to that conundrum.
Perhaps the biggest thing Red Bull lost on the day Adrian Newey walked out the door last year was certainty, the confidence that the team would be at the front – or very close to it – no matter what.
Little more than a year after stitching together the most dominant season ever produced, one of the most successful teams in F1 history suddenly have everything to prove all over again under the new technical direction of Pierre Waché.
And the way Red Bull lost their way so dramatically in 2024 does not inspire much confidence that they will reclaim their status as the fastest team come the start of 2025.
That is where things will start to get very interesting.
Although Verstappen is under contract until the end of the F1 2028 season, Christian Horner confirmed to media including PlanetF1.com at last year’s Dutch Grand Prix that the deal contains a “performance element” potentially allowing him to walk away if the team cannot provide a competitive car.
A few months later came a report from a respected British newspaper claiming that this exit clause will allow Verstappen to leave Red Bull if he is lower than third in the Drivers’ standings after a significant portion of the season has been completed in 2025.
If true, that would appear to mirror a clause widely reported to have been included in one of Verstappen’s previous Red Bull contracts.
Of course, the secret to making an astute team switch in F1 – listen up, Fernando – is looking not at who’s the fastest today, but who’s going to be the fastest tomorrow.
And it seems almost accepted wisdom that Mercedes’ preparations for the 2026 regulations are more advanced than most.
Indeed, recently it was even suggested that Merc are secretly quite relieved that customers McLaren and Williams are in better shape these days than when the last major engine changes occurred in 2014.
Why?
Because it means Mercedes won’t completely dominate in 2026 and win every race as they very nearly did back then.
That’s the kind of advantage we’re talking about if a team aces next year’s rules and, in the case of Mercedes, produces an engine strong enough to comfortably conceal any lingering weaknesses in the chassis department – yep, that big.
With that in mind, could Carlos Sainz’s move to Williams – and his preparedness to take such a huge step back for 2025 in the hope of a great leap forward with Mercedes power behind him in 2026 – offer a clue to Verstappen’s future?
Verstappen is convincing when he speaks of his emotional attachment to Red Bull, yet loyalty in sport only ever lasts for as long as the relationship is mutually beneficial.
And do not underestimate the influence of Jos, the only person Max has ever really listened to, in all this either.
Pledging allegiance to a declining Red Bull with an untried and untested engine division, only to go off the edge of a cliff with the team as Sebastian Vettel did after four consecutive titles in 2014, is a time-wasting scenario his father will be actively pushing for Max to avoid at all costs.
Better, Jos will say, to see the fall of Red Bull coming, jump before it arrives and transition seamlessly to the next phase of your quest for world domination – only now in silver, not blue.
Step 2: Lando Norris to Red Bull
And where would Red Bull turn in the event of Verstappen’s departure? Almost certainly to McLaren.
In so many ways Lando Norris – young, fast and urbane – is the most Red Bull driver Red Bull have never had.
And not through a lack of trying, either, considering how often the team have been linked with him over the years (it was rumoured last year that Norris was offered a Red Bull seat at least once in recent times and turned it down).
Oscar Piastri?
Now there’s a Red Bull driver if ever you saw one: a Max clone, frighteningly calm under pressure and getting better all the time as his experience grows.
Even better? Piastri already has a Red Bull link in his manager Mark Webber, who spent the best years of his own F1 career with the team.
Helmut Marko even claimed last year that Webber is “intensively seeking conversations” over a potential move for Piastri.
Yet consider this: if Verstappen deems Red Bull no longer good enough for him, why would Webber be pushing for Piastri to take that seat, knowing from his own experience how crucial Newey was to the team’s success?
Better, surely, to stick with an upwardly mobile McLaren team – still with Mercedes power for 2026, remember – than to take a risk on Red Bull-Ford and all the questions hanging over that operation.
That is why this could be fertile ground for a rash, emotionally driven decision by Norris, which could prove to be his own ‘Daniel Ricciardo to Renault’ moment.
There are more than a few parallels between Norris’s current situation and Ricciardo’s Red Bull career and the way Daniel’s momentum was gradually lost, his results and performances put into some sort of context, soon after Verstappen joined the team in 2016.
Sensing the team’s affections had drifted towards Max, Ricciardo moved to Renault in 2019 in a move he always insisted he did not regret even if the results soon suggested otherwise.
Like Verstappen then, as he enters his third full season in 2025 Piastri could prove even harder to contain for his more established and experienced team-mate.
And everything we know about Norris, his temperament and his personality, suggests he is unlikely to respond well to the friction and moments of adversity inevitable in a title battle involving two drivers from the same team.
He is an emotional person. And emotional people are prone to letting their feelings – think back to the moment Ricciardo accepted Renault’s offer on that famous flight to Los Angeles in the summer of 2018 – affect their decision making.
Even if he officially remains under contract for some years yet, if this season does not start well and he begins to feel unsettled within his current surroundings this could be the year Norris finally answers Red Bull’s calls – at precisely the wrong time for his career.
Norris or Piastri?
Red Bull would be happy with either, possibly even try for both…and end up with Lando.
Step 3: George Russell to McLaren
The great risk of taking on Verstappen as aggressively and as publicly he did at the end of 2024 was that Russell was only setting himself up for a fall.
Unless Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s debut season turns out to be a total crash-a-thon, there is only one driver Verstappen will be replacing at Mercedes and it is the driver whose contract is known to expire at the end of 2025.
A year after their little dance in Qatar and Abu Dhabi, Max will smear the egg all over George’s face as he strolls into a potentially dominant Mercedes for 2026.
Where will that leave Russell? He may just be in luck.
The media will no doubt campaign for Carlos Sainz to return to McLaren in the event of Norris’s departure, urging his old team to bring poor old Carlos back to a race-winning car a year after being squeezed out of Ferrari for Lewis Hamilton.
And few would begrudge him – heavily rumoured to have an escape clause of some description written into his Williams contract – another chance at the front.
But here’s the problem: Sainz will turn 32 towards the end of 2026.
Not too old, not necessarily past his peak and perfectly adequate as a support act to Piastri – but the signing of a driver beyond the age of 30 to replace Norris would be a highly unusual move for a team of McLaren’s stature in these youth-obsessed times.
Russell, a year older than Norris, has not quite received the credit he deserves for the role he played in making Hamilton so uneasy at Mercedes that he saw fit to leave the team he once regarded as an extended family.
And on the few occasions he has had access to a race-winning car on merit at Mercedes – Sakhir 2020, Las Vegas 2024 – he has demonstrated a level of performance not dissimilar to Norris’s peaks.
He will be a victim of circumstance as Max moves to Mercedes, but Russell will find a soft landing at McLaren for 2026.