Max Verstappen Mercedes Rumours Refuse to Go Away Despite Red Bull Commitment

The Max Verstappen Mercedes rumours that dominated the second half of 2025 were supposed to have been settled definitively at the Hungarian Grand Prix in late July, when the four-time world champion told gathered media in Budapest that “it’s time to basically stop all the rumours, and for me it’s always been quite clear that I was staying anyway.”



As of mid-March 2026, those rumours have not gone away — they have, if anything, intensified, because the 2026 Formula 1 season has opened with precisely the competitive dynamic that was always going to make them impossible to fully extinguish.



Mercedes claimed a one-two finish at the Australian Grand Prix, the first race of the new regulations era, demonstrating early mastery of the sport’s most sweeping technical overhaul in over a decade.



Red Bull, racing for the first time with their in-house DM01 power unit developed in partnership with Ford, delivered a considerably more difficult weekend, with Verstappen uncharacteristically crashing out of Q1 in qualifying before fighting back through the field to finish sixth.



The gap between those two outcomes — Mercedes on the top step in formation, Verstappen recovering from dead last — is exactly the kind of early-season image that feeds transfer speculation, regardless of what any driver says about loyalty and second families.



Max Verstappen Mercedes Rumours: What the Australian GP Changed and What It Did Not



The Max Verstappen Mercedes rumours gained renewed momentum in the days following Melbourne, with former Ferrari general manager Peter Windsor stating on YouTube that he believes Verstappen could end up at Mercedes for the 2027 season if Red Bull’s struggles with the new regulations persist through the summer.



Windsor posed the scenario plainly: “Suppose Max hasn’t signed anywhere by September, not even with Red Bull. We’ve been talking about this for eighteen months: will Max go to Mercedes?”



The structural basis for those rumours lies in the exit clause understood to be written into Verstappen’s Red Bull contract, which would allow him to leave the Milton Keynes team if he is sitting outside the top three in the drivers’ standings at the summer break.



That clause was not triggered during the 2025 season, but the early signs from 2026 suggest Red Bull’s competitive position may be considerably more fragile than in any of the four championship-winning campaigns that preceded it.



Verstappen himself addressed the question with characteristic honesty after the Australian Grand Prix, speaking to The Times and confirming his intention to stay at Red Bull while acknowledging the broader context of any future decision.



In an earlier BBC Sport interview, he had said: “For me, it’s not only about F1. There’s a lot of things that have to come together for me to make a change. Future roles, stuff like that. If I ever would make a change, of course, it’s a big one for me because this definitely feels like a second family, and that’s not easy to replicate.”



He also admitted, with the same openness: “I’m not going to lie. For sure, there were talks. But at the same time, it was all very friendly and open. Nothing more than that.”



The Mercedes connection in 2026 is not entirely confined to paddock rumour either, because Verstappen’s personal GT racing team, now officially named Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing, will compete in the GT World Challenge Europe this year using a Mercedes-AMG GT3, following a multi-year partnership agreement confirmed in December 2025.



That commercial arrangement is entirely separate from his Formula 1 contract and carries no implication about his plans at Red Bull, though the optics of Verstappen’s name appearing alongside Mercedes branding in any context keeps the association alive in the public imagination.



Red Bull have navigated the regulation transition with a squad that includes Verstappen alongside Isack Hadjar, and the team remain broadly optimistic that the DM01 engine project with Ford will find its footing as the season develops.



Whether Toto Wolff retains any active interest in bringing Verstappen to Mercedes for 2027 remains unclear, though given Wolff’s sustained and very public pursuit of the Dutchman across 2024 and 2025, it would require a dramatic shift in character for him to have abandoned the idea entirely after a single discouraging answer in Budapest.



Verstappen is contracted to Red Bull until the end of 2028, and he has reiterated that commitment clearly and on multiple occasions, but in a sport where context changes every two weeks and performance clauses sit quietly in contract documents, the story has a habit of finding new reasons to resurface.
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