For the first time in four long years, Max Verstappen heads to the Formula 1 season opener as the hunter again, rather than the title defender. There may be several question marks lingering over Red Bull’s first foray as a bona fide works team, but 2025 has shown there are none over the prowess of its star asset, who is at the height of his immense powers.
Ronald Vording – Still the most complete driver on the grid
The 2025 season underlined that there was only one driver who could top this ranking. Verstappen said that he received more appreciation from fans last season than during the title-winning years that preceded it.
It is partly linked to the fact that fans like a good underdog story, although Verstappen also single-handedly managed to make life difficult for McLaren until the final race, despite having an inferior car. The Dutchman described it as his best season so far, and that seems a fair assessment.
Verstappen today is the polished version of the raw diamond he was at his F1 debut in 2015. He has always possessed natural speed and showed glimpses of his racecraft back then, for example with the around-the-outside move on Felipe Nasr at Blanchimont.
As Verstappen has gained more experience, he has combined that with improved consistency. The last grand prix in which the Red Bull driver finished outside the points – excluding retirements – was the 2016 Belgian GP. It says a great deal about the regularity that he has demonstrated over the past years and, all things considered, makes him the most complete driver on the current grid.
Stuart Codling – Quality of competition will decide which Max we get
If F1 2026-style were a flat-out contest decided by the ability to drive to the theoretical limit of grip in every corner, Max Verstappen would be much higher on the list – because, all other factors being equal, he’s the consistently quickest driver in F1. And the most burningly competitive.
My reservation concerns how his mindset will cope with racing situations in a formula decided by energy management. In previous years he’s been enraged whenever his power unit starts to ‘clip’. Will the toys come flying out of the pram when he has to waste previous mental bandwidth dealing with the effects of ‘superclipping’?
What with this, and the likely stalemates in terms of straightline speed which are expected to make following and overtaking difficult, the stage is set for more costly losses of temper like his ram-raid on George Russell in Spain last year.
Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Sona Maleterova / Getty Images
Filip Cleeren – Rule him out at your own peril
It doesn’t happen very often that a multiple world champion can bolster his reputation even further by missing out on a title, but 2025 may well have been Verstappen’s finest work yet aboard the RB21. Between our metrics of pace, racecraft and consistency, it is hard to nitpick the Dutchman’s body of work, other than the very rare moment of red mist.
Verstappen’s Red Bull team may well go into 2026 as the fourth-fastest team on paper, but we have seen what the 28-year-old can do in an inferior car as well as a winning one. The positive is that Red Bull Ford Powertrains seems to have done its homework extremely well, and under Laurent Mekies there appears to be a fresh change of direction that proved fertile soil for its late 2025 renaissance.
No, Verstappen doesn’t care very much for these hybrids, and true to form he has made little effort to sugarcoat his opinion. But don’t think for a second that his criticism of the 2026 cars means he won’t somehow find a way to wring every last drop of performance out of it, just like he’s done with every other machine put at his disposal. Rule Verstappen out at your own peril.
How our rating system works
To set the drivers apart, we have taken inspiration from the official F1 game to attribute scores in four different categories, out of a maximum of 100.
- Experience (EXP): An objective score simply based on the driver’s experience level through total race starts
- Racecraft (RAC): The driver’s ability to race wheel to wheel, either to defend a position or pull off a decisive overtake, without landing themselves in trouble with the stewards
- Consistency (CON): The driver’s ability to keep clean, avoid unforced errors while being consistently quick in a race
- Pace (PAC): Reflects a driver’s pace over one lap, largely in relation to their team-mate
- Overall Rating (OVR): The four above categories will be combined into an overall rating, weighted towards Pace.
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Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: motorsport.com
