There’s a headline this week about Max Verstappen that no F1 reporter saw coming six months ago. The four-time defending world champion is seventh in the drivers’ championship. Seventh. He has 26 points. Kimi Antonelli, the 19-year-old who replaced Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes this year, has 100.
Now Verstappen has got Montreal, which historically has not been a track where Red Bull’s problems have been small. They grow up.
The Circuit Gilles Villeneuve is built around long straights, heavy braking zones and a pair of slow chicanes leading to the Wall of Champions. Under the 2026 rules, with new active aero and more demanding energy-deployment systems, each of those features penalizes a car that is weak in power-unit performance or low in harvesting efficiency. It’s a brutal description of where Red Bull currently sits in its first year as a full power unit constructor in partnership with Ford. The team’s DM01 engine, named after Red Bull’s late founder Dietrich Mateschitz, is its first in-house creation.
This is not going well.
Red Bull’s Formula 1 troubles and impact on Verstappen
Red Bull has scored 30 constructors’ points in the first four races. Mercedes has 180. The team’s best finish all season is a fifth place for Verstappen at Miami, where he qualified second, but spun in the opening lap and finished 40 seconds behind the race winner.
“Absolutely not,” Verstappen said in Miami when asked if the spin cost him any victory. “I lagged behind by 40 seconds. A spin is not 40 seconds.”
That’s as honest a self-assessment as you’ll hear from a driver in this sport.
Verstappen has been openly unhappy about the 2026 rules since before the season started. After the Chinese Grand Prix he called it a “joke”. He has compared racing to “Mario Kart”, noting that drivers now have to manage battery deployment, often forcing them to straighten up and coast. He has said he wants F1 to make “significant” changes for 2027. And Verstappen has openly told Dutch outlet Viaplay that he needs the next several weeks and months to figure out what he really wants from the rest of his career. He has a release clause in his Red Bull contract that is activated if he falls outside the top two in the standings after the Hungarian Grand Prix at the end of July, and given where he is now, the math says he will have to make a decision.
Is Verstappen focused on F1 or other interests?
This is why he keeps wandering towards other forms of racing. Last weekend, Max Verstappen made his Nurburgring 24 Hours debut in a Mercedes-AMG GT3, and was leading the race with a few hours remaining, before a driveshaft failure took his team out of contention. He has talked about Le Mans. He talked about NASCAR. He hasn’t said he’s excited to drive the RB22 around Montreal.
Verstappen is the closest thing to generational dominance the sport has had since the Schumacher years. He has 71 Grand Prix wins, the third most in F1 history. They won four consecutive World Championships from 2021 to 2024. If he leaves the sport or continues to struggle until 2026, the entire competitive shape of F1 changes. “The next Schumacher” the legend goes. The “Verstappen vs. the field” story fades away. What you are seeing now, the rise of Antonelli, the resurgence of Mercedes, the McLaren title defence, is a game between changing eras in real time.
Montreal is where you find out how much of it is real and how much is a bad Red Bull car.
Montreal and Verstappen’s history there
Verstappen has been very good at this track recently. He won here three consecutive times from 2022 to 2024, becoming the third driver to do so after Hamilton and Michael Schumacher. He likes the rhythm of the circuit. He likes the way he punishes other drivers’ mistakes. In years when his car hasn’t been at its absolute best, Montreal has historically been a place where he can deal with the problem.
But the rules of 2026 changed the mathematics. Energy deployment matters more here than at most tracks on the calendar. The new Straight Mode aerodynamic system, which essentially flattens the wings on long straights, rewards cars that can put down clean power through deployment zones. The Red Bull is not one of those cars right now. By the admission of their own engineers, there is a chassis problem at the top of the engine learning curve. The car is heavy. It loses grip in high-speed sections. Verstappen has spent the qualifying sessions making constant steering corrections to keep things on track.
However, there is a way. If it rains in Montreal this weekend, and the forecast says it might, none of the above will matter much. Verstappen is one of the best wet-weather drivers in modern F1 history. The cooler conditions may also ease some of the tire and energy management issues that are hitting Red Bull on Sunday. If qualifying goes weird, if a safety car comes out at the right time, if the sprint race order gets thrown around, Verstappen suddenly becomes the most dangerous floater.
Longtime Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko said after Miami that he saw “light at the end of the tunnel” with the team’s Miami upgrade package. Whether that light is real or just the headlights of another freight train will be answered later this week.
Verstappen has previously said that he does not get frustrated for the sake of being disappointed. After Suzuka, where he finished eighth at his favorite circuit, he was asked how he was dealing with the whole situation. “When he came up to me again I just waved at him,” he said, referring to Antonelli. “It’s not going the way it should, but being upset about it all the time won’t help. I’m just trying to laugh about it.”
The four-time world champion, in a car he can’t push, waves as a teenager laps it up.
Montreal is going to tell us if Max Verstappen has anything left to laugh about in 2026.
#Max #Verstappen #faces #toughest #test #Canadian
