The future of Red Bull Racing Formula 1 driver Max Verstappen has been thrown into doubt by motorsport advisor Helmut Marko.
The team's senior advisor told Sky Germany that "the concern is great" over the team’s ability to hold onto Verstappen after technical glitches and poor on-track performance saw the Dutchman finish sixth at the 2025 Bahrain Grand Prix.
“Improvements have to come in the near future so that he has a car with which he can win again," Marko said. "We have to create a basis with a car so that he can fight for the world championship."
After four grands prix, Verstappen is third in the driver’s standings with 69 points to his name. In second is McLaren's Oscar Piastri with 74 points while his teammate Lando Norris currently leads the standings with 77.
Verstappen has so far won just one race in the 2025 season, in Japan, while the McLaren pair has picked up three victories between the two. Piastri and Norris have been aided by a McLaren car that looks planted and dominant on most tracks, while the Red Bull RB21 has appeared scrappy and more of a handful for its drivers.
It’s for this reason that Verstappen’s future has been brought into question, despite the Dutchman holding a contract to race for Red Bull until the end of the 2028 season. That contract reportedly contains various performance clauses to keep Verstappen in place, and if those clauses aren’t met then he could walk away from the Milton Keynes side sooner than expected.
The details of Verstappen’s contract aren’t publicly known, but such clauses would likely call for Red Bull to provide Verstappen with a winning car. This year’s Red Bull has been a far cry from the dominant machine it fielded in 2022 and 2023. This led the team to launch “crisis talks” following the struggles it faced in Bahrain this weekend, which included faulty pit equipment that cost Verstappen and teammate Yuki Tsunoda time in stops.
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner previously told Motorsport.com that his team “understands where the issues are,” but warned that introducing solutions “obviously takes a little more time.” With the final race in the first triple header of this year’s F1 calendar coming this weekend, that’s time that Red Bull doesn’t have on its side if it wants to take the fight to McLaren soon.
