Max Verstappen reveals he could quit F1 in 2028

Max Verstappen last night revealed that he may walk out of Formula One at the end of his current deal.

The 24-year-old world champion is signed up on a £40-million-a-year contract that ties him to Red Bull until 2028, taking him just beyond his 31st birthday. But, sitting on the team’s floating platform on Monaco harbour, he talked for the first time about retirement.

‘The plan is to stay here until 2028,’ said the Dutchman, who leads the championship going into this weekend’s fabled chase around this cramped principality.

‘I am not planning on changing teams. I am happy here and they are happy with me. But I have not made up my mind what I will do after 2028. I might stop.

‘I have been in Formula One since I was 17. It has been a long time. I have done a lot of seasons in F1. I may want to do different stuff. By 31, I don’t know whether I will have peaked or where the drop-off in performance may have occurred.

‘I want to do other types of races — endurance racing, for example. Maybe I will have had enough of travelling all the time. Maybe I will want an easier life and just to do the races I like.

‘Whenever an opportunity comes to win a championship, you want to take it. If I am in a fight in 2028 it may be stupid to suddenly stop. It is difficult to know.’

My goodness, how this sort of talk ages us all, but Verstappen came so young into this world that he raced in Formula One before he was licensed to drive on the roads in Belgium, where he then lived. He is also 13 years junior to the Englishman he pipped to the title last year, Lewis Hamilton.

They both live in Monaco — well, Hamilton does nominally, though he seems to spend a weighty chunk of his downtime in the United States.

Verstappen points beyond the Grimaldi