Since Lewis Hamilton announced he was leaving Mercedes for Ferrari at the end of next year, Mercedes have talked up Verstappen, who has a contract with Red Bull until 2028.
Verstappen, who won the Spanish Grand Prix on Sunday, has consistently made it clear he wants to be in the fastest car and in the “right environment”.
It appears the most decisive factor in the 26-year-old’s F1 future is which team he thinks will be best placed when the new 2026 regulations begin, as the pecking order will almost certainly change.
“The best driver wants to have the best car. And that’s our job, to bring the best package together,” Kallenius told Sky Germany.
“The cards will be reshuffled in 2026. New order with new rules. That’s also an opportunity. Who knows.
“The cards will be reshuffled in 2026. New order with new rules. That’s also an opportunity. Who knows.
Toto Wolff previously stated “no team principal wouldn’t do handstands” to sign the Verstappen and that he was “waiting” to see how the driver market develops.
Sky Sports News understands 17-year-old Andrea Kimi Antonelli is the leading candidate to take over Hamilton’s seat, with Verstappen still an outside target.
However, Wolff says Mercedes are not in contact with Verstappen over a shock move.
“No, there’s no talks taking place at that stage because I think we need to look at ourselves and on improving the car,” he said.
Teenager Antonelli has been testing Mercedes’ 2021 and 2022 cars this year, as well as competing in Formula 2.
Antonelli is highly rated after he won multiple junior single-seater titles at the first time of asking since stepping up from karts to racing cars in 2021.
At the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix in May, Hamilton was asked whether Sainz would be a good fit for Mercedes but responded by saying his preference would be Antonelli.
Wolff has indicated Mercedes won’t announce who will drive alongside George Russell before the summer break in August.
“No driver decision has been made. I said we want to keep this decision as long as possible because who knows what will happen,” he said.
Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur has raised his eyebrows at Red Bull carrying out a test with Max Verstappen at Imola before flying to Barcelona.
It emerged during the Spanish Grand Prix weekend that Red Bull had carried out a day of testing with Max Verstappen at Imola immediately prior to heading out to the Spanish Grand Prix.
Red Bull’s test was carried out with the 2022 RB18, with Verstappen at the wheel as the team made use of a regulation that allows for the testing of previous cars (TPC).
The regulations allow teams to carry out private testing with a car at least two years old, running in a specification used at a Grand Prix during that season, to be tested, using tyres specifically designed by Pirelli for such outings.
TPC is frequently used by teams to allow junior drivers a chance to get a feel for a contemporary F1 car without sacrificing any valuable official testing time and falls outside the requirements for handing over FP1 sessions to junior drivers.
For instance, Kimi Antonelli has been set loose recently in the Mercedes W13, while Alpine confirmed on Monday that Mick Schumacher and Jack Doohan will both carry out a test with the A522 at Paul Ricard in early July.
While it’s not unusual for the teams to occasionally hand over a car to a current driver for refreshing themselves – particularly after a break like returning after Christmas – a mid-season test for a driver right in the heart of a championship campaign is a little more unusual.
While Red Bull didn’t publicise the test in the same way many do for their TPC running, leading to many dubbing it a ‘secret’ test, the rules do allow all the current drivers to thrash around in a two-year-old car should they feel like it.
The regulations also don’t demand the tests be made public, although the FIA would be in full knowledge of all circumstances and parameters.
But the inability to carry out any development work with TPC events doesn’t mean the test hasn’t caught the attention of Ferrari boss Fred Vasseur, who labelled the outing as being “clearly about development” as he spoke to media – including PlanetF1.com – following the Spanish Grand Prix.
“Over the season, I think we will do probably a bit less than 10,” he said, when asked about Ferrari’s plans for TPC over the season.
“But you can’t differentiate on these, there’s TPC that you could do with your racing drivers and these, for me, it’s more development than something else when you do a TPC one week before.”
Making it clear he had no issues with the Red Bull test, Vasseur said: “I’m not complaining about them and they are in the regulations and it’s completely okay – it’s more development than something else.
“It’s not to give mileage to Max between Barcelona and Austria (sic) that, Tuesday, you do nothing but go along to Imola.”
Vasseur suggested that TPC regulations need tightening in order to differentiate between such a test with a current driver, and one where it’s giving an opportunity to a junior.
“It’s clearly development and what you could do with the young drivers that this permits another approach, it’s giving them the opportunity to sometimes to do mileage for the simulator and so to develop them – it’s another approach,” he said.
“I think, if we have to police it, we will have to split the two aspects – the day we are doing with our drivers and the days that we are doing with the non-racing drivers.”
With Red Bull unable to use the test for the development or testing of any components or setups that may have been learned over the time period since running the RB18 in a Grand Prix, what development could Vasseur be referring to?
As Red Bull’s chief engineer Paul Monaghan explained, the test gave Verstappen a reference on how a car – with which he largely dominated – handled and felt around Imola, not long after scraping across the line to win with the 2024 RB20.
With Red Bull’s struggles riding kerbs becoming more evident as the rest of the pack closes up, Monaghan explained the TPC allowed Verstappen to get a feel on whether the issue has improved or gotten worse since those days.
“We really tried to give Max a reference from a previous car,” Monaghan explained on Friday morning at Imola.
“When you’re trying to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a current car, his reference is the current car, and it’s ‘in previous years, we’ve had this, we’ve had that’.
“[But] have we really? Because we haven’t run them at the same time. So in taking that car out, we tried to give Max a reference to judge it from and he’s been able to give us feedback from that.”
Fully transparent about the benefits Red Bull got out of carrying out the test – a facility open to all the teams – Monaghan said the data gathered would allow the Milton Keynes-based squad to get a firmer handle on the extent of the problem nowadays relative to when the issue seemed less serious.
“That [feedback] won’t change as such, we just give him a different reference,” said Monaghan.
“The strengths and weaknesses of the cars or how we perceive it, we can obviously judge relative to our opposition. But we blend that with his comments, check those comments, and we say, ‘OK, are we good? Are we bad?’
“[We can] look in the data, see if it’s valid to say we’re better or worse than some people, what’s his perception, why is he saying it? And then what on earth do we do about it?”