Max Verstappen strongly contradicts Helmut Marko’s statements about allegedly declining motivation and explains why nothing has changed for him.
Max Verstappen contradicts Red Bull sporting director Helmut Marko, who claimed that his motivation had suffered during the summer months.
Marko told Sky in Austin last weekend that Red Bull had “already given up on the 2025 Formula 1 season in the summer. But then Max suddenly won at the Nürburgring and came back incredibly motivated. Now everyone is motivated again.”
Verstappen refutes this portrayal, saying in Mexico: “Of course, it’s more enjoyable to come to race weekends like this when you know you have a chance of winning than when you don’t.”
“But I know for myself that when I’m in the car, I always try to give it my all—even if I’m fighting for fourth or ninth place. Then I’m more or less satisfied with certain results.”
A spontaneous trip to the Nürburgring? Not at all!
Verstappen emphasized that his Nürburgring outing in a GT3 car was not a spontaneous decision, but had been “planned for a long time.” “It’s not something that just happened suddenly. Something like this has to be well organized in advance, and you have to prepare accordingly.”
“This year, I had the opportunity to take part in the races. It was my first chance on the real track after I had already trained a lot online – even during Formula 1 race weekends. So nothing has changed in my professional approach.”
Verstappen’s philosophy for the title fight
And now that he is still 40 points behind and still has a chance of winning the world championship title, “nothing really changes” for him, said Verstappen: “In the worst case, I’ll finish third.”
“I’ll just try to win races until the end of the season. Hopefully that will be possible every weekend, but you can’t know that. We’re just on a good run right now and we know that everything has to go perfectly until the end.“
”If we succeed, great! Then it would be an incredible comeback. If not, then we’ll move on. We can still be proud of the final phase of this season and the upturn in performance. But those are things we’ll deal with in Abu Dhabi.”
