Possible

If that is the case, his earliest Ferrari will be the 2028 car.

Does this mean that Max isn’t far behind?

Could you imagine what this would do to the driver market, interesting times.

Doubtful. Nobody is even close to RB. I think max will stay for the guaranteed WDCs as long as RB is serving them up to him.

Well boy was I wrong. Genuinely surprised he's on the move.

I wonder If this is anything to do with RB powertrains and Newey maybe seeing some writing on the wall.

He’s old as shit, has plenty of money, and nothing to prove. I’ll be genuinely surprised if he says in the sport.  Especially given the 2+yrs it’s going to take for his designs to make it to the track.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/articles/cmm3v9ny78eo

Wow, saw some of the rumors late last night on twitter but didn't feel they were solid enough to share. What a difference 12 hours makes.

This is a huge shake-up. I wonder if the Horner investigation provided any motivation for him to make the jump.

The one thing that has always caught my attention in Max’s response to ‘Will he leave?’ Is that wants a quiet and peaceful environment.

That comment can mean very different things to each person and curious what it means specifically to Max.  Does newey leaving impact that?

 I almost wonder if the WDC’s are a priority anymore for Max. That may sound strange but is he already looking to the next form of racing to make his mark on given his success in F1. The guy is consumed by racing and i doubt he cares the platform but the journey mastering it is his motivation.

Talking out my butt I suppose but that’s what is rattling around in my head in any case.

No I think you have it right. Drama is bad for a team, and there is apparently a lot of it around in RBR since Mateschitz died.

Good ole fashioned power struggle and ALL of the media and competitors doing what they can to keep it embroiled.

Would love to see him retire to pursue a Triple Crown.

Is that winning the Indy 500, 24 hrs of Le Mans and Monaco?

That would be cool to see but I think ALO will beat him to it and it will lose its appeal.

Damn this is going to be crazy. Especially if he goes to Ferrari!

There was a article that Alonso and Verstappen were discussing being on a team together.

I read if he leaves during this season he would have to take 1 year off (2025) and would be able to work starting in 2026, so the 2027 car would be the earliest he would have full control of.

BBC sources say it is the primary reason for the jump.  

Yes.


Alonso already tried. He's back in F1 trying to win a third F1 WDC.

Max already has 3 and doesn't seem to me like he's in it to top Schumacher and Hamilton. At his age, if he retires from F1, he'll have loads of time to get a Le Mans and Indy win. He'll have days worth of Sim racing under his belt for each track before he ever drives them under a green flag. I think that's a huge difference between Alonso and Verstappen. Now I'm wondering if he's ever commented on IndyCar, I know many F1 drivers think open-wheel oval-racing is too dangerous.

The person I'd most like to see complete it is Montoya. Still have a spark of fandom for him from his CART days.

I'm wondering why it's so personal to Newey.

Wait a little while and you might see his son.

If he can find a way out of his RB contract.

Max to Ferrari for WEC.

**I know it's been long banned, but Max could probably run Le Mans solo ... and win.

You're probably not wrong.  He's been known to stay up very late sim racing, get up early for an actual race, win the race, then get back on sim racing afterward.  Dude treats Formula 1 like a side quest.

I think Alonso still has “it” and has proven that over the last two years. Maybe I’m not giving the IRL guys enough credit but if he really is done in F1 after 2026 and sets his sights on the Indy 500 I think he could easily find his way in the best car and after a full season of races have a real shot of pulling it off.  If it wasn’t for a mechanical issue he may have got it done in 2017(I think it was 17).

All that being said if Max were to walk away in the next few years I think it would be easy for him to accomplish. He’s the biggest name In Motorsports and could find a seat anywhere he wants, he’s got the talent, only fait could stop him.

People tend to attribute super-human feats to WDC drivers (Senna and Schumacher in Particular) but there's little evidence for it. Put them in a certain car and they can look ordinary. A big part of what went down with Senna at Williams was near total disbelief he could be beaten.

“Red Bull.  It’s better than meth!”

I chuckled a few times at this one.

I don’t think Schumacher is a good example of that. He won 2 with Benetton then went to a dog shit Ferrari team and helped them succeeded like never before or since.

More often than not the best drivers find themselves in the best car, it takes both to be dominant.

F1 should reconsider having consecutive 2 week breaks between races.

All the drama starts up when the teams aren’t hustling between tracks with only a week between races. 😁

Next years schedule is much better than this years.

I'm simply stating known facts, not attributing "super-human feats".

Nobody is capable of winning in a shitty car but Max dominates F1 in the Red Bull and performs at an extremely high level in sim racing so he is immensely talented.

Alonso ain't getting a ride if it has a Honda engine.....

Uhh…

Same but I can switch to different in car feeds and track data with F1TV.  All ad free.  FreeVee has ads.  If you use a Firestick there is an F1 TV app that does everything I mentioned.  Why a second service?

In a way. After he signed for Ferrari in 1995, the then editor of F1 racing magazine (Tony Dodgins, if my memory is right) declared in the season preview edition that Schumacher would be champion, such was the hype around his ability.

The fact he tended to be well ahead of his teammates at Benetton (with the notable exception of Martin Brundle) created this mythology around him. I saw fans on Internet forums saying he could win in any car on the grid.

It is just not true.

He was the best around for a long time, but given what we can observer about Alonso, and all the sport science around aging, exactly how much speed did he lose during 2007-2009? It can't have been that much. He was still supremely fit (the yardstick for so long, in fact) and yet, he looked absolutely ordinary vs Rosberg, the entire time they were teammates. You can only conclude two things: He'd lost some pace, and Rosberg was that good. Either way, there was an expectation that he would immediately be winning races, even with the early acknowledgement the 2010 Mercedes wasn't competitive.

Senna, by comparison, also preferred 'tame' teammates. He famously vetoed Derek Warwick from joining Lotus, because he was worried (probably rightly so) that the team could not run two cars with the same focus. When Hakkinen out-qualified him on debut in 1993 in Portugal, it lit an enormous fire under him, and he won the final two races of the season.  It was psychologically devastating to see him wobble at Williams in the first two GPs; it's difficult to explain unless you were taking it all in at the time. There were people talking about him winning every single race. Of Course, he can't overcome a difficult car.

The laws of physics are always going to be the bound.

I am seeing similar proclamations about Max. It's a different story when you don't have a competitive car.

ETA, this is without mentioning Vettel and the weird collapse in form he had in what was still a Newey-penned car. Newey is another outstanding performer, but he cannot create miracles. John Barnard was similarly lauded, and it was his 1996 Ferrari that the helped build the notion that Michael Schumacher could win in a wheelbarrow, which was jolly unkind to both him and Barnard. The unloved F310 had some excellent details, a superb V10, the first steering wheel that moved all the driver tunables to the wheel center, and ultimately was a winning car in its first year.

As I understand it, it's not for watching races live, it's just programmed F1 content, like old races, documentaries, interviews, shit like that.

Of course those archived on the F1TV app.

I paid for this season but based on the options I may not next year.

The price is well worth not having to listen to the announcers on Sky TV or Danica Patrick. 🤮

I prefer to watch Laura Winter so there’s that too…

Once I got used to Alex Jacques and Jolyon's style, I really prefer to listen to them. Buxton's a twat, but it's a small price to pay for otherwise excellent coverage.

Also, as incomplete as they are, I really do enjoy the archives and go back to them; everyone should IMHO. You learn a huge amount watching how it was.

So Newey can’t leave Red Bull until the end of 2025, then he has 1 year of gardening leave. So the earliest he gets to work at a new team is 2027, on the 2028 car.

The one thing that I like that Will does it the walk down the starting grid and giving a quick highlight of each drivers race weekend.

I just can't picture him wanting it. The return to what he has called an engine Formula does nothing for him either, I suspect.

Team events and get togethers are going to be awkward for some time.

Craig Slater quote:



I hope we get an official statement soon.

Plot twist.

Red Bull used this story to find the internal leaker.

Tinfoil hat time... they are discussing for 24 hour races and who they want as a team.

I don't believe anything

I don't know if you'd want two hard chargers in an endurance entry. Whomever the 3rd is, they'd need to coach them; we have not seen that ability in either Max or Nando, so far. Endurance is a very different and interesting discipline.

Strange implication that both Max and Fernando wouldn’t be able to figure out how to handle an endurance race.

Fernando's already won Le Mans twice, and the 24 hours of Daytona once.
(Funny enough, he competed at Daytona in 2018 on a team with none other than Lando Norris, before he started in F1. )