Speculation has swirled that Verstappen may soon step away from the sport, his dissatisfaction with the FIA’s new standards no doubt a part of the rumor fuel. While I didn’t press him about his retirement plans, he did discuss another aspect of his future: Verstappen is building a GT3 team (GT3, like F1, IndyCar, or NASCAR, is simply another category of racing, with a different kind of car). “GT3 is quite expensive if you really want to be good at it,” he says. “If you want to win, there are not many teams out there that actually make money, but that’s okay. If I do something, I want to win—I don’t want to just participate. I want to make it a dream team with people, drivers, and a platform.”
I ask him if he has any personal goals remaining within Formula 1 itself. “I would like, of course, to win a championship again,” he says (he was close in 2025, narrowly missing the top spot to McLaren’s Lando Norris by two points). “But no—there’s no real bucket list. The main ones have all been completed. What I want now are smaller achievements—like achieving a win on our own power units, stuff like that. I’m just passionate about racing, and trying to build more knowledge—even down to computing power, and AI, which is in a way quite scary, but cool. You need to be a little bit of a geek for these kinds of things, but I like it.”
We’ve motored as far west as Cap-d’Ail, passing Monaco’s formidable Port Hercule and an array of modern apartment buildings with expansive sea views, one of which Verstappen calls home. Just before the day wraps, the surf has calmed a bit, and Verstappen is taking his final shots on the boat, his square-face TAG Heuer Monaco glinting like obsidian in the golden air. Verstappen looks down at the watch, a gift from the label, customized with three stars as he became a three-time world champion. (When he won his fourth championship, a fourth star was added.)
It was then, for just a brief moment, when Verstappen seemed to let slip what lies on the horizon after F1, or GT3, or racing—an almost imperceptible loosening of the program. We were talking, broadly, about how he might spend his time when it’s all done.
“I’ve never been, for example, to South Africa. I also love Japan, and want to explore it more. I want to visit with less of this time pressure of, like, ‘Next week is Formula 1.’ At one point, maybe, you don’t have that pressure anymore, and you can go on an extended holiday…”
