Guenther Steiner: Verstappen Won't Win in 2026
Guenther Steiner has never been one to sugar-coat an opinion, and he’s just dropped one of his sharpest yet: Max Verstappen, four-time world champion and the dominant force of the last era, will not win a single grand prix in 2026.
Not one.
Speaking on The Red Flags Podcast after the Spanish Grand Prix, the former Haas team principal didn’t hesitate when asked in the show’s “Gas or Brake” segment whether Verstappen would go winless across the season.
“Gas, he will not,” Steiner said. “Mercedes and McLaren are too strong, and it's just the car. He's not good enough. He will be Super Max, he will be on the podium, but I think that's the limit. That's the limit of that car.”
It was a brutal assessment of both driver and machinery, aimed squarely at a Red Bull package that, in Steiner’s eyes, simply cannot live with the new benchmark set by Mercedes and McLaren under the 2026 regulations.
A Champion Stuck in the Pack
The numbers paint a very different picture from Verstappen’s peak years.
After the Spanish Grand Prix, the Dutchman sits only sixth in the standings on 145 points. He’s a hefty 147 points adrift of championship leader Kimi Antonelli, the teenager spearheading Mercedes’ resurgence. Verstappen’s best results so far? Three second places — in Austria, Hungary and Spain. No wins. No sense of inevitability. Just a driver fighting to salvage podiums in a car that no longer intimidates the grid.
In Madrid, Verstappen had to live on his wits rather than raw pace. Starting behind polesitter Lando Norris, he pounced when McLaren’s day began to unravel. An ill-timed virtual safety car and a slow pitstop stripped Norris of control, and Verstappen did what champions do: he made the most of it.
On the new, narrow layout of the Madrid circuit, overtaking bordered on impossible. Once Verstappen cycled into track position ahead of Norris, the race locked into a stalemate. He held second place, but it felt more like a defensive masterclass than an attacking charge.
The result flattered Red Bull. The stopwatch did not.
‘He Was Flying’
Speaking to Sky Sports after the race, Verstappen didn’t try to disguise the gulf.
“It's just looking at the lap times, we are quite a bit down still,” he admitted. “It's a mix of a lot of things, for sure maybe a little bit of deployment, but also the car itself that we still need to improve on, because when Lando was behind me he was flying. He was a lot faster, but just because of the nature of the track he couldn't get by.”
That line — “he was flying” — cuts to the heart of Steiner’s argument. Verstappen is still Verstappen: sharp, relentless, ruthless in traffic. But the days when he could rely on a dominant Red Bull to crush the field have gone. On a conventional circuit with real overtaking zones, Norris’ pace advantage would almost certainly have told.
Steiner’s view is that this is the new normal. Podiums, yes. Heroic damage limitation drives, almost certainly. Victories? Not with this car, not against this opposition.
Red Bull’s Ceiling – and the Road to Baku
Steiner’s comment that Verstappen “will be Super Max” but capped at podiums is as much an indictment of Red Bull’s 2026 package as it is of the driver himself. In his eyes, the ceiling has dropped. Mercedes and McLaren have raised the bar, and Red Bull are playing catch-up in areas where they once led the field.
For a team that built an era around Verstappen’s supremacy, that is a jarring shift.
The calendar, though, offers no time for reflection. The 15th round of the 2026 season, the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, runs from 24–26 September at the Baku City Circuit — a track that has never been shy of chaos, safety cars and shock results.
If there is anywhere a wounded giant can steal something back, it’s a street circuit that punishes the slightest mistake and rewards opportunists. Steiner says Verstappen won’t win at all this year. Baku will show whether Red Bull really have hit their limit, or whether the man once untouchable at the front of the field still has one more trick left.
