Birthday Tribute – Max Verstappen | 30 September 2026 | Oracle Red Bull Racing · Netherlands · Formula 1
Verstappen turns 29 today, the first birthday in five years on which he is not the reigning Formula 1 world champion.
Max Verstappen is a Dutch driver for Red Bull Racing, four times world champion between 2021 and 2024, and the winner of 71 Grands Prix. He started his first race at 17 years and 166 days, younger than anyone in the history of the sport, and won his first at 18. Both records still stand.
ROOTS: A KART SEAT AT FOUR AND TWO RACING PARENTS
Max Verstappen was born on 30 September 1997 in Hasselt, Belgium, and grew up in Limburg with a racing driver on each side of the family. His father, Jos Verstappen, spent a decade in Formula 1 and took two podiums in his rookie season at Benetton as Michael Schumacher’s team-mate. His mother, Sophie Kumpen, raced karts at international level against drivers who went on to Formula 1 themselves.
He was in a kart at four. He holds both Dutch and Belgian nationality and races under the Dutch flag, which is a choice rather than an accident of birth.
His parents separated when he was young and his father took over the karting programme — a van, a trailer and a calendar that ran across Europe most weekends of the year. In 2013, at fifteen, he won three CIK-FIA championships in a single season, including the world title, making him the youngest gearbox world champion in karting history.
HOW HE REACHED FORMULA 1 AT 17 WITHOUT SERVING THE LADDER
He arrived in single-seaters in 2014 and never served the usual apprenticeship. One season of FIA European Formula 3 with Van Amersfoort Racing produced ten wins and third place in the championship at sixteen.
Red Bull signed him to its junior programme in August 2014 and put him straight into a Toro Rosso for 2015. He skipped GP2 entirely.
Two records from his first months in the sport are still standing.
15 March 2015, Melbourne — youngest driver ever to start a Grand Prix, at 17 years and 166 days
Malaysia, two weeks later — youngest driver ever to score points, at 17 years and 180 days
From 2016 the FIA raised the minimum age for a Formula 1 super licence to eighteen, a direct response to his debut. He is the reason the rulebook now says nobody can do what he did.
“A seventeen-year-old walked into Formula 1 and the sport had to change the rules so that it could never happen again — that alone tells you who Max Verstappen is!” – 🎙️Jay
THE BREAKTHROUGH: BARCELONA, FIRST RACE IN A RED BULL SEAT
Red Bull moved him into the senior team after the 2016 Russian Grand Prix, four races into that season, swapping him with Daniil Kvyat. Barcelona was his first race in the car and he won it.
That was the Spanish Grand Prix on 15 May 2016, at 18 years and 228 days, which made Max Verstappen the youngest Grand Prix winner in the history of the championship. Nobody has been near it since.
Six months later at Interlagos he dropped to sixteenth after a late stop and finished third in the wet, on a day when most of the field was concentrating on staying out of the barriers. The reputation for wet-weather driving was set that afternoon and has never left him.
One record he does not hold is youngest world champion. That belongs to Sebastian Vettel, who was 23 when he won the first of his four in 2010. Verstappen was 24.
WHAT HE HAS ACTUALLY WON: FOUR TITLES AND 71 GRANDS PRIX
The first title came down to the last lap of the last race of 2021, and to a pass on Lewis Hamilton at Yas Marina after a season-long fight that had run out of margin for either man. He won ten races that year.
What followed was the most one-sided run any driver has produced in the modern era. Fifteen wins in 2022. Nineteen from twenty-two starts in 2023, ten of them consecutively, with 575 points and twenty-one podiums in a single season.
A fourth straight title arrived in 2024 in a car that had stopped being the fastest on the grid, including a win at São Paulo from seventeenth on a flooded track.
His career totals, as listed on his official Formula 1 driver page, read as follows.
248 Grands Prix entered and 71 wins
Four world championships, 2021 to 2024
134 podiums and 48 pole positions
37 fastest laps and 3,607.5 career points
Season records still standing: 19 wins, 21 podiums, 10 consecutive victories
HOW HE LOST THE 2025 TITLE BY TWO POINTS
2025 was the year the machinery went elsewhere. McLaren had the fastest car and two drivers in the fight, and after the Dutch Grand Prix in August he was 104 points behind the leader, Oscar Piastri, saying publicly that he was out of the championship.
Then he won eight races, more than anyone else in the field, while the lead changed hands inside McLaren.
By the time the season reached Abu Dhabi the man in front was Lando Norris and the gap was twelve points. Verstappen won the race. Norris finished third and took the title, 423 to 421.
A 104-point hole had become a two-point defeat.
WHY HE RACES WITH NUMBER 3 IN 2026
Losing the championship cost him the number 1 on the car, which goes to the reigning champion. He chose 3 for 2026 rather than going back to the 33 he started with, and said he simply liked it better.
The new regulations and Red Bull Racing’s first season with its own Ford-partnered engine have not produced a car capable of winning, and the year now belongs to Kimi Antonelli. Fifteen races into a twenty-three-race calendar, his own season reads like this.
No wins and no pole positions
Seven podiums, six of them in the last eight races
Four retirements
Sixth in the championship on 163 points
He has spent 2026 extracting second places from a car with no business finishing second, which is a different skill from winning nineteen races in a year.
Away from Formula 1 he has built a second racing life. Sportscar365 reported his September 2025 outing in a Porsche Cayman GT4 with Chris Lulham that earned him the Nordschleife A-permit, and in May 2026 he made his 24 Hours of Nürburgring debut with Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing alongside Lucas Auer, Jules Gounon and Daniel Juncadella. GPFans reported in its final classification that the car had led for close to twenty hours when a driveshaft failure ended its race with four hours to go.
He signed a fresh Red Bull Racing extension in August 2026, runs his own GT and sim racing operations, and has a daughter, Lily, born days before the 2025 Miami Grand Prix.
From all of us at Just Plain Sport — the fifth title may come and it may not, but nobody in the history of this sport is ever going to be allowed to start a Grand Prix younger than you did. 🎂🏎️
