- Verstappen has ruled out rallying after F1, fearing the one hazard/no barrier.
- Father Jos beats drivers half his age on rally stages & pushes Max on airfield.
- Instead, Verstappen Racing next heads to the Nurburgring 24-hour race.
Max Verstappen has ruled out competitive rallying after his Formula 1 career ends, citing the sport’s unforgiving natural environment as a risk he is not prepared to accept.
The four-time world champion made the admission on the Up To Speed podcast. He draws a clear line between the engineered safety of a circuit and the raw, immovable hazards of a rally stage.
The decision is particularly striking given that his father, Jos Verstappen, has become a formidable rally driver in recent years.
Jos Verstappen: a father who commands his son’s admiration
Jos did not come to rallying until 2022, arriving at the sport well into his 50s. He has since won the Belgian Rally Championship and now competes in the European Rally Championship as a privateer.
For a man whose name belongs to Formula 1’s history books, the move into rallying has been a genuine second act.
What strikes Max is not only the results. It is the context. Jos is 53, approaching 54, and he is lining up against drivers in their late 20s and early 30s, and in some championships, he is beating them.
Max explained how his father reached that level. In rallying, pace notes carry a driver far, but repeated runs on the same stages eventually become muscle memory.
Do it long enough, and the improvement comes naturally.
The two men also test each other away from any formal competition. When they share a makeshift track on a rented airfield, Max said he has to go flat out just to beat his father by a lap. That detail says something about both men.
Why Max draws the line at the rally stage
The admiration is real and openly expressed. But it stops well short of the desire to follow Jos onto a live rally stage.
Verstappen’s reasoning is specific. A crash on a circuit usually means contact with a barrier built to absorb energy progressively.
A crash on a rally stage can mean a tree, a rock face, or a concrete wall, none of which offer any give whatsoever.
“I find it really impressive. I think it’s really cool,” Max Verstappen told the podcast, as quoted by PlanetF1. “But I just think about if I make a mistake, and I hit that tree, I mean, the tree is not moving, and that for me is my limit. That, for me, is something that I don’t want to do; it is too high of a risk.”
He acknowledged the reasoning might seem strange coming from someone who races at speeds above 300 km/h. But to him, there is a meaningful difference.
Formula 1 circuits have tyre barriers, Tecpro barriers, SAFER barriers, and carefully measured run-off areas. The natural world carries none of that.
“It’s a bit different, in my head at least, and it’s just a risk that I’m not willing to take,” he said.
It is an unusually candid admission from a driver whose public image is built on controlled aggression at the wheel. The line he draws is not about bravery. It is about the difference between engineered risk and the raw, unforgiving physics of rallying.
If not rallying, what else for Verstappen after F1?
Verstappen has already started building his answer to that question.
He has put together a GT3 operation away from the pressures of Formula 1, describing endurance racing as more old school and less political, a space where he can be more himself.
His team, Verstappen Racing, is entered for the 2026 Nürburgring 24 Hours, set for May 16 and 17.
He will drive a Red Bull-liveried Mercedes-AMG GT3 alongside Dani Juncadella, Jules Gounon, and Lucas Auer.
He has also been building towards the event through the Nürburgring Langstrecken-Serie, including a winning run in the NLS2 round that ended in disqualification due to a tyre usage breach.
The Nürburgring is not a gentle environment. But it is a circuit. It has barriers, safety infrastructure, and a rescue operation built around the needs of drivers. That distinction matters to Verstappen.
He has watched his father take the rally stages and genuinely marvelled at it. But admiration and participation are two different things, and for Verstappen, they will stay that way.
Some risks, he has decided, are simply not his to take. The trees will stay where they are.
