There is a ritual to Zandvoort. Every year Mercedes sits Toto Wolff down with the Dutch press, and every year he says something he did not need to. Two years ago the session all but confirmed Kimi Antonelli’s F1 promotion a week early. Last year it produced a candid account of the Toto Wolff Verstappen conversations, and a detour into AI-generated pictures of the pair. Remembering all of it, Wolff opened this year’s edition laughing: “You know, let me get into the groove and then I’ll give you a few punchlines!”
What followed was rarer than a scoop. It was an ending. The longest-running background hum in the sport has gone quiet, because both sides spent the summer signing other people. Red Bull has tied Verstappen down long-term. Mercedes has extended George Russell and Antonelli through 2027. Asked by Motorsport.com whether the new Red Bull contract had killed his instinct that their paths would eventually cross, Wolff’s answer was that the paths already have — just not in a grand prix car.
What the Toto Wolff Verstappen pursuit actually amounted to
Mercedes could have had him first. Verstappen was winning in Formula 3 as a rookie in 2014 and Wolff was interested, but only Red Bull could offer an immediate seat in a world championship car, courtesy of its second team. The two have been on opposite sides of the garage ever since.
The serious approach came two years ago, when Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari left Wolff needing a replacement. He had already earmarked Antonelli, but Verstappen was worth a phone call. It went nowhere, and Wolff would not close it off. “Yes, it is,” he said when asked whether the idea was still in the back of his mind. “Somehow I have that feeling. But I don’t know when that could be. Whether it’s ’26, whether it’s three years later, I don’t know yet.”
He tried again a year later, with Antonelli struggling through his rookie campaign, and got another refusal. “Could that mean our paths will never cross because the timings are wrong? Well, that can happen,” he conceded then. This time there was no approach at all. Wolff’s own reading is that the odds were better twelve months ago than at any point this year, and that it was obvious by the spring.
The consolation prize has four wheels and a roll cage
Which is where the punchline came in. Mercedes and Verstappen do already share a garage — in GT racing, where Mercedes-AMG Team Verstappen Racing runs a GT3 EVO with Verstappen alongside Daniel Juncadella, Jules Gounon and Lucas Auer, including at the Nürburgring 24 Hours. “Well, the paths have crossed already with the GT racing,” Wolff said, before noting that the joint programme means Mercedes has the four-time world champion in its car for some of the biggest races of the year. If he cannot have Verstappen on a Sunday afternoon in F1, he will take him at the Nordschleife.
A driver market with nothing left to trade
The wider effect is a silly season that has run out of oxygen before it started. Antonelli leads the drivers’ championship, Russell is third, and both are now contracted into 2027 — which removes the sport’s most attractive vacancy from the board. Red Bull’s line-up is settled. David Coulthard’s verdict, reported by Motorsport.com, was that Verstappen’s rivals were “breathing a sigh of relief”: nobody now has to plan a season around where he might land. For a team that has spent two winters keeping a seat warm in theory, the tidiness is the point. Wolff can stop hedging and get on with refereeing the title fight he already has.
The door is not bolted. Wolff’s estimate is a few years rather than never, and he has been wrong about timing before. But the room where he says these things is closing: this is the final Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort, and the annual roundtable with the Dutch press presumably goes with it. Wolff got his punchlines in. It just turned out that the joke was on the question: the answer had been settled months ago, and everyone kept asking anyway.
