Max Verstappen

Max Verstappen was raised for this. His father Jos raced in Formula 1 through the 1990s and 2000s, and his mother Sophie competed in karting herself, so motorsport wasn't a hobby in the Verstappen household — it was the family business. Max was karting almost before he could see over the wheel, and by his young teens he was already blitzing categories that other drivers took years to escape. Red Bull noticed fast, and rather than send him down the traditional GP3/F3 ladder, they fast-tracked him straight into Formula 1.

He made his debut in 2015 with Toro Rosso at just 17 years old — still the youngest driver ever to start a Grand Prix. A year later, barely 18, he was promoted to the senior Red Bull team mid-season and won the very first race he started for them, in Spain. It remains one of the most startling debuts in the sport's history. From that moment, it was clear Red Bull hadn't just found a fast kid — they'd found someone with the temperament to go with the talent, someone who raced like he had nothing to lose because, in a sense, he never had.

The years that followed were about Red Bull building a car worthy of him. Verstappen kept delivering wins and near-misses through the late 2010s while Mercedes dominated, and the frustration of watching a faster car win races he felt he deserved only sharpened him. That tension finally broke in 2021, in one of the most fiercely contested title fights in F1 history against Lewis Hamilton — a season of wheel-to-wheel racing, controversy, and a finale that split opinion but delivered Verstappen his first championship.

What came next was total dominance. With Red Bull building him a genuinely dominant car, Verstappen won back-to-back-to-back titles through 2022 and 2023, breaking records for wins in a single season along the way. He raced with a ruthlessness that occasionally drew criticism but never stopped drawing respect — he simply didn't make the mistakes his rivals were hoping for. A fourth title followed as Red Bull's advantage tightened against a resurgent field, won the hard way rather than the easy way, which if anything did more for his reputation than the dominant years had.

These days Verstappen is Red Bull's anchor through a changing grid around him — team-mates have come and gone, junior drivers have been promoted and swapped mid-season, but he's remained the one constant, still delivering wins and podiums as the benchmark every rival is measured against. He's no longer the wild teenager who arrived with nothing to lose; he's the driver every other driver on the grid builds their season around trying to beat. Still only in his late twenties, with four titles already banked, the conversation around Verstappen has quietly shifted from "how good is he" to "how many more can he win?"