Max Verstappen’s teammates have been no match for his talent.
With Sergio Perez stepping back from Red Bull Racing in 2025, 22-year-old Liam Lawson has been promoted to a top-level Formula 1 team with just 11 races under his belt. It’s a dream come true for the New Zealander — but how long will the dream last?
Much has been made of Max Verstappen’s generational talent, and the impact that his hard-charging performance has had on his teammates. We’re taking a look back at how Verstappen stacked up against each teammate he had on his way up the F1 ladder.
While most aspiring Formula 1 drivers while away their late teens and early 20s in various junior-level open-wheel categories on their way up the Formula 1 ladder, Max Verstappen was different.
After a stunning karting career that resulted in countless regional titles, as well as a World Championship, Verstappen contested exactly one season of international Formula 3 before he was propelled into the ranks of F1 courtesy of his ties with the Red Bull junior team.
Since then, Verstappen has tamed a fiery temper to secure four World Championships, crushing his teammates in the process.
We’re going to take a dive into how Verstappen has compared to every teammate in his professional racing career.
Max Verstappen joined Jules Szymkowiak and Gustavo Menezes at Van Amersfoort Racing in the 2014 FIA Formula 3 World Championship, where they contested 33 races at 11 different tracks.
Esteban Ocon and Tom Blomqvist took the first two positions in the championship, but Verstappen was a close third with 411 points to Ocon’s 478 and Blomqvist’s 420.
His teammates? Menezes finished 11th in the championship with a total of 91 points and a best result of two third-place finishes. Szymkowiak finished 20th, securing 17 total points with five finishes in the top 10.
Just for some comparison, Verstappen didn’t start a race, and retired from eight more — but his 10 wins exceeded the total wins scored by both Ocon and Blomqvist.
At the conclusion of the season, it was announced that Verstappen would be promoted to Formula 1 — the youngest driver in history to earn that honor. He would partner Carlos Sainz at Toro Rosso.
Toro Rosso made headlines in 2015 when it signed two rookie drivers — Verstappen and Sainz — to its team that season. Verstappen’s single year in single-seaters made him far less experienced than Sainz, who had been marinating in the Red Bull Junior program for five years.
Though they remained tightly matched in head-to-head qualifying and race stats, the Dutch driver was resoundingly more impressive when it came time to score points. Verstappen finished fourth twice, while Sainz could only manage a best finish of seventh during their time as teammates.
Such was Verstappen’s performance that, four races into 2016, he received the call to swap places with Red Bull’s Daniil Kvyat, providing him with a new teammate in Daniel Ricciardo.
Of all of Verstappen’s Formula 1 teammates, Ricciardo was his closest competition. Though the young Verstappen roundly outqualified and outperformed the more experienced on his team, Ricciardo rarely straggled behind. After 58 races together, Ricciardo had only scored 18 fewer points.
However, these were extremely formative years. Verstappen learned what it was was like to win races, secure podiums, and mount a serious challenge against a teammate.
It also proved to be critical for Red Bull Racing. During the Ricciardo/Verstappen era, the team clearly began to trend toward prioritizing Verstappen. Ricciardo could see that he wouldn’t be the favorite and departed the team for Renault, leaving Verstappen as the undisputed king of Red Bull Racing.
With Ricciardo gone, Red Bull Racing promoted Pierre Gasly from its junior team — but only briefly. The French driver was only in his second full season of F1 competition, and the pressure from the team seemed to crush Gasly before he could find his footing.
He lasted a handful of races as Verstappen’s teammate before being demoted to Toro Rosso, with rookie Alex Albon taking over.
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Just 12 races into his Formula 1 career, Alex Albon was given an impossible task: Outperform Max Verstappen. Unfortunately, despite finishing his first season strong as a Red Bull driver, Albon clearly lagged behind the more experienced Verstappen.
At the conclusion of the 2020 season, Albon departed not only Red Bull, but Formula 1 as a whole, before returning in 2022.
In signing Sergio Perez, Red Bull took a risk. It hedged its bets on a driver outside of its own junior program — albeit one with a decade of F1 experience to draw from. If anyone could bring the seemingly impenetrable Verstappen back down to reality, it would be Perez.
Instead, it was the nail in the coffin of Perez’s career.
Recency bias can make it easy to forget that Perez started out strong. He played the role of second driver extremely well, helping Red Bull secure World Constructors’ Championship and helping Verstappen in pursuit of his drivers’ titles.
But just a handful of races into the 2024 season, Perez suffered an inexplicable drop in performance made all the worse by the fact that teams like Mercedes, McLaren, and Ferrari had all brought impressive upgrades to their machinery. His future was already in doubt heading into the summer break, and it was admittedly a surprise that he lasted all the way to the end of 2024.
Now, heading into 2025, Verstappen will have a new teammate: Liam Lawson. For the first time in his Formula 1 career, Verstappen will be paired with a teammate younger than him — but will that have any impact on how the season plays out?
It’s near impossible to tell without a crystal ball. But we can skim back through Lawson’s resumé, if only to gain some sense of how he stacked up against others.
Unlike Verstappen, Lawson has spent eight years in junior formulae, working up from a Formula First Winter Series to Formula 2. And his stats are decent:
Plus, Lawson has also raced in 11 Grands Prix, giving him ample competitive experience heading into his first full-time F1 season.
Will it be enough for Lawson to challenge Verstappen for first-driver status at Red Bull Racing? Or will we see another driver falter in the face of the four-time champion’s generational talent?
Only time will tell.
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