Max Verstappen was born in 1997 in Hasselt, Belgium, to two racing parents: his father, Jos, was a Formula One driver, and his mother, Sophie Kumpen, a karting champion. He races under the Dutch flag. His childhood was built around karting, with a father who was relentless about it.
He spent a single season in single-seaters before Toro Rosso put him into Formula One in 2015, at seventeen — so young that the governing body changed its rules afterwards to stop it happening again. In May 2016, in his very first race after promotion to Red Bull, he won the Spanish Grand Prix at eighteen, the youngest winner the sport has seen.
The title came in 2021, after a season-long fight with Lewis Hamilton that ended on the last lap in Abu Dhabi, where a contested safety-car decision gave him the chance to pass. He won again in 2022, 2023 and 2024. In 2023 he won nineteen of the twenty-two races, a record that may never be touched.
He is uncompromising in wheel-to-wheel racing and indifferent to criticism of it, and he spends much of his spare time racing in online simulators with the same intensity.
He has more than seventy Grand Prix wins and has spent his entire Formula One career with teams owned by Red Bull.
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