Max Verstappen’s final home race at Zandvoort ended in heartbreak when he crashed at the last corner of lap one, striking a wet strip left by a pre-race shower and destroying his RB22. The impact triggered a red flag and an hour-long stoppage, capping a difficult weekend for Red Bull as Lando Norris won and Verstappen slipped to sixth in the championship standings.
For the Flying Ducthman, Zandvoort was supposed to be his last home rsce in his career. Yet Max Verstappen's run lasted less than a lap. The four-time champion crashed out of the 2026 Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort's final corner, triggering a red flag that called of the whole race for an hour and ended his hopes for the weekend.
Verstappen started seventh after a difficult qualifying weekend, then found himself squeezed onto the grass in a four-wide move at Turn 1 on lap one. He shrugged off the resulting scrap with Red Bull stand-in Liam Lawson: "We are allowed to race, so I think that's normal." The real trouble, however, came moments later at the final corner.
A rain shower roughly 50 minutes before lights out left Zandvoort patchy. A pre-race shower had left one strip of the final corner's banking still wet, sitting roughly 50 centimetres inside the dry racing line everyone else was using. Verstappen wasn't alone in getting caught; moments later, Gabriel Bortoleto spun through the same corner before retaining control of his Audi, forcing teammate Nico Hulkenberg into incredible high-speed evasive maneuver to avoid a collision (you just had to be there to see the view from Hulkenberg's POV; he drove into Bortoleto's dirty air blind and came out of it with Bortoleto's car just a millisecond away from colliding with him).
Verstappen had no such luck. He drove marginally tighter through the corner than his rivals, which put his car right on that wet strip. The car actually got caught in the wet patch twice, and while he managed the first patch, he got back on the throttle at the exact moment he judged the corner had dried. It was a misfire, and without the grip of the dry track his car slammed into the outer concrete wall so hard that his RB22's front wing, backwheel and much of teh bodywork were ripped right off.
The crash likely closes the book on Zandvoort for now: the race drops off the Formula 1 calendar after this year, making it Verstappen's final home race for the foreseeable future. This, of course, has nothing to do with his own future at the team: he'd arrived at the weekend fresh off a Red Bull contract extension through the end of 2030. His exit clause, however, still remains: if he isn't in a condition to win the driver's championship before summer break, Max Verstappen can take the decision to leave Red Bull Racing.
Red Bull's weekend was difficult regardless of the crash. Lando Norris won the race, ahead of Mercedes' Kimi Antonelli and George Russell, while Liam Lawson salvaged seventh as Red Bull's best result of a tough outing. Verstappen called his pace across the weekend disappointing, though not unexpected, given the gap to McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes.
Currently, at 116 points, Verstappen is sixth in the World Drivers' Championship standings, coming after the drivers from Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren's Lando Norris. Red Bull stands fourth in the Constructors, coming in at 186 points.