The 2026 season has not been kind to Max Verstappen, and one of his own quotes about the number on the front of his Red Bull is starting to read like a self-inflicted prophecy.
When Lando Norris took the world championship in Abu Dhabi 2025, Verstappen lost the right to run a number one. Instead of returning to the 33 he made famous between 2015 and 2021, he picked up the digit he had wanted since he was a child.
"My favourite number has always been three, apart from number one," he said at the time. "We can now swap, so it'll be number three. Number 33 was always fine, but I just like one three better than two. I always said it represented double luck, but I've already had my luck in Formula One."
That last sentence has not aged well. He spun in qualifying in Australia, started 20th and clawed back to sixth. He retired in China with a technical failure. In Japan — a track he put on pole in 2025 — he qualified 11th and finished eighth. Miami flashed a front-row qualifying lap before an early spin and a chaotic pit stop dragged him back to fifth. Five rounds; zero podiums.
Bad luck has followed him outside Formula 1 as well. His Verstappen.com Racing team won the NLS2 four-hour event at the Nurburgring dominantly, then was disqualified for exceeding the tyre allocation. The NLS5 race ended with a broken splitter and 38th place. The Verstappen camp shrugged off both with the same line — better in the warm-ups than the main event.
The main event came last weekend. The 24 Hours of the Nurburgring drew a record 352,000 spectators, a turnout the German promoters openly credited to the so-called Verstappen Effect. He delivered two extraordinary double stints, the Red Bull Motorsport YouTube commentary literally gasping as he picked off cars through the dark. Then with three hours of the race remaining and the lead in reach, teammate Daniel Juncadella reported a warning, then a strange noise, then a failure too time-consuming to fix. The team drove the final two laps as a thank-you to the grandstands.
The race was won by the sister Mercedes-AMG GT3, the number 80 car. Maro Engel was one of its winning drivers — the same Engel who very publicly raised an eyebrow when Verstappen broke the Nordschleife lap record in 2025, prompting a direct social-media reply from Verstappen at the time. The symmetry was not lost on Dutch fans.
YouTuber Wimbo of WimboFormula did the obvious analysis afterwards: would Verstappen be better off going back to 33? The original choice was a workaround. Daniel Ricciardo had three, so the teenage Verstappen took the next-best option. With Ricciardo retired and the FIA's rule on dormant numbers relaxed, three opened up. Verstappen took it. It was, he said, the one he had always wanted.
Sporting common sense argues that numbers do not win or lose grands prix. Setups do, tyres do, power units do. But Verstappen himself gave the season its narrative when he said his luck was already used up in Formula 1. Five rounds in, with the Nurburgring as a brutal coda, neither his Red Bull nor his Mercedes-AMG endurance car appears willing to disagree.
