For the first time, Max Verstappen has put his management company behind a driver from outside his own family — and the pick tells you plenty about where the four-time champion's ambitions are heading away from the cockpit. The driver is Dries van Langendonck, a 15-year-old Belgian leading the British Formula 4 championship, who now sits under the Verstappen Racing umbrella while staying inside McLaren's junior programme. The dual arrangement was a talking point up and down the Spa paddock this weekend.
This is no vanity project. Van Langendonck already has seven karting titles, a debut F4 weekend that produced pole and a win, and a Formula Winter Series crown built on nine victories in 15 races. He currently tops the British F4 table with four wins from his opening 15 starts, and he has been part of McLaren's development set-up since July 2024. Verstappen, who almost never attaches his name to a young driver, said the deciding factor was pure ability.
"I would only do it with drivers in whom I genuinely see great potential," Verstappen said. "Dries has been a big talent for a long time already in go-karting and I think you can spot quite quickly when someone is a little bit more special than someone else."
His yardstick was his own teenage self. "He's very good for a 15-year-old," Verstappen said. "Compared to myself when I was 15, he's very, very good." He expanded on that to GPblog: "Drivers like this don't come around every year. For me, Dries is actually the first of whom I think there's real potential there."
There are two halves to the deal. Raymond Vermeulen, Verstappen's long-standing manager, will run the career calls and the finances — a serious consideration, with the Dutchman himself pointing out that the budgets in Formula 3 and Formula 2 are steep. The coaching side falls to Verstappen, who will put the youngster on the Verstappen Racing simulators in Tilburg. The idea, he explained, is to steer clear of the mistakes that end promising careers early: "You often see wrong choices being made in the junior categories, where a driver ends up with the wrong team."
The reason the story spread is the badge Van Langendonck keeps. He is still a McLaren junior, both parties chip in on his budget, and that Woking link is what lent the timing its edge. Jos Verstappen and Vermeulen turned up in McLaren's hospitality at Spa on Friday, in the gap between the two practice runs — and with Verstappen-to-McLaren talk still doing the rounds, that image was never going to be taken at face value. Those in the know say the visit was purely about the 15-year-old.
The analysts see it much the same way. The Race wrote that the move "in no way reflects anything about Verstappen's future aside from the apparent growing independence of his overall racing ambitions from Red Bull." Until now, Verstappen Racing has housed simracers, GT3 drivers and his father's rally ventures; this is the first driver on its books chasing Formula 1 alone. Autosport reached the same conclusion — Verstappen assembling a project he controls himself.
The message to the driver is uncomplicated. "The goal, like I said before, is Formula 1," Verstappen said, "so we're just going to try and help him achieve that by making hopefully the right calls and decisions in terms of where he has to race." And there is a personal strand running through it. "Dries' father knew my father, and they were also good friends through the Pex family," Verstappen said — karting friendships that, a generation later, have become a signed deal.
