Max Verstappen has a puppet website and F1 champion Max Verstappen approves

Credit for photo: Red Bull Content Pool — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 Off the Track

Max Verstappen has a puppet website and Max Verstappen approves

Wait, there are two Max Verstappens?

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Monday 26 January 2026 22:43 Updated: 23:15

It has been revealed that four-time F1 champion Max Verstappen liked Max Verstappen's puppet making social media page. Confused?

Well, it turns out that there is more than one person named Max Verstappen, and now the man who claims to be the 'first Max Verstappen' (although surely he's not suggesting that there are only two Max Verstappens out there) has revealed that his name is a great way of breaking the ice in social situations.

One may be a four-time world champion and one of the greatest drivers that the sport has ever seen, but the other is a puppet-making legend, crafting everything from elephants to royal figures.

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And he has a website, titled maxverstappen.nl, not to be confused with verstappen.com, where you are able to buy merchandise linked with the Red Bull F1 star.

Maxverstappen.nl is the landing page of the puppeteer, whose shows include 'Hedgehog and the Trollball', and 'The book of squirrel'.

Now, the puppet-making Verstappen has issued an interview to the Formule1 magazine, where he has spoken about the positives and negatives of sharing a name with the Dutch F1 racer.

"I didn't like it for a while; it felt like my name had been stolen," he said. "But that feeling has completely disappeared now, and now I have something special. I always tell people: I was the first Max Verstappen.

"For example, when I go to an official body and make a joke about it, the ice is immediately broken.

"I once had a like from Max Verstappen on my Facebook page. So he apparently knows me. At least, I think so. Of course, I can't verify whether he did it himself or someone from his PR team, but I thought it was funny."

F1 team-mates with the same name

On the subject of similar names, there are some team-mates in F1 history who have shared the same first name.

Before we go down a rabbit hole of whether Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz shared the same name because of their names meaning similar things in their respective languages, I'm just looking at team-mates who shared the same first name from an English language point of view.

For example, Toro Rosso had Sebastien Bourdais and Sebastian Vettel as their driver lineup for the 2008 season. Even funnier, when Vettel was promoted up into the Red Bull seat for 2009, the sister team replaced him with Sebastien Buemi to sit alongside Bourdais.

Meanwhile, Jack Brabham and Jack Fairman were briefly team-mates in 1958, while Brabham was also team-mates with Jacky Ickx in 1969.

Not F1 team-mates as such, but Eddie Irvine of course became a household name at Eddie Jordan's eponymous team between 1993-1995.

I wonder if Max Verstappen would make a good puppeteer once his time in F1 is over? Or could we see a Sonny Hayes-style jump into F1 in his 60s for the puppeteer to be Verstappen's team-mate? Probably not, but fun to think about.

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