Max Verstappen signs for Mercedes and four other F1 silly season moves

F1 Silly Season

Max Verstappen signs for Mercedes and four other F1 silly season moves

When one domino falls...

Chris Deeley

Tuesday 14 July 2026 19:45

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Thought you'd seen the last of this gimmick, didn't you?

More fool you! F1 silly season speculation is reaching its pre-summer break crescendo, with people around the sport falling over each other to insist that yes, the best driver on the grid could be on the move.

Max Verstappen isn't a happy bunny right now, and not for no reason. The team where he came of age as a racing driver is crumbling around him, his closest allies are walking out the door, and his car keeps trying to put him in the wall.

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The fact that there are exit clauses in his Red Bull contract is pretty well known at this point (how could it not be, nobody ever stops talking about it!), and he's been linked with more or less every team on the grid.

Mercedes are foremost among them, after being strongly linked with Verstappen last summer. Let's say he swaps Red Bull for Silver Arrow. The chain reaction would give the whole sport a good shake – and it could look something like this...

F1 HEADLINES: Verstappen McLaren warning as fresh Red Bull revelations drop

Max Verstappen to Mercedes

The first domino that has to fall. Would Verstappen be interested in driving the best car on the grid? We can probably pencil 'yes' in for that one.

Would he be delighted to go to a team where he wouldn't have the benefit of a decade of relationships, where he might get more pushback than he does now at Red Bull? Maybe not – but winning fixes everything, at least for a while.

Now for the key decision point: do Mercedes want Verstappen? In a vacuum, absolutely. He's the best driver in the sport, and Toto Wolff is not an idiot. In the real world, it puts them in an awkward position.

If Verstappen comes in, George Russell is the man on the chopping block – after all, they're not jettisoning the teenage star and future of their team who's currently leading the championship. Russell, though, is contractually locked in for 2027.

If Mercedes really, really want Verstappen, and believe that it's now or never, their only real option is to throw an obscene amount of money at getting out of Russell's contract, and then an amount that would make the first figure blush to install the Dutchman.

It could, theoretically happen – that's the point of this exercise, after all. Just don't put the house on it.

Ollie Bearman to Red Bull

Well, wasn't this a shock? Since his entry into F1, Bearman has been tabbed as a future Ferrari driver, possibly – probably? – Lewis Hamilton's replacement when the British great hangs up his helmet.

He was famously a Ferrari prospect, he even made his F1 debut for the team when he replaced Carlos Sainz (appendicitis) in 2024, and the Haas team he drives for now have close ties with the Scuderia.

That's why the reports this week that Red Bull are keeping a very close eye on him are so surprising.

A Bearman-Hadjar partnership would represent the sort of reboot and youth movement that it looks like the team desperately needs post-Verstappen and post-their mass exodus of key staff. Laurent Mekies is a big fan. And most importantly, he's probably better than anyone in the Racing Bulls pipeline right now.

Fernando Alonso to...retirement?

It has to happen some time. There's only so long that the first-time father can keep toiling and toiling around the globe in the hopes that he'll finally get a car which can deliver him win number 33.

The 14th anniversary of his last F1 race win will be 'celebrated' early in the 2027 season. Alonso will be 45 years old. Unless Adrian Newey and the boffins at Honda can perform some sort of miracle, Aston Martin will not be putting him in a position to win.

It's time to hang it up, spend some more time with his recently-expanded family, and...dare we say it, start working in the backroom at Aston with a view to a future senior role in the team's operations, given his insistence that he'll win a title with Aston 'whether as a driver, or not'?

Of course, that leaves a gap on the grid...

George Russell to Aston Martin

It sure is a step down in status to go from the team who started 2026 with the best car to the team who started 2026 with the worst of the lot, but go with us on this one.

Let's say that we believe Aston Martin's projections that their upcoming upgrades will steal them back two seconds a lap on their rivals, that puts them somewhere in the lower midfield. That's not great.

What it is, however, is a platform – a launching point. Further significant upgrades will come in the second half of the season, which could absolutely put Lawrence Stroll's green machines in the points mix by the end of the season.

The problem facing Russell is that if he's jettisoned by Mercedes, Red Bull is the only place he could go that remotely resembles a top team. For various reasons, a straight swap of him and Verstappen feels...unlikely. That means that to race in 2027, he needs to pick from some unappealing options.

Which would you choose, an Alpine team helmed by an unpredictable 76-year-old Italian who appears to make decisions based on what he's had for breakfast that morning, or an improving Aston Martin team backed by unfathomable wealth and with this generation's greatest designer?

Could a great British driver end up with a great British brand?

Liam Lawson to Alpine

Speaking of the team helmed by the unpredictable etc. etc., hey! What if Alpine do something weird?

This one is based on nothing but feel and amateur divination, but...this is Liam Lawson's fourth year driving in F1. The Racing Bulls setup is designed for Red Bull to find out what they have in a young driver and, after his 11 races replacing Daniel Ricciardo in 2023 and 2024, they panicked and gave him a Red Bull drive. That lasted two races.

By the end of this year though, he'll have started over 50 races for the junior team. At that point, after working with him for four years, they know who he is. If he's not ready for a promotion to the big time – and it doesn't seem like they believe he is, certainly not in this timeline where they've brought in Ollie Bearman – then he's just filling a development seat that another prospect could take.

However, Lawson has shown something this year. He's already topped last year's full-season points total after just nine races (albeit in a better car than last year), and frequently made team-mate Arvid Lindblad look like the rookie he is.

In short, he's probably done enough for another team to take a chance on him in the hopes of unlocking another gear, or at least getting regular points finishes and some TV time for their sponsors. That's why we're lightly pencilling in a move for Lawson to replace Franco Colapinto at Alpine, after the Argentine's rapid descent into mediocrity since his exciting rookie stint at Williams.