Verstappen Patient After Malaysia Win, Eyes Elusive Singapore Victory

Max Verstappen has won seventy-two Formula 1 races in his career. Not one of them has come under the lights of Marina Bay. Nine times he has tried to conquer the Singapore Grand Prix. Nine times the circuit has turned him away.

On October 8th, sitting in the paddock ahead of this weekend's race, the 29-year-old Dutchman seemed unbothered by the streak. He had just claimed his first victory of 2026 four days earlier in Malaysia—a breakthrough that arrived only after months of struggle. Red Bull's season had begun badly. Verstappen failed to finish two of his opening seven races. The team felt distant from victory, and he knew it. "We just needed to be realistic for a long time that we aren't in a position to win," he said, reflecting on those early months.

The turning point came in June at the Austrian Grand Prix, when Red Bull introduced a major upgrade package. From that moment forward, the car transformed. Verstappen finished second in Austria and collected six podiums over the next eight races. Then came Malaysia on October 4th—a track he had not raced on since 2017, when he was the last driver to win there before the Malaysian Grand Prix left the calendar. The victory carried weight beyond the usual significance of a race win. This was Red Bull's first season running their own in-house power unit, built in partnership with Ford. For Verstappen, for the team, for the engineers who had labored through a difficult beginning, the win in Sepang meant something deeper than points on a scoreboard. "It's good to drive on a track that I like and of course win there," he said, but his words about the broader achievement carried more resonance: the turnaround had been real, the car had become genuinely better to drive, and the first season with their own engine had produced results that mattered.

Yet Verstappen was careful not to let confidence tip into overconfidence. Singapore presented a different challenge entirely—a completely different circuit, despite similar conditions, and this year featuring a sprint race for the first time. "Being a sprint weekend, it's always going to be quite tough," he acknowledged. He would make his 250th Formula 1 start this weekend, another milestone in a career already decorated with four consecutive drivers' titles from 2021 to 2024. But he did not dwell on the numbers. Each win, he insisted, carried its own character. "They all feel different because they all come down to a different way of winning and that makes it very beautiful," he said. "If the win is always the same, it's a very weird feeling and it's just very boring if everything feels the same."

This season marked his first without the drivers' championship since 2020. Lando Norris had taken the title in 2025 by two points. Some might have expected the loss to weigh on him, to create pressure or distraction heading into Singapore. Verstappen saw it differently. "Every single weekend, you just try to maximise your result. It doesn't matter if you're leading or behind, we're just always try to do our best and I don't really get bothered about these things, it doesn't put any extra pressure in any way," he said. In August, he had signed a contract extension keeping him at Red Bull through 2030, a commitment that reflected his belief in the team's direction and his own hunger to compete. "It's just working with the people and the team, keeping it fun as well and actually having a competitive car and trying to fight for the win, that's what keeps me going."

As the weekend approached, Verstappen carried the momentum of Malaysia but tempered it with realism. Singapore had eluded him for nine attempts. The sprint format was new. The car would need to perform, and he would need to execute. But he had learned something over those months of struggle and the breakthrough that followed: patience, paired with relentless effort, could eventually yield results. Whether this weekend would finally bring that elusive Singapore victory remained to be seen.