Verstappen handed surprise Hamilton judgement by F1 legend

A renewal of old rivalries between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen is not on the cards, one F1 legend believes.

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Max Verstappen will “not be a problem” for Lewis Hamilton in the 2025 F1 world championship, reckons Juan Pablo Montoya.

Verstappen enters the new season as the four-time defending world champion whilst Hamilton has swapped Mercedes for Ferrari in a bid to claim his eighth world title.

But Red Bull struggled with its 2024 car, with an alarming dip in performance which the team did not fully understand even though it did rally late on to allow Verstappen to clinch the drivers’ title.

The team is also facing the loss of Adrian Newey after he quit to join Aston Martin, with the McLaren and Ferrari cars both considerably faster than Red Bull at the end of last season, with the 2025 machines set to be largely evolutions of the 2024 ones.

Looking ahead to the new season, six-time F1 winner Montoya believes Verstappen will not be able to fight closely with old title rival Hamilton.

Max Verstappen is not going to be Lewis’s problem this year,” Montoya told OnlineCassino.com. 

“I’d be surprised if Red Bull comes out swinging like the last few years, Adrian Newey came out the other day saying that the problems at Red Bull are not as simple as they think it is.

“It’s really difficult because when you believe what you’re doing is right and all of a sudden things stop working, how far back do you go, and at what point do you go, ‘Is what we’re doing now right or are we still wrong?’

“If you’re saying you’re building the car wrong and you realize what you’re doing is wrong, then how convinced are you that what you’re doing now is completely right?

“At some point, they have just got to go: ‘This is what we believe in, and this is where we’re going to put an effort in, and this is what we’re going to do, and this is what’s going to happen.

“You just start moving sideways or even backwards. If you keep going forward based on the wrong basics you’re never going to get out of the hole.

“That hole can be very deep, that’s the problem.”