Back to zero
Max Verstappen no longer has penalty points on his license. Not a single one. With the arrival of June 1st, the three points he had received exactly 12 months ago during the Spanish GP in Barcelona for deliberately hitting George Russell’s Mercedes in the heated final stages of that race were also removed from his ‘record’.
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The clash between the two, who already had tense history dating back to the qualifying of the previous season’s Qatar GP, created huge tension in the paddock and pushed Verstappen to the brink of a one-race ban since the Dutch Red Bull champion reached 11 penalty points out of a possible 12. With another sanction, the four-time world champion would have been forced to miss a Grand Prix, just as happened during the 2024 season to Dane Kevin Magnussen, who was stopped for the Azerbaijan GP.
Since then, Verstappen has been particularly careful to avoid getting into complicated situations, managing not to receive any more penalties and ‘clearing’ one race after another all the sanctions he had received in the previous twelve months.
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A different evaluation criterion
It must be said, however, that at the start of the 2026 season the criteria for assigning penalty points by the stewards completely changed. Now the stewards intervene to assign penalty points on the drivers’ superlicense only for truly serious and dangerous actions, almost deliberate. In all other cases, they limit themselves to assigning the usual time penalties, without intervening by assigning penalty points. Also for this reason, in the first five GPs held this year, no driver has yet received any penalty points.
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