Calum Nicholas, Max Verstappen’s long-serving mechanic turned Red Bull Racing ambassador, believes F1 2025 is the final season of the Dutchman’s career.

Nicholas made the bold prediction that Verstappen will successfully capture a fifth consecutive World Championship in F1 2025, and at that point, announce his retirement from Formula 1.

Max Verstappen to retire after F1 2025?

After rising to end Lewis Hamilton’s dominance of Formula 1 in 2021, Verstappen embarked on a run of four straight Drivers’ Championship wins and is chasing a fifth in F1 2025, though he has work to do against the rampant McLaren, Verstappen 49 points behind Championship leader Oscar Piastri after nine rounds.

However, speaking over a round of golf on Lucas Stewart’s YouTube channel, Nicholas not only predicted Verstappen to bounce back and win that fifth straight title, but also to retire from Formula 1 off the back of it.

A long-time presence on Verstappen’s side of the Red Bull garage in his senior engine technician role, Nicholas announced ahead of the F1 2025 campaign getting underway that he was to take up a new position as a Red Bull Racing ambassador.

Asked to ‘fill in the blank’ on how many World Championships Verstappen will finish his Formula 1 career with, Nicholas replied: “Five.

“I think Max is going to win the Drivers’ this year, and then I think he’s going to call it a day.”

Asked if he knows something we don’t here, Nicholas clarified: “No, I definitely don’t know anything.”

However, when it comes to Verstappen winning the F1 2025 title, despite at this stage being the underdog, Nicholas warned: “To not back Max is just like lunacy, I think.”

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While winning a fifth title this year is far from out of reach for Verstappen, regaining the Constructors’ crown is becoming a long stretch for Red Bull, the team now 218 points behind runaway leaders McLaren.

The fact that Verstappen has scored 137 of those points highlights the continued problem that is the second seat, Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda both struggling to impress after Sergio Perez departed Red Bull at the end of 2024, following similar issues.

But, as Nicholas insisted that the Red Bull cars “are the same”, and that the second seat “curse” is not a thing, he would offer some insight into why he thinks Verstappen’s team-mates are unable to deliver the same level of performance.

“The guy is just really really good,” said Nicholas. “Not in terms of just his technical skill and his talent, but I’ve watched Max grow into this guy that can do everything. He does everything well now.

“And I think it’s just added pressure. I know the cars are the same. I spent all this time building them!

“Other than things that you change for setup, driver preference, comfort, things like that, the cars are built the same, for the most part.

“Sometimes you might have a weekend where you haven’t got a set of upgrades for both cars and things like that, but over the course of the season, those cars are essentially the same.

“So, I don’t think it’s like the seat is cursed, I think… Okay, so you look at when we took Max into the team in 2016, it was much lower pressure, because we weren’t there winning, Merc were winning, we weren’t there winning, so the whole pressure around the team was essentially less.

“When you come into a team that’s had the dominant season that we had in 2023, the pressure is very different. Most successful ever season in Formula 1, you’re now the second driver against the guy that’s done all of these things.

“It’s a very different ballgame in terms of where you need to be in your headspace.”

Verstappen is under contract at Red Bull until the end of 2028.

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