Max Verstappen driving the Red Bull RB21 during FP3 at the 2025 Italian Grand Prix. Photo by Eustace Bagge via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
Red Bull spent most of August selling Max vs 100 as pure spectacle: one four-time Formula 1 champion, one hundred strangers, thirty laps, Silverstone. On September 9 it published the actual entry list, and on September 10 Verstappen sat down to explain why he isn’t worried about any of it. Buried in both is the detail that will actually decide whether Wednesday’s race is a rout or a real contest: a single lap, and exactly when each side is allowed to use it.
Who’s Actually on the Grid
The 100 names Red Bull released aren’t club racers padding out a number. They’re a genuinely strange cross-section of people who are fast for a living, just not in cars: rock climber Janja Garnbret, skateboarder Leticia Bufoni, freediver Molly Carlson, hard-enduro rider Billy Bolt, and a wall of streamers and creators, including Caedrel, TheGrefg, IitzTimmy and TechnoGamerz, whose day job is talking, not driving.
That mix matters more than the size of the field. Karting rewards reflexes and spatial awareness before it rewards racing experience, which is why the enduro and freestyle names on the list are arguably more dangerous to Verstappen than anyone’s subscriber count. It also explains why an inexperienced grid can be harder to pass than a disciplined one: a driver who doesn’t know the racing line yet isn’t defending it on purpose, they’re just occupying it, and unpredictable occupation is much harder to read than a clean defensive block.
The Rule Nobody’s Talking About
Every one of the 100 challengers gets a single shortcut, a fast lap that can be triggered once in the first half of the race to gain ground or shake Verstappen off. He gets the identical shortcut, except his doesn’t unlock until lap 15, the race’s halfway point. It’s a deliberately asymmetric rule, and it’s borrowed from a discipline that already knows how to use one: World Rallycross and its domestic offshoots have run joker laps, a mandatory alternate, longer section of track each driver must take once per race, for close to two decades, precisely because it stops the fastest car from checking out early. Red Bull didn’t invent the mechanic. It just pointed it at one driver instead of an entire field.
Locking Verstappen’s shortcut to the second half isn’t a handicap for its own sake. Give him the same access from lap one and the format probably ends in ten minutes: he uses it, clears twenty karts in the confusion, and the rest of the race is a formality. Delaying it means the first half has to be won the hard way, through traffic, and the shortcut only becomes useful once he’s already dealing with a smaller, faster-moving group near the front.
What Identical Karts Are Actually Testing
Red Bull has been explicit that all 101 competitors get the same equipment, which is the part of this that’s genuinely useful to a motorsport audience rather than a general one. Take away the car, the aero, the power unit, the strategy calls that decide most Formula 1 results, and what’s left is just a driver reading grip and traffic in real time. Verstappen doesn’t sound worried about that part. Asked about preparation, he pointed to the fact he raced karts from age four to fifteen: there’s no excuse to say ‘oh, I need more practice.’
That’s a fair claim about memory and feel, and a separate question from traffic management at a scale karting almost never sees. Backfire’s earlier look at the event covered the logistics of putting 101 karts on one circuit safely; the driver-side equivalent is that Verstappen has never had to lap through a hundred karts he’s never raced against, all on unfamiliar lines, in one sitting. Karting pedigree gets him up to speed. It doesn’t necessarily get him through lap 20.
Why Red Bull Needs This Right Now
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Verstappen goes into Silverstone off a 2026 Formula 1 season without a win, and Red Bull has spent the back half of the year rebuilding around him rather than just racing. It hired Aston Martin’s Tom McCullough as Head of Racing earlier this month, and it keeps leaning on karting as the pipeline for whoever eventually replaces him, most recently by fast-tracking Robin Raikkonen into its junior program. A global broadcast built entirely around Verstappen’s karting instincts is a low-risk way to remind casual viewers why he’s worth a contract through 2030, in a year the trophy case hasn’t grown.
How to Watch, and What to Watch For
Max vs 100 streams live worldwide on Disney+, which has spent 2026 building out its motorsport shelf well beyond Formula 1, and via the ESPN App in the US, with a same-day tape delay on ESPN2. Coverage starts at 5pm UK time on September 16, with racing from 6pm. The number worth tracking once it’s live isn’t Verstappen’s position, which will only move in one direction; it’s how many karts are still on course by the time his shortcut unlocks at lap 15. If the field has already thinned out by then, the format did its job. If it hasn’t, one locked lap is about to get very interesting.
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