Why Max Verstappen wanted Nico Hulkenberg to be his teammate at Red Bull

F1 pundit Ben Anderson mentioned that F1 world champion Max Verstappen would have been happy if Nico Hulkenberg was his teammate. The German driver returned to the grid at the start of the 2023 season, replacing Mick Schumacher in the Haas F1 team.

In the 2023 season so far, Hulkenberg has impressed everyone with his performances, reaching Q3 in all three races and even getting a P7 in Melbourne ahead of his teammate, Kevin Magnussen. While appearing on The Race podcast, Anderson said:

"A motivated Hulkenberg who suits the car and is comfortable is gonna perform fairly relentlessly. He's a guy that even Max Verstappen would have been happy to have as a teammate. I don't think so because Max thinks he will be comfortably faster than Hulkenberg, although he might be. It's because he's a driver that he respects and drives more in a similar way to Max. So it would have been quite useful for him to have that similar reference on the other end of the garage."

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"Yeah, but I didn't have a seat in Formula 1 that I could offer him" - Toto Wolff on Max Verstappen

Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff mentioned that he couldn't sign Max Verstappen with the German team as he had no seats available during the 2015 season. In an interview with Motorsport Italy, Wolf stated:

"Yeah, but I didn't have a seat in Formula 1 that I could offer him. We had Lewis [Hamilton] and Nico [Rosberg] and they both had long-term contracts. Max was clearly an interesting young man but at the time we could offer him a place in GP2 and then maybe a contract. But Helmut was able to offer him a place in Formula 1 and in the end I also advised him to go that route. And that meant seeing him leave the Mercedes orbit."

Addressing the topic further, he continued:

"It is undoubtedly an advantage to be able to have a team like they [Red Bull] have in which you can evaluate the drivers on the field. It was a big advantage in their case to be able to evaluate Honda [with Toro Rosso in 2018] before the move to the main team [in 2019], but it is a very expensive operation. You have to be able to afford to spend 100 million a season to be able to judge the drivers, and I repeat, it is the best way to do it, but it is also very expensive."

It would have been fascinating to see if Max Verstappen would have joined Mercedes and raced alongside Lewis Hamilton.