Max Verstappen's 2026 season has become a study in misfortune — and one of his own quotes about the number on his car is now reading like a warning he gave himself.
The four-time world champion lost the right to run the number one when Lando Norris took the 2025 title in Abu Dhabi. Rather than slide back into the 33 he made famous between 2015 and 2021, Verstappen took the number three he had wanted since he was a child. At the time he made it sound like a homecoming.
"My favourite number has always been three, apart from number one," Verstappen said when the switch was confirmed. "We can now swap, so it'll be number three. Number 33 was always fine, but I just like one three better than two. I always said it represented double luck, but I've already had my luck in Formula One."
That last line, spoken cheerfully, now reads very differently.
In Australia he spun in qualifying, failed to make Q2, started 20th and dragged himself back to sixth. In China he retired with a technical failure. In Japan — a circuit where he put it on pole in 2025 — the car would not respond, he qualified 11th and finished eighth. Miami briefly hinted at a recovery with a front-row qualifying performance, until an early spin forced a chaotic pit stop and a fifth-place damage limitation. Five rounds in, the number three on the Red Bull has produced exactly zero podiums.
The pattern has followed him beyond Formula 1 too. Running for his own Verstappen.com Racing outfit at the Nurburgring Langstrecken-Serie, his crew dominated the four-hour NLS2 race only to be disqualified for exceeding the tyre allocation. The NLS5 preparation event ended with a broken splitter and a 38th-place finish. Each time, the team and the fans consoled themselves with the same line — better here than at the 24 Hours.
It did not hold. Last weekend's 24 Hours of the Nurburgring drew a record 352,000 spectators, a turnout the German promoters openly attributed to the so-called Verstappen Effect. Max produced two extraordinary double stints, the Red Bull Motorsport YouTube commentary literally gasping as he scythed through traffic in the dark. Then in the early hours of Sunday, with three hours left to run and the car still in contention, his teammate Daniel Juncadella reported a warning, then noises, then nothing — a failure that could not be fixed quickly enough to matter. The team completed the final two laps as a courtesy to the grandstands.
The race was won by the sister Mercedes-AMG GT3, the number 80 entry, with Maro Engel among the winning drivers. Engel was the man who very publicly raised an eyebrow when Verstappen broke the Nordschleife lap record in 2025; Verstappen replied directly on social media at the time. The symmetry was not lost on Dutch fans on Sunday night.
That leaves the question YouTuber Wimbo, of WimboFormula, raised in his analysis of the season so far: would Verstappen be better off returning to 33? The number was originally a workaround. Daniel Ricciardo had three, so the teenage Verstappen took the next-best option in 2015. Ricciardo has since retired and the FIA's rule that a number must lie dormant for a season before being reissued was relaxed, freeing three for the driver who had always wanted it.
The sporting case for changing again is thin. Drivers do not chase numerology — they chase setups, tyre windows and reliable power units. But Verstappen's own framing of the swap, the "double luck" line that has aged so badly, has given the season a narrative it did not need. He said his luck had already been used up in Formula 1. So far in 2026, both on grand prix Sundays and on a foggy Nordschleife in May, the universe appears to be agreeing with him.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/verstappen-number-three-curse-double-luck-quote-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
