While Max Verstappen was simultaneously leading the Nurburgring 24 Hours and reminding the global motorsport audience why he is widely regarded as the greatest driver of his generation, Formula 1's own official media channels chose to look the other way.
Over the course of the endurance race weekend — a weekend on which the four-time world champion held the lead at the Green Hell for hours before a drive shaft failure in the final stages handed victory to a Mercedes-AMG GT3 — F1's Twitter and Instagram accounts posted curated montages built around words like 'heritage', 'relentless', 'triumph' and 'legacy'. Old images. Iconic moments. Including, awkwardly, a photo of Verstappen himself.
What the posts notably did not contain was any acknowledgement that the most successful active driver in the championship was, at that very moment, taking on one of the toughest events in motorsport in a different category entirely.
The optics were not lost on the audience. The flagship F1 tweet collected a flood of replies from fans pointing out the obvious gap between the messaging and the timing. As F1 News - TacticalRab put it in a video review of the weekend, Liberty Media's social team was happily posting content about golf, tennis and brand ambassadors while saying nothing about the Dutchman's headline-grabbing weekend at the Eifel.
The choice was clearly deliberate. Why would F1 voluntarily put a spotlight on its own biggest star competing somewhere else, especially at a moment when car number three has been having one of its most uncomfortable Formula 1 seasons in years? The TacticalRab analysis suggested the calculation is understandable from a commercial perspective, but the silence still left Liberty Media exposed to charges of pettiness.
There was, in particular, an instructive contrast with a separate F1 post celebrating golfer Yannik Sinner's recent success — a partner athlete the sport was happy to associate with. The Verstappen weekend got nothing. Even title sponsor Dacia, which had publicly cheered the Ferrari 296 GT3 effort, ended up taking heavy social-media engagement away from the official F1 post that did make it out.
The underlying tension here is well rehearsed. Verstappen has been openly unenthused about the direction of the 2026 regulations and the increased role of energy management in racing. His move to endurance racing in his off-weekends — including the Nurburgring 24, where he qualified third on debut and ran at the front — has been a thinly veiled reminder of which form of motorsport he genuinely loves.
The fan response makes the equation harder to manage, not easier. The flagship F1 post drew the kind of ratio that suggests there is a real cost to ignoring the most popular driver in the sport, even on a weekend when he isn't strictly working for them.
F1 has spent a decade building a brand around personalities. Choosing silence about one of those personalities, on a weekend when even the GT3 winner Maro Engel was praising Verstappen's pace at the Green Hell, was always going to be noticed. Liberty Media has work to do on goodwill with its own fanbase right now, and this weekend's social-media output did not help.
Source: youtube.com