The 2027 driver market has just opened with a thump. A straight swap of Oscar Piastri to Red Bull and Max Verstappen to McLaren — once a Reddit meme — is now being entertained by a chorus of senior F1 voices, and Juan Pablo Montoya has fired the loudest shot yet.
Speaking to Betpack, the seven-time grand prix winner argued that the trade would be commercially logical and managerially overdue. "There's a suggestion that Max and Piastri could do a straight swap. That makes some sense," Montoya said.
The Colombian's most consequential line was about Piastri's manager, the former F1 race winner Mark Webber. "From what I'm hearing Mark Webber is not happy the way things are going for Oscar at McLaren." That account, if accurate, marks a sharp shift in tone from a Piastri camp that has publicly defended McLaren's running-order calls through the early stages of the 2026 season — a season in which Mercedes rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli now leads the standings by 20 points.
Montoya then handed Piastri's negotiating table its biggest line of the year. "Piastri would find a seat anywhere." Coming from a former CART champion who knows the cost of a mid-career manufacturer move, the implication is unmistakable: Webber's leverage in any negotiation is at a multi-year high.
The trigger for the rumour is unrelated to either driver. Verstappen's race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase is leaving Red Bull at the end of 2026 to take a senior role at McLaren. Ralf Schumacher, speaking on Sky Sports last month, was among the first to argue the engineer move only made strategic sense if it foreshadowed a bigger driver move.
"Or: He goes to McLaren with his engineer, which would equally mean that there are negotiations underway at McLaren for Oscar Piastri to go to Red Bull, something we've seen before," Schumacher said.
Even Sky F1's lead correspondent David Croft, usually the calmest voice in the paddock, conceded that the rumour has legs even if he is sceptical of the destination. "I don't give it much weight but you are constantly surprised in this sport," Croft told Speedcafe. "It's kind of watch this space with interest really."
McLaren's pushback has been deliberately understated. Team principal Andrea Stella, asked in Miami about the swirl of pre-contract gossip linking him with a sudden Red Bull move, took aim with humour. "Honestly, some of the recent rumours, including those regarding astronomical salaries and mythical pre-contracts, have made me smile."
Zak Brown was even more matter-of-fact. The McLaren CEO declared "I've got the best one in pitlane, Andrea Stella" and dismissed the Lambiase signing as a coup of substance, not a precursor to anything else.
The mechanics of an actual swap are more complicated than the headline. Verstappen has a contract that runs through 2028 with an exit clause tied to performance markers. Piastri's deal was extended by McLaren last year on terms one paddock source described to Sky as "championship-tier" pay. Any deal would require synchronised buyouts, sponsor approvals on both sides and a public-facing narrative that does not embarrass either team during the run-in to a 2026 title fight.
But the political ground has shifted. Verstappen's relationship with the new Red Bull leadership under Laurent Mekies is functional rather than warm. Piastri, after a Miami weekend in which he was instructed to hold station behind Lando Norris in the closing laps, has the most explicit grievance of any current top-three driver. And Webber, whose own career was defined by being on the wrong side of a team's number-two equation at exactly this stage, knows the weight of acting before the silly season locks in.
Watch this space, as Croft says. May has barely begun.
