Max Verstappen will try to overtake 100 other drivers in a karting challenge at Silverstone on Sept. 16, putting the four-time world champion back into the kind of race that shaped his career long before Formula 1. will live stream the event on Disney+.
That is why Max Vs 100 is drawing attention now. Verstappen spent years on kart tracks as a child, and the event turns that background into the main attraction. Between the ages of four and 15, his life revolved around go-karting, with weekends spent racing across Europe and weekdays often ending in his father's workshop, where Jos worked on the engines and handled much of the preparation.
Verstappen has said karting was a defining stretch of his life. He described it as a really nice period, but also one built around constant travel and work. Jos was his mechanic and engine tuner, and the pair even had their own dyno in the workshop. On race weekends, Jos loaded the kart into the back of their van, and during the busiest years he calculated they were covering more than 60,000 motorway miles a year. The routine took them from Belgium and the Netherlands to Italy, Spain and the U.K., with the local circuit in Genk, Belgium becoming a second home and a place where Max tested new parts multiple times a week.
The scale of that upbringing helps explain why this challenge matters. Verstappen continued racing through wet winter months when others would pack up early, and he has recalled warming his gloves on the exhaust because his hands were so cold. He said the heat could make his fingers swell, leaving him driving with thick hands. That kind of detail matters because it shows how much of his edge was built before he ever reached F1.
There was also friction in that path. The school he attended in Belgium did not recognise go-karting as a sport, which made it difficult to get exemptions from class for races. That problem did not stop the schedule, but it shows how unusual the karting life was: a child moving between lessons, workshops and tracks while trying to fit a racing career into a system that did not quite know what to make of it.
What happens next is simple, even if the race itself is not. Verstappen will line up at Silverstone on Sept. 16 against 100 other drivers, but the format and scoring for Max Vs 100 have not been laid out. For now, the draw is the test itself: a champion who grew up around kart tracks stepping into a mass kart race that asks whether the habits built in childhood still matter when the field is this large.
