This is a really tricky question to answer because Formula 1 teams have become increasingly secretive about the lengths of their driver contracts in recent years.
However, some things are known for certain.
The big one is Max Verstappen. He’s the keystone of the driver market because he is regarded by everyone as the best out there.
The four-time champion has a contract with Red Bull that runs until 2028. However, it has performance clauses in it, which mean he is free to leave the team if he is not in a certain position in the championship by a certain point of the season.
The way Red Bull are performing at the moment, there is absolutely no chance that Verstappen will be high enough in the championship to lock him in by the summer break unless they have a massive turnaround in form.
So, we can assume that Verstappen is a free agent this summer if he wants to be.
The questions then would be: a) does he want to leave Red Bull; b) does he want to go to another F1 team and if so which one; and c) might he leave F1 and go and race elsewhere? In Japan, he confirmed he was considering the last option.
If he wants to stay in F1, the obvious destination would be Mercedes. Team principal Toto Wolff has been courting Verstappen pretty openly for the past two years.
However, both George Russell and Kimi Antonelli are said to have contracts that lock them in at Mercedes beyond the end of this year.
Wolff said in an interview with Austria’s OE24 last month: “We have two drivers with whom we have long-term, multi-year contracts. I couldn’t be happier with both of them.
“Both are delivering top performances, so there’s absolutely no reason to even consider a line-up change, or other drivers. I say this with the utmost respect for Max.”
Of course, in F1 no contract is completely concrete, there is always room for manoeuvre. But on the face of it, that does suggest the door at Mercedes is shut for Verstappen for now.
McLaren might also be appealing to Verstappen, especially with his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase heading there.
Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are under contract at least until the end of 2027, according to the team. And McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown has said on a number of occasions that he believes they have the best driver line-up in F1.
It’s also hard to see how Verstappen would fit in with McLaren’s racing philosophy and the way they operated with their drivers in the championship fight last year.
The other leading team is Ferrari. BBC Sport’s sources say that Lewis Hamilton signed a firm three-year deal when he joined the team for the start of the 2025 season – and certain things Hamilton said last year strongly implied that was indeed the case.
Assuming that’s accurate, the seven-time champion is locked in to the end of 2027, and Charles Leclerc’s deal is at least that long.
The other big name to think about is Fernando Alonso. His Aston Martin contract definitely runs out at the end of this season.
Alonso said in a BBC Sport interview at the end of 2024 that he would go into 2026 thinking it was his last season, but see how he felt in the course of it. I know that was still his mindset through last year.
Amid all the noise about Aston Martin and Honda’s struggles at the start of this season, Alonso has not yet been asked how he feels about his future.
He will be 45 in July, and he has just become a father for the first time. But he loves driving with a passion. And if you want to drive all the time, why not do so in the fastest racing cars in the world if you can?
How will Alonso view the prospect of racing in F1 in 2027 in the context of Aston Martin’s struggles?
On one level, it’s hard to imagine he wants his final season in F1 to be as bad as it is right now. And having finally joined forces with Adrian Newey, will he want to stop before he’s had a chance to drive a car that has not been designed under such a short and compromised timeframe as this year’s?
On another level, though, F1 is a brutal schedule and Alonso has been doing it for a long time. Does he have the energy to continue? And do the team want him to?
He may be getting on a bit now, but he’s obviously still extremely good. And it’s difficult to imagine that Aston Martin are especially appealing to other top drivers at the moment.
Might Alonso in the end give it one more trip around the sun in F1?
