Sophie Kumpen was a serious karting talent long before her son became a four-time Formula One World Champion, competing at the highest level of international karting against future F1 stars, including a young Christian Horner, the man who would go on to run Red Bull Racing, the team her son would eventually drive for.
She gave up that career at 21 when she married fellow racer Jos Verstappen and had two children, Max and Victoria.
In November 2025, Max himself publicly acknowledged that his own arrival played a direct role in ending his mother’s racing career, a rare and pointed admission that reframed a story usually told only through his father’s side of the family.
Sophie Kumpen Biography
She was born on October 30, 1975, in Hasselt, a city in Belgium’s Limburg province. Sophie Kumpen grew up in a family with deep ties to both business and motorsport.
Her father, Robert Kumpen, had a business career and served as chairman of Belgian football club KRC Genk.
Her racing lineage runs through her father’s side of the family. Her uncle, Paul Kumpen, was a rally driver who first inspired her interest in the sport.
Her cousin, Anthony Kumpen, Paul’s son, went on to become a two-time NASCAR Euro Series champion, making motorsport success something of a family trait well before Max Verstappen ever sat in a kart.
As a girl, Kumpen tried several other sports and hobbies, including ballet, which she has said was ruled out almost immediately for being too wild and undisciplined a fit for something so graceful.
Max Verstappen Mother
Sophie Kumpen retired from racing in 1996 at age 21, the same year she married Dutch Formula One driver Jos Verstappen, shifting her focus to raising a family and supporting Jos through his own F1 career, which ran from 1994 to 2003.
Juggling test-driving commitments of her own, raising young children, and supporting her husband’s racing schedule became increasingly difficult, and she has said the decision to step back from competition, while difficult, ultimately came down to family.
The couple had two children, Max Emilian Verstappen, born September 30, 1997, in Hasselt, and Victoria Jane Verstappen, born in 1999.
Sophie and Jos divorced in 2008, after 12 years of marriage. After the split, Max primarily lived with his father, who took over managing his son’s karting and racing development directly, while Victoria lived primarily with her mother.
Jos has since remarried twice, most recently to Sandy Sijtsma in 2018. Max has spoken about his own beginnings in the sport in interviews, describing how he was just four years old when he first asked his father for a kart after watching a younger friend already racing.
His father initially told him to wait until he turned six, a decision that led to days of crying until, by Max’s own account, it was his mother who eventually called Jos and told him they needed to buy their son a kart immediately.
He began competing at seven and went on to win 68 of his first 70 kart races.
In November 2025, Max spoke publicly about his mother’s racing career in a way that had not really been addressed before, effectively acknowledging that his own birth played a direct role in ending it.
Speaking to media around the United States Grand Prix, he noted that both of his parents raced at a high level, his father in Formula One and his mother in karting against names like Jenson Button and Giancarlo Fisichella who went on to reach F1 themselves.
When Red Bull principal Christian Horner recalled that Sophie had been a very good racer, Max cut in with a pointed remark about her marrying his father, an acknowledgment that his arrival, and the family life that followed, was ultimately what ended her competitive career.
Career
Sophie Kumpen got into a kart for the first time early on, drawn in by her uncle and cousin’s racing backgrounds, and has said the speed itself was what hooked her immediately.
She rose quickly through Belgian and international karting, and by 1991, at just 16 years old, she was already considered a serious talent, finishing ninth in the Formula A World Championship that year.
As a teenager, she also competed in the Junior Karting Championship, where in 1989 she raced against a young Christian Horner, decades before he became team principal of Red Bull Racing. This team would go on to sign her son.
Over the course of her career, she also raced against a remarkable list of future Formula One drivers, including Giancarlo Fisichella, Jarno Trulli, Nick Heidfeld, Jan Magnussen and Dario Franchitti. She was teammates with future F1 world champion Jenson Button.
Kumpen has said she was always told her driving style was fluid and that she set unusually consistent lap times, a trait she believes Max inherited directly from her rather than from his father.
She competed at the Karting World Championship across five appearances between 1991 and 1995, racing for teams including Tecno, Tony Kart and CRG in the Formula A, K and Super A classes, with a best individual finish of ninth place in 1991.
Along the way she also won two Belgian national championships. Her signature achievement came in 1995, when she won the Andrea Margutti Trophy, becoming just the third woman in history to win a major international karting championship, following Susanna Raganelli and Cathy Muller.
She had genuine ambitions of progressing into car racing and possibly Formula One itself before her career took a different direction.
2013 Comeback and Career-Ending Injury
After 17 years away from competition, Kumpen returned to racing in 2013, entering the Formido Swift Cup in a Suzuki. The comeback was short-lived.
She made it to the final race of the series at the Zandvoort circuit in the Netherlands, where she crashed and fractured a vertebra, an injury serious enough that she was advised to stop racing permanently. That crash marked the definitive end of her competitive driving career at age 37.
Life After Racing
Kumpen now works as a social worker at OCMW, the Belgian public social welfare organization, a career entirely separate from the racing world that defined her twenties.
She has remained closely connected to Max’s career from the sidelines in ways that go well beyond simply attending races.
According to Belgian outlet De Limburger, Kumpen visits a small chapel in the Belgian village of Heppeneert before every one of her son’s Grands Prix to light candles for him, a ritual she has kept up for years.
Recalling Max’s first World Championship win in Abu Dhabi in December 2021, she described shouting for angels on the final lap, saying she does not believe in God but does believe in angels, and that she has lost count of how many candles she has lit over the years.
She has also spoken about the family’s long friendship with seven-time world champion Michael Schumacher, who was close with Jos Verstappen as a former Benetton teammate, sharing that the families vacationed together and that Schumacher was always sweet with Max as a child.
Kumpen has also spoken publicly about the specific anxiety of watching a child compete in one of the most dangerous sports in the world, telling Dutch broadcaster RTL that she often thinks about Lewis Hamilton’s mother, Carmen Lockhart, and the years of stress that come with watching a son race at that level.
Sophie Kumpen’s Net Worth
Sophie Kumpen’s net worth has not been publicly verified. She is best known for her own career in motorsport. Before becoming the mother of four-time Formula 1 world champion Max Verstappen, she was a successful competitive kart racer from Belgium.
Formula 1 has described her as a successful karting driver and has highlighted her role in the racing background that helped shape her son’s early development.
Her son, Max Verstappen, has built a vastly larger financial profile through his Formula 1 career. Forbes estimates that Verstappen earned $86 million in 2026, including $78 million from on-track earnings and $8 million from endorsements and other off-track income.
Forbes also estimated Verstappen’s 2025 Formula 1 earnings at $76 million, made up of approximately $65 million in salary and $11 million in bonuses.
