We have just been through that somnolent stretch of the year when Christmas bleeds into New Year and the previous season disappears almost overnight.
The mists of 2025 fade quickly, and suddenly, Formula 1 is staring down the barrel of a new season. And the honest answer is this: nobody knows what is coming. Anyone pretending they do is a fake Nostradamus.
The 2026 Formula 1 rules are not just another evolutionary step. Yes, they build on the current framework, but they are revolutionary in intent, scope, and consequence. Aero. Engines. Energy deployment. Packaging. Philosophy. DRS binned. Just about every tech rule has been poked, prodded, and/ or rewritten. This is the biggest reset the sport has seen this century.
The obvious question is the dangerous one. Do we get another Mercedes-style decade of domination, born from superior interpretation and smarter engineers than the rest, at the time? Or do we get a Brawn GP-style ambush, where one minnow team or a n00b operation reads the rulebook correctly while everyone else blinks?
Then there are the unknowns stacked on top of the unknowns. Cadillac enters from scratch, much like Gene Haas’ project got to life with Ferrari power. Audi effectively starts their first foray into Formula 1 with a head start after annexing Sauber. How these two end up will reveal the ideal template to go F1 racing. Buy a team or start one from scratch? 12th team anyone?
Power units are a mystery box. Who gets their sums right on that one will be king. You can have the best chassis on the grid, but if the PU is feeble, nothing can be done. A strong engine disguises aero and chassis flaws. Remember when Mercedes got a march on their rivals with their rockets? Chassis was secondary as we now see with their customers beating them with the same PUs.
I will stick to my theory that until we see them in action, the pecking order will not reveal itself until testing begins, when everyone arrives with a blank canvas and nowhere to hide. This is where reputations are made. And destroyed.
Adrian Newey will inevitably be name-checked, because history shows us he reads regulations better than most. But this is not a one-man sport. There are other brilliant designers out there. Get the maths wrong, though, and careers end. We have seen it before. Paddy Lowe and his entourage of the clueless did not just miss a concept at Williams. History shows he nearly wiped the team off the grid during his brief tenure at Woking.
Pressure does not even begin to describe what the top Formula 1 teams are under. So let us impose some order. Call this a virtual grid walk. Or a virtual garage walk ahead of the first test later this month. We will start with the Big Four.
McLaren Are Champions With a Loaded Gun Pointed Inwards
Start at the top. McLaren. World champions. Lando Norris, world champion. That alone changes everything. Whatever happens from here on, Norris is etched into the history of the sport. Taking the crown from Max Verstappen will always be part of his legacy but so will the fact that many believe (F1 drivers themselves) that the dethroned Champion was the better driver.Â
Nevertheless, the relief that comes with a first-world championship is real. We saw it in Max. The pressure lifts. The self-doubt evaporates. But it is immediately replaced by something else. Obligation. Media. Expectation. Norris will return from the off-season with his Formula 1 world champion status fully internalised and with demands on his time exploding.
I expect a calmer Norris. A more mature Norris. The version we saw when it mattered last season. But his biggest problem sits metres away in the same McLaren garage.
Oscar Piastri is a future champion. And an ever-present threat. Age is irrelevant. Speed is not. Skill is not. If anything, Piastri might be quicker. Anyone watching closely knows that. For now, their trajectories have danced an intertwined route. One weekend one is better, the next one the other gets the edge. a seesaw battle for supremacy between teammates. How long will the twin trajectories last before one plateaus as the other continues to rise? Who will peak first?
Teammate battles are Formula 1 distilled to its purest form. Beat your teammate is the first order of business, or you are exposed. The stopwatch does not lie. Last season was ping-pong. Momentum swung violently. There was contact. There were tears. There was tension.
Expect more of it. Papaya rules do not work. They never have. Are they even a thing? Two alpha drivers in one team always end the same way. Feathers everywhere. Very few eggs.
Andrea Stella deserves enormous credit for his ultra-calm leadership. Zak Brown deserves enormous credit, too. McLaren was dead when the American petrolhead and PR wizz took over. Properly dead after Ron Dennis all but detonated the team he built to such great heights. He left behind the worst team on the grid for Zak to revive. Turning that into a championship-winning operation in six years is extraordinary.
But staying on top is as hard as getting there. The greatest privilege in Formula 1 is having two drivers capable of fighting for wins. The greatest waste is those drivers being stuck in the midfield. McLaren cannot afford to drop the ball for this regulation cycle.
Red Bull Is Still Max’s Team, No Matter the Badge
Next up, Team Verstappen. Red Bull Racing, now with Ford very much onboard. This partnership is muscle, brand power, and marketing firepower rolled into one. But none of that matters unless Max Verstappen believes in the car. A confident Max is unstoppable. A happy Max is lethal.
If Ford and Red Bull under Laurent Mekies deliver, this team could become terrifying again. Verstappen, with a competitive car, is the most dangerous asset in the sport. If Ford takes this seriously, the rest of the grid should be nervous.
After the years of Christian Horner leadership, it has been left to Laurent Mekies to revive a team and his ace driver when they were waving white flags mid-season before the Frenchman took over as Red Bull team principal. Smartly, albeit obviously, he put all his eggs in one basket by backing Verstappen to the hilt. And they nearly stole the title.
Along the way, we saw the Liam Lawson experiment as Verstappen’s teammate lasted two races. Despicable. They put Yuki ‘I can beat Max’ Tsunoda in the car, which promptly cut the kid down to his real size and a reality check that he is nowhere in the Dutchman’s league. Like all others before him.
Into the lion’s den this season (to start with!) is Isack Hadjar. Let’s be honest, everyone who follows or works in Formula 1 wishes the kid well. But the brutal reality is that being Max Verstappen’s teammate is the hardest job in Formula 1. No one has beaten him regularly. Few have survived the Bull-pen with the four-time World Champ in it.
Hadjar is not there to beat Verstappen. He should be there to learn. To absorb. To stay close. If he matches what Sergio Perez managed at his best, that is success. Anything more is a dream waiting to come true. Will Hadjar clash with Verstappen? Or will he grow in his shadow? That storyline alone is worth watching the entire season.
One thing is guaranteed. Verstappen will deliver every single weekend. One hundred and ten percent. No excuses. No mercy. Let’s see how Hadjar adapts and responds.
Mercedes: Reset, Reality, and Redemption
Somewhere along the way, this past season, I warmed to Toto Wolff. During the Hamilton era at Mercedes, everything was built around Lewis. And rightly so. Wolff had the greatest driver of this generation and extracted a dozen Formula 1 world titles from that partnership.
Post-Hamilton, things wobbled. The Verstappen flirtation last year was clumsy and embarrassing. But Wolff recalibrated. And seemed to finally accept his hand.
George Russell and Kimi Antonelli is a serious driver pairing. I questioned Antonelli’s promotion. Many did. His Formula 2 record did not scream greatness. His Monza FP1 crash was a disaster. But then the kid did what good drivers do. He responded in a jaw-dropping manner. Invariably, when elimination looms in Qualifying, he finds a lap. Again and again. That is not luck. That is instinct.
Russell, freed from Hamilton’s shadow, has grown into a leader. Crucially, he did not turn defensive or toxic or get all prima donna as he can at times get. He embraced Antonelli and the pair are now a formidable force.
If Mercedes delivers a strong car, especially with their supposed power unit ‘advantage’, they will win races. Russell may even be ready for a title fight. But there is a problem the German juggernaut cannot ignore. McLaren showed what could be done with a Mercedes engine.
Which means Mercedes themselves failed on the chassis/aero side. A works team being beaten by its customers is humiliating. Wolff knows it. His engineers know it. We all know it. They will be under enormous pressure to be Boss again, or at least be better than the teams using their PUs.
Ferrari have run out of excuses
And then there is Ferrari. Always Ferrari. They should be central to every pre-season conversation. Instead, they are a permanent question mark. The last world championship came in 2008 when Kimi Raikkonen and Felipe Massa won the Constructors’ title. Räikkönen remains the last champion, thanks to his title a year earlier. Fernando Alonso came close, but that’s all ancient history now.
Fred Vasseur is in charge and already battle-scarred by the relentless Italian media reporting on their national team. The Frenchman revealed that Ferrari abandoned development of their 2025 sh!tbox early, namely April. That decision left scars. Lewis Hamilton looked broken. This was not the Sir Lewis of old. This was a driver questioning himself. Publicly.
Hamilton cannot lead Ferrari until he beats Charles Leclerc. That is Formula 1 law. If the car is undriveable again, this project collapses. Bookmakers are already circling and offering odds that the 41-year-old will walk away before the season ends. Early exits. Reputations on the line.
Give Hamilton a proper car and he will still win races. We saw flashes of it even last year with his cameo win inthe China Sprint Race. Everything now rests on 2026. For Vasseur, he will have a great deal of explaining to do if the next car under his watch flops. Or maybe not, they will probably fire him.
In the other Red car, Leclerc is no passenger. He is one of the few drivers capable of challenging Verstappen in equal machinery. But patience is not infinite. If Ferrari fail him again, Monaco will start looking elsewhere.
His demeanour has changed dramatically since Hamilton arrived at Maranello and wore his heart on his sleeve from the moment he felt uncomfortable. Leclerc once took it for the team without fsail, this season he took a page from the ‘F1 Drivers Moaning Handbook’ and did his own soul searching.
This meant more criticism of his team this past year than in his entire career put together. But you can’t blame him for warning them he is looking around. With a decent car, Leclerc is a force for the title because, on current form, he does not really have to worry about his teammate.
2026 is Ferrari’s line in the sand. Miss it, and the consequences will be explosive.