Sour grapes. That’s the accusation Max Verstappen’s detractors have been throwing at him so far in F1 2026.
With Red Bull struggling at the start of this season, it is as easy as it is convenient to dismiss Verstappen’s comments as the classic complaints of a driver stuck in an uncompetitive car.
What Max Verstappen said about the F1 2026 rules back in 2023
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Yet there’s quite a large hole in that narrative: Verstappen has been saying the same thing about the F1 2026 rules for nearly three years now.
Max’s stance against the regulations is no kneejerk response to the situation in which he finds himself.
Instead, it is borderline heroic.
From the beginning, he has been the only one with the courage of his convictions to express reservations about the direction Formula 1 is heading and the 2026 trap it was blindly walking into.
His recent remarks in Japan, that his unhappiness with the current rules could ultimately drive him away from F1, saw him cross into the territory of martyrdom.
Only now are some drivers starting to find their voices.
Some, but not all.
A couple of those who currently find themselves in competitive cars maintain that they are quite happy with the current rules – or at least they are for as long as they remain successful.
Their selfishness in the face of the sport’s self-made crisis should not be easily forgotten.
They are, as the very modern saying goes, on the wrong side of F1 history.
Max? Say what you like about him, but he saw this mess coming from the very start.
And, more than that, he had the bravery to speak up about it too.
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It was following his dominant victory at the 2023 Austrian Grand Prix – the really dominant one, you’ll recall, in which he pitted for fresh tyres in the closing stages purely for a stab at the fastest lap – that Verstappen first aired concerns about 2026.
Asked if he agreed with the opinion of then-Red Bull team principal Christian Horner that the 2026 rules were not the right step for F1, Verstappen told PlanetF1.com and other media outlets: “I’ve been talking about that with the team and I’ve seen the data already on the simulator as well.
“To me, it looks pretty terrible.
“If you go flat out on the straight at Monza, four or five hundred [metres] before the end of the straight you have to downshift flat out because that’s faster.
“I think that’s not the way forward. Of course, probably that’s one of the worst tracks.
“But for me, the problem is it looks like it’s going to be an ICE competition: whoever has the strongest engine will have a big benefit.
“But I don’t think that should be the intention of Formula 1, because then you will start a massive development war again and it will probably become quite expensive to find a few horsepower here and there. I think it actually should be opposite.
“Plus, the cars probably have a lot less drag, so it will be even harder to overtake on the straight.
“And then you have the active aerodynamics, which you can’t control – well, the system will control it for you.
“Which then I think makes it very awkward to drive, because I prefer to control it myself.
“Of course, when you’re behind someone, maybe you need more front or more rear. These kind of things.
“If the system starts to control that for you, I don’t think that’s the right way forward. Plus, the weight is going up again.
“We have to seriously look at this because ’26 is not that far away.
“And at the moment, to me, it looks very bad from all the numbers and what I see from the data already, so it’s not something I’m very excited about at the moment.”
The 2026 rules were further refined following Verstappen’s comments, with the minimum weight of the current cars actually 32 kilograms lower than the 2025 models.
Likewise, active aero is controlled in 2026 by the driver in the same way as the old DRS mechanism.
Yet in almost every other respect – the need to downshift on the straights, the manufacturer with the strongest engines being on top – his critique of the 2026 rules has proven prophetic.
Certainly, Verstappen was mindful of the trouble with not-so-super clipping long before the F1 term of 2026 was even invented.
Four days after his comments in the Austria press conference, during his Thursday media session at the British Grand Prix, Verstappen was asked specifically the counter-intuitive driving style required from the 2026 cars, including the alien experience of downshifting on the straights.
He replied: “It’s just not right, I think, that you have to drive the car like that.
“And also, the way under braking the engine just almost stays flat out, I think it will just create [a] very weird atmosphere – it’s a bit like with the blown diffusers, just being flat out almost.
“For me, it just looks very weird and also with the active aero that is regulating itself, it looks a bit odd to me.
“I think it’s really overcomplicating a lot of things.
“And, from the engine side, like I said already in the press conference last time, we really need to have a good look at it.
“But I also know that people think they will have an advantage, so they will say that the regulations are good.
“I think from my side, just looking at it as a racing driver, it looks wrong.
“But you always have these politics in Formula 1 where one team thinks: ‘We can take an advantage out of this.’
“They will say it’s great, but at the end of the day we really have to look into what is good for the sport and I think at the moment, with how it’s looking, I don’t think it’s good for the sport.”
Then came the final question on the matter.
Verstappen was asked if any of his fellow competitors shared his concerns with how the 2026 rules were looking at that stage.
His response?
“Yeah… I’m just not sure how many are actually fully aware of how it’s looking.”
If the drivers weren’t all fully aware back then, now most of them can see the light.
Like so often on track over recent years, though, it was Max who got there first.
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