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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I’m considering an intriguing new parallel between two Formula 1 legends. Can you tell there’s suddenly no racing to discuss?
I’m Alex, and with Luke Smith and Madeline Coleman enjoying well-earned breaks from covering the frantic opening to the 2026 campaign, it’s just me in your inbox today.
Manpower or Motor Power: Verstappen, Senna on side of driver skill
Before Luke took time off, he produced this excellent piece on the topic of the moment: Will Max Verstappen leave F1 over his distaste for the new cars?
We’ve been over Verstappen’s criticisms of the new machines, and specifically the engines that power them, plenty here in PT of late.
But Luke broke the debate down into the key combination of how Verstappen’s contract could now allow him to walk away from Red Bull after 2026 and that “there’s too much else in Verstappen’s life that does give him the kind of joy that F1 doesn’t appear to right now.”
Read Luke’s piece here. One of the first comments posted under the article really stood out to me.
Because John P. has a point, which ties into a phrase I’m hearing more and more as 2026 goes on: “History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
In F1, Mercedes is winning comfortably at the front after a change in engine design rules, just as it did the last time regulations changed in 2014. And Verstappen’s desire to sample categories outside F1 matches nicely with late Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna’s career crossroads in the early 1990s, as John P. mentions.
Specifically, how both drivers — each an F1 dominator, serial winner and uncompromising racer — have felt F1 isn’t giving them their desired thrill.
On a separate note at this stage, news dropped this week that Lance Stroll will copy Verstappen in racing an Aston Martin GT3 sports car at the GT World Challenge Europe round from April 11-12 at the Paul Ricard track in France.
But sticking to actually successful F1 drivers, this Verstappen/Senna comparison stands out nicely nowadays. Particularly given these comments Senna made after he tested an IndyCar in December 1992:
“Today, F1 is so sophisticated, the computers do most of it for you,” Senna said in the Jan. 7, 1993 issue of then-weekly British magazine “Autosport.”
“If you’ve got a clever computer, you’re in good shape. What I saw driving the IndyCar was that the man’s input has tremendous value. It was something really exciting.”
That sounds a lot like Verstappen’s point that the F1 yo-yo racing featured so far this season is like “playing Mario Kart” (in how the engine electrics systems mean passing is much easier, as the cars exchange being starved of energy in said systems).
It isn’t the driver doing the hard work.
“You are boosting past, then you run out of battery the next straight, they boost past you again,” Verstappen pretty explosively said after the Chinese GP. “For me, it’s just a joke.
Now, there are important differences in each case here.
The F1 cars Senna was railing against were incredibly sophisticated — arguably the cleverest to ever feature in the championship.
They had automatic gearboxes, traction control and auto-leveling suspension. These were driver aids — subsequently banned for 1994, just when Senna finally got his desired move away from the McLaren team he’d made his F1 home between 1988-1993.
Verstappen still wants things to work out with his own Red Bull. That much was clear when he said to the BBC in the aftermath of the Suzuka race, where he finished eighth, that he still enjoys “working with my team. It’s like a second family.”
Luke’s point about Verstappen’s contract shows how the Dutchman and his camp were careful to include a clause where he could see how the pecking order looked around Red Bull’s first attempt at building an F1 engine.
But, following his 2021 title triumph, he couldn’t have known when he signed his deal through 2028 just how little he’d like the style of racing that engine — and those produced by Mercedes, Ferrari and Honda — would require.
Senna got what he wanted in terms of driver aids disappearing, after a 1993 season when he was famously paid $1 million per race. And we can’t ignore the potential for Verstappen’s current gloomy position to be about benefitting him commercially too, somehow.
But it seems F1 may have to make a similarly major pivot on car technology to keep its current drivers around post-2026, as it once did during Senna’s career.
Alpine’s Letter: Team condemns abuse, dismisses conspiracy
It was shaping up to be a quiet end to the week ahead of the Easter break, when all 11 teams get a long weekend off. Then Alpine dropped a rather extraordinary 1,200-word “open letter” to its fans, and those of F1 overall.
Jaw and floor came close to meeting as it went on, and on, and on.
A team moving to condemn social media abuse is, depressingly, nothing new in 2026.
Headlines on the matter aren’t even new to Alpine this year, after its former driver Jack Doohan said on the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive” that he received death threats at the 2025 Miami GP.
That was Doohan’s final race before he was replaced in Alpine’s lineup— alongside Pierre Gasly — by Franco Colapinto.
And it was the incidents Colapinto was involved in with Haas drivers Esteban Ocon and Ollie Bearman in China and Japan, respectively this season, that triggered the following online hate of each and prompted Alpine’s letter.
The statement included the lines: “This isn’t about one particular fanbase, it’s about the entire F1 community coming together to enjoy the sport we all love and are passionate about.”
The gaps don’t need to be very large between those lines to work out which fanbase Alpine is discussing. After all, before the China race even finished, Colapinto’s management already had to put out a statement on X asking fans not to “send hate messages or death threats to Esteban, his family, or the Haas F1 team.”
But that Alpine also said it made an “oversight” in not calling out the abuse Ocon suffered “sooner” and that it had to defend “one of our own drivers” from further abuse, around that already flying around over the Bearman crash, is what really stood out.
Because Alpine dedicated over half its letter to explaining the suggestions Colapinto was being sabotaged this season in favor of Gasly — who has made an excellent start and scored in all three events so far, to Colapinto’s best result of 10th place in the Chinese GP — were “completely unfounded.”
We’ve covered this before in PT, but F1 teams just don’t go about holding one driver or car back, when the highest points total from two entries combined in the constructors’ championship is always the primary aim.
You can read Alpine’s full letter here.
Sport Crossover: Soccer players share F1 knowledge
We love a sports crossover at The Athletic, so here’s two involving F1 and football (for my fellow Brits) or soccer (for our American readers).
First up there was Darnell Furlong — a right-back player for English Football League Championship club Ipswich Town — showing seriously impressive F1 knowledge by recognizing tracks being featured in a series of clips.
At first I was smug to have exclaimed “Austria, Monaco, Silverstone, Baku, Monza and Suzuka” as the shots of those venues flashed by, just before Furlong did likewise.
Then I realized he was going ON SOUND ALONE.
A handy device isn’t visible in the clip Ipswich shared, but I’m taking Furlong at these words: “I can just hear, like I can see.”
“When it’s slowing down, how much it’s slowing down, the gap between the next corner. I first noticed when I could do it at home and I’d be doing something but not watching, and I’d notice that (a driver had) done something … different. And I’d turn around and (see) something’s not quite on.”
Then on Wednesday, Haas turned up at the training ground of current Championship-leading club, Coventry City.
This wasn’t some jet-lag-curing excursion for the American team’s F1 race crew once it arrived back at its nearby Banbury base in the UK from Suzuka. Instead, team boss Ayao Komatsu is a long-time Coventry supporter, after discovering the club through teammates when playing rugby as a student at (sort of) nearby Loughborough University in the 1990s.
Komatsu had previously welcomed Coventry winger Tatsuhiro Sakamoto to Haas’ Banbury facility, which Coventry turned into this great video that charts both of their careers.
Outside the Points
❗ Madeline explained how the F1 Academy championship will expand its schedules in Montreal and Austin to replace the races lost in the cancellation of the 2026 Saudi Arabian GP, where the all-female driver series would’ve been on the support bill.
🏎 And both Madeline and Luke produced our regular post-GP mailbag, where they answered questions after the Japanese race on topics including the intra-Mercedes title battle and what F1 can now do to try and fix its problematic new cars during the unexpected spring break.
‼️ Also in the mailbag, a meeting on April 9 between key F1 stakeholders should reveal how things could change for the new engines heading to the next race in Miami in early May. I’m sure Verstappen will be watching the outcome of this one closely.
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