The F1 drivers who need a big season in 2026

Formula 1’s 2026 regulation reset will not only reorder the competitive landscape; it will also remove the comfort of continuity and expose reputations to quick reappraisals for the drivers.

Some will arrive with credit in the bank, others with patience already wearing thin.

Like some teams, several drivers will be left with few excuses in 2026, which could end up feeling less like an opportunity and more like a reckoning.

Here we look at the drivers who need a big season as F1 enters a new era.

Lewis Hamilton

Perhaps no driver arrives at the 2026 reset with more to prove, or more to lose, than Lewis Hamilton.

The statistics alone make 2025 for uncomfortable reading: his worst season in F1 by results, one in which the decline narrative finally gained enough substance to escape easy dismissal.

His partnership with Ferrari was supposed to be a dream scenario for both, but it quickly turned into a nightmare, in the British driver’s own words.

Unable to match his team-mate, Hamilton finished a distant sixth in the standings, having not scored a podium in 24 grands prix.

However, the pressure on Hamilton is no longer only about laptime.

At 40-plus, the question has shifted from whether he still can perform at the elite level to whether he still wants to endure what modern Formula 1 demands.

Throughout 2025, Hamilton sounded increasingly frustrated, even defeatist at times, his radio messages and media appearances reflecting not the galvanising discontent of a champion dragging a team forward, but a weariness that cut against the image Ferrari expected when it signed him.

That matters because 2026 will be unforgiving to drivers who need a car to come to them.

The new regulations will reward adaptability, technical clarity and psychological resilience – areas Hamilton once dominated, but which inevitably dull when confidence erodes.

Ferrari has invested not in a legacy act, but in the idea that Hamilton can still impose standards, stabilise development direction and extract performance when reference points are scarce. If he cannot, the consequences are stark.

A second season of visible struggle would not just dent Hamilton’s reputation; it would refract backwards through his entire late-career narrative, recasting the Ferrari move as indulgence rather than ambition.

In 2026, Hamilton needs to reassert his authority, over the car, over the team, and over the story being written about him as his F1 career nears the chequered flag.

Oscar Piastri

Oscar Piastri’s 2025 season was strong enough to confirm his status as a genuine championship-level driver, yet awkward enough to raise the stakes heading into 2026.

Losing the title fight to Lando Norris did not expose a weakness so much as it clarified an internal hierarchy that McLaren spent all of 2025 being careful to avoid defining.

Piastri was consistently fast, technically impressive and increasingly assertive in wheel-to-wheel combat, but Norris ended up being the reference when it mattered most and eventually went on to take the crown.

As McLaren aims to consolidate as F1’s best team, bouncing back in 2026 will be very important for the Australian driver.

The danger for Piastri is not stagnation, but the slow settling of assumptions about where he sits within the team.

F1 is unforgiving to drivers who allow themselves to be framed as the ‘very good’ alternative to a ‘great’ team-mate. Once that framing settles, it can become self-reinforcing, both in terms of strategy calls and even long-term contractual decisions.

A new generation of cars offers Piastri the chance to disrupt those internal assumptions and move on from 2025’s defeat.

His reputation as an analytical, adaptable driver should suit the regulation change.

If Norris again emerges as McLaren’s emotional and competitive centre of gravity, Piastri risks being locked into a supporting role before his prime has properly begun.

Isack Hadjar

Few drivers will face a steeper learning curve in 2026 than Isack Hadjar.

Only in his second Formula 1 season, he will find himself measured not against expectations of growth, but against Max Verstappen – the most complete competitive reference of the current era – inside a team with an unusually low tolerance for prolonged acclimatisation.

Hadjar has, so far, struck the right tone. He has been open about expecting to be slower than Verstappen, framing the opportunity as an education rather than an immediate duel with the four-time champion.

That sort of realism is sensible and expected, but it comes with an expiration date at Red Bull.

The team’s recent history offers clear warnings.

Liam Lawson’s demotion after two races exposed how brutally Red Bull will prioritise short-term performance over long-term potential, while Yuki Tsunoda’s extended audition demonstrated that even modest improvement is not enough.

The 2026 rules change complicates the picture further. New cars will magnify the value of a stable benchmark, and Verstappen will inevitably become the axis around which development and understanding revolve. For a young driver, that can be both a gift and a trap.

Hadjar is unlikely to threaten Verstappen, and he doesn’t need to, but he does need to become operationally useful fast, unlike his predecessors.

He needs to be close enough to validate set-ups, robust enough to absorb difficult weekends, and quick enough to justify Red Bull’s patience and help Verstappen when needed.

Charles Leclerc

Charles Leclerc doesn’t enter 2026 under pressure because of anything he failed to do.

If anything, 2025 reinforced his status as one of Formula 1’s most complete drivers: fast across conditions, and resilient in the face of Ferrari’s familiar failure to deliver at the top. The pressure surrounding him is not about improvement, but about endurance.

Year after year, Leclerc has absorbed near-misses that would have prompted many drivers to look elsewhere sooner. He has carried Ferrari through transitional phases, regulatory missteps and strategic incoherence, often extracting results that flattered the Maranello package.

For Leclerc, loyalty has been both a virtue and a gamble. The 2026 reset will up the ante.

The regulation changes offer Ferrari an opportunity to finally give Leclerc a car that matches his ability, but they also remove all possible excuses.

If Ferrari again emerges as other than a championship-challenger, the emotional contract between Leclerc and the team will become harder to sustain.

At some point, Leclerc’s ambition will demand alignment with the results, not just faith.

In that sense, 2026 will not be a test of his talent, but a moment of reckoning over whether Ferrari can finally give him the car his skill and loyalty deserve.

Kimi Antonelli

Kimi Antonelli’s rookie season in 2025 was always going to be uneven, and it largely unfolded that way: flashes of speed and composure offset by errors that underlined just how steep the step into F1 remains.

What mattered for Mercedes was not his polish, though, but his trajectory, and Antonelli gave enough evidence to justify the long-term bet, particularly towards the end of the season.

The pressure arrives now because circumstances may finally align around him.

If Mercedes capitalises on the 2026 regulation reset in a similar way it once did in 2014, Antonelli will no longer be afforded the developmental latitude of a rebuilding team. His potential will have to turn into performance quickly, particularly alongside one of the best drivers on the grid in George Russell.

Antonelli will not be judged only against the British driver, but against what his car makes possible. In a frontrunning Mercedes, the mistakes that were tolerated as growing pains in 2025 become points squandered.

Mercedes has already shown its faith by committing to the Italian long-term, and 2026 is where that faith will be stress-tested.

Franco Colapinto

Franco Colapinto enters 2026 with less margin for error than almost anyone else on the grid.

A point-less 2025 season is almost an unforgiving line on his resume, even if it obscures the context: he had the worst car on the grid and showed progress towards the end of the year, getting closer and sometimes outpacing, team-mate Pierre Gasly.

That was enough to secure a lifeline for 2026, but Colapinto’s future was openly fragile at times during 2025, although he managed to survive.

Survival alone will not be enough if Alpine emerges from the 2026 reset with a genuinely competitive car.

Alpine’s broader reset – new power units and new ambitions – will inevitably sharpen its evaluation of who belongs in the project long-term.

As he showed in 2025, Flavio Briatore is unlikely to hesitate should the Argentine driver fail to deliver what’s expected of him.