Max Verstappen's driving standards haven't dipped at all, but in a formula built on energy management over instinct, even the four-time F1 champion appears unable to out-drive his car anymore
For several of the past seasons, the gap between what Max Verstappen‘s car could do and what Max Verstappen could do with it was one of the single most reliable numbers in Formula 1.
It is what won him four consecutive titles, and it is what nearly won him a fifth in 2025, when he hunted down Lando Norris in a car that had gone from winning the championship a year earlier to becoming merely good somewhere around the summer break.
Verstappen finished that campaign two points short. Few who follow the season seriously doubted that a lesser driver would have lost by at least 50.
That gap has not disappeared in 2026, and this year it has looked smaller than it has in years. The reasons why say something uncomfortable about what this new regulation era actually rewards.
Verstappen finished third in the Belgian Grand Prix — one of his favourite races — a result that would once have been filed under quietly disappointing. Now it is being reported, accurately, as a good weekend.
The four-time champion sits seventh in the drivers’ championship, 113 points behind Mercedes‘ championship leader Kimi Antonelli, who scored his sixth win of the year at Spa.
The Red Bull driver is over 100 points off the championship lead
Red Bull
Red Bull is, by its own team principal’s admission, often the fourth-fastest car on the grid behind Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren, depending on the venue.
By now, none of that is new information by itself, but it’s a reminder that a driver who spent 2025 papering over a car deficit through sheer force of will has not managed the same trick this year, and raises the question of whether that failure is temporary or structural.
What the 2026 rules actually removed
With lighter cars, more mechanical grip, and less reliance on the kind of aerodynamic wizardry that had made overtaking difficult and driving styles increasingly homogeneous, Formula 1’s regulation reset was sold, on paper, as a return to driver relevance.
In practice, however, it has done something closer to the opposite for a driver like Verstappen.
As it’s well known by now, the new power units place far greater emphasis on electrical energy management – and the algorithms that come with that — than anything that preceded them, and getting that wrong exposes the car in a way that raw commitment or skill can’t really fix.
Races are now decided as much by systems management as by pure speed, which narrows the gap between the best driver on the grid and everyone chasing him.
As Piastri put it after qualifying at Spa: “When you’ve got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, it’s a pretty crap way of going racing.”
Spa proved one of the worst circuits for the current cars
The ability to mask a car’s mechanical shortcomings through driving style — arguably Verstappen’s single greatest and most repeatable skill across his career — is worth less when the car punishes imprecise energy deployment more harshly than it rewards outright commitment.
The type of driving style required with these cars is, in effect, empirical confirmation of a complaint Verstappen has been making since pre-season testing, when he described the new generation of cars as something closer to “Formula E on steroids” than the machines he built his reputation on.
As the first 10 races of the year have shown, he wasn’t exaggerating for effect. The data says he was right.
The unpredictability of the current power units was not an abstraction at Spa.
Asked in the post-race press conference about a mysterious loss of deployment George Russell and his side of the Mercedes garage had been unable to explain all weekend — not traceable to driving, battery wear, or anything else identifiable — both Antonelli and Charles Leclerc confirmed they had experienced the same thing.
Antonelli described doing the same lap and getting a different result from the system, adding that on energy-demanding tracks, “if you start driving differently, then for the system it’s a bit crazy.”
Leclerc went further, saying there are days he is “scratching his head trying to understand why you are losing so much on the straights” despite doing nothing differently behind the wheel.
Verstappen’s contribution to that exchange was shorter, and more resigned, than either: “Yeah, I mean, welcome to F1 2026. Sometimes it can be a jungle.”
Coming from the driver whose career was built on knowing exactly what his car was doing beneath him at every moment, it read less like a joke than an admission.
Where the magic used to be
The era Verstappen built his reputation on was based on finding performance nobody else could.
Verstappen made all the difference at Suzuka last year
Suzuka last year set the tone for the whole season: McLaren had comfortably been the faster car through the opening rounds, yet Verstappen beat Norris to pole by 0.012 seconds, then held off both McLarens for a pole-to-flag win.
Imola worked the same way in reverse: an inferior McLaren-beating car turned into a lights-to-flag win off the back of a stunning first-lap pass, the kind of move that gets replayed independently of the championship context around it.
Those weekends didn’t happen because Red Bull had built the fastest car. They happened because Verstappen found something in it that was not supposed to be there.
As stellar as some of his performances have been, not much resembling that has happened so far in 2026.
That is not a criticism of his results, which have been as good as his car has allowed.
What has gone missing is the specific, recognisable thing that used to separate a Verstappen weekend from anyone else’s: the pole from a car with no right to be there, the pass that should not have worked, the sense that he was operating above whatever ceiling the machinery imposed.
Belgium was a clean illustration of the shift in the opposite direction at a venue where Verstappen has always offered his best version.
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His podium finish was authentic and hard-earned. It was also, unmistakably, a smaller achievement than the version of him that used to turn a third-fastest car into a race win by force of will alone.
Even allowing for his reliability problems, which have been real, the shape of the season doesn’t change much.
Verstappen is not being beaten by bad luck alone; he is being beaten by a car that structurally limits how much of his talent he can deploy, in a regulation era explicitly designed to reward the kind of systems management that was never his strongest suit.
None of this makes Verstappen a diminished driver in any meaningful sense. It makes him a driver operating in a formula that values a different combination of skills than the one he spent a decade mastering, in a car that is usually the fourth-best on the grid regardless of who is driving it.
The gap that used to run entirely in his favour — car deficit compensated by driver excellence — has narrowed because the compensation mechanism itself has been engineered out of the sport, at least partially, by design.
Pablo has been covering motorsport (mainly F1 and MotoGP) as an editor and writer for over 20 years, having worked for Autosport and Motorsport.com before joining Motor Sport Magazine.
