Matt Bishop: 'I'm backing Russell to beat Verstappen in bitter 2026 F1 title duel'

Pre-season testing in Formula 1 is a treacherous siren. It sings sweetly, seductively, but often misleadingly. Laptimes are set on unknown fuel loads; adherence to weight limits can be haphazard; tyre compounds are shuffled like a conjuror’s cards; the odd team that wishes to conceal its competitiveness may deliberately hide its light under a bushel; and engineers peer at laptops with expressions so sphinx-like that one half-expects them to start speaking in riddles. Yet sometimes, despite all that, the siren still sings true.

Over the past month, in breezy Barcelona and balmy Sakhir, the new-for-2026 F1 cars have been running their first laps. The regulations to which their designs must adhere are a veritable Gordian knot, expressed in phraseology that rewards a delicacy of interpretation bordering on sorcery, encompassing radically revised power units, increased electrical deployment, active aerodynamics, fully sustainable fuels, and much more besides. The cars that the new regs have spawned are uber-sophisticated confections of electrical complexity and aerodynamic scarification, and managing the test days has been not only challenging the teams’ engineers but also confounding them. Or, to put it another, perhaps more brutal, way: there is a reason why football is the world’s most popular sport, and that is that it is so easy to understand, even for casual fans; by contrast F1 is now fiendishly difficult to understand even for those who work in it, indeed even for those who design, engineer, and race the cars.

Nonetheless, on the evidence of the data we have from Barcelona and Sakhir, the Mercedes designers and engineers appear to have done their homework with typically Teutonic efficiency, despite the fact that they are mostly Brits who work in Brackley (Northamptonshire) and Brixworth (ditto). Their car appears to be compliant over kerbs, stable under braking, and — crucially — encouragingly gremlin-free on the straights. Its power unit’s electrical systems must therefore be harvesting and deploying in reasonably harmonious synchrony. Moreover, the stopwatch, unreliable witness though it can be in testing, suggests that the Mercs will be at or near the front when the five lights go out on the Melbourne startline gantry on Sunday 8 March, and the regulatory loophole that allows their power units to operate at a compression ratio of in excess of 16:1 will remain open until at least the summer break.

If the black, grey, and green cars are the fastest from the get-go, it should not surprise us. When I was a lad, and before then too, a wholesale F1 regulation change would be a cue for the engineers of Scuderia Ferrari to roll up their scarlet sleeves and show everyone else how F1 should be done. Think 1952, when F1 was suddenly run to F2 rules. Think 1961, when F1 engine capacity was summarily reduced from 2.5 litres to 1.5 litres. Ferrari dominated both years. But since 2014, and the return of turbocharging in the form of the 1.6-litre hybrid V6s that the F1 regs have stipulated these past 12 seasons, the dominant power unit has tended to be the Mercedes.

The canonical example is 2014, the year in which F1 finally cast aside the naturally aspirated 2.4-litre V8s that had been howling their way up to 18,000rpm since 2006, and first embraced the brave new world of turbocharged hybrid power that still persists today. The Mercedes engineers did not merely interpret those regulations well; no, they comprehensively mastered them. The result was that their number-one driver, Lewis Hamilton, swept to the F1 drivers’ world championship by a margin so vast that it required binoculars to see his nearest rival, who just happened to be his Mercedes team-mate Nico Rosberg.

Why, then, should we doubt that Mercedes might be similarly well prepared in 2026? The team’s head honcho — Toto Wolff — is the same. Below him, the personnel are different in detail but not in philosophy. The culture — data-driven, meticulous, ambitious, ruthless even, yet cognisant of the importance of compassion in management — remains intact. No, I do not predict a 2014-style annihilation. The competition is too tough, the budget cap too constraining, and the intellectual and technological arms race too finely balanced for that. But I believe that Mercedes will be competitive straight away, and thereafter that it may well continue in the ascendant.

What about the others? McLaren, of course, will also be strong. The team that Zak built, which I am sure Mr Brown would not mind me calling it, also enjoys the benefit of Mercedes power, and the synergy between Woking and Brixworth is close. The new car looks tidy, well-balanced, and aerodynamically efficient. Yet there is a developing opinion — gleaned from studying long runs rather than headline laptimes — that the McLaren MCL40 still lacks the poise that the Mercedes W17 already possesses.

As for the Ferrari, it appears to be quick, but the Scuderia remains, to my eye, operationally unsettled. There has been recent friction, upheaval, and restructuring, the ramifications of which have not yet been entirely resolved. F1 teams are ecosystems of trust and clarity. When either is compromised, even fractionally, lap time seeps away like air from a slow puncture. Ferrari may win grands prix this year, but F1 world championships are rarely secured amid the churn of internal recalibration.

In my view, therefore, the most formidable threat to Mercedes’ world championship aspirations wears navy-blue war paint. Last year Red Bull underwent a senior management revolution dramatic enough to provide narratives that could populate an entire series of Drive to Survive, culminating in the unceremonious ousting of that popular Netflix series’ most engaged A-lister, Christian Horner. Yet, if you imagine that such turbulence will blunt Red Bull’s competitive edge, you have not been paying attention. Red Bull is an organisation forged in confrontation, sharpened by adversity, and animated by a singular, almost monomaniacal compulsion to win at all costs. It is, in the best and worst senses, frighteningly single-minded. When I describe the team’s livery as war paint, I mean it.

We should buckle up, for Russell and Verstappen do not like each other

So much for the top teams, but what about the top drivers? At McLaren, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri will take points away from each other, just as they did last year. At Ferrari, if Lewis Hamilton can lean on the new SF-26 chassis in a way that he felt unable or unwilling to lean on last year’s SF-25, he and Charles Leclerc will also rob Peter to pay Paul. By contrast, at Red Bull the number-one driver is Max Verstappen, and at Mercedes, despite young Kimi Antonelli’s raw talent, the senior man is George Russell. In both teams I therefore expect the established leaders to do most of the heavy lifting. So, unless testing has been a masterclass in collective sandbagging by persons or teams as yet unknown, 2026 has the tantalising potential to become a Russell-versus-Verstappen duel.

If so, we should buckle up, for they do not like each other. That much is evident in the frostiness of their media pen exchanges and the absence of conviviality off-track. But it is not merely personal antipathy that would make such a contest compelling; it is also contrast.

Verstappen drives as Michael Schumacher used to. Like Michael, Max likes a grippy and responsive front end — what engineers and drivers call ‘pointy’. Cars designed and set up that way can feel nervous, skittish even, to lesser mortals. Such cars’ rear ends step out under braking, and twitch throughout corner entry. Yet for Verstappen now, and for Schumacher then, that is not a vice; rather, it is a virtue. A tail-happy set-up allows Max to rotate a car assertively in a corner’s entry phase, to straighten its steering early, and to unleash its throttle fast and firm on exit. It is an attacking style, and it is reliant on supreme confidence and prodigious car control.

Russell, by contrast, prefers stability at the rear. He seeks predictability on entry and in mid-corner, and his set-up objective is to create a platform that allows him to exploit with conviction all available grip without triggering the entry oversteer that would unsettle him. He is therefore less tolerant than Verstappen of a jumpy back end, and less inclined to dance on the knife edge of imbalance as he slows a car for a turn. That is not to say that he lacks control or even aggression — far from it — but that his aggression and control are smooth and stealthy.

He reminds me a little of Alain Prost and Jenson Button — drivers whose success was predicated on polish, fluency, and intellectual rigour — except that Russell has sharper elbows and a more muscular willingness to impose himself on rivals, wheel to wheel, than Prost or Button ever had. Alain was dubbed ‘the professor’ for his analytical approach; Jenson at his best was also a metronome of clever tyre management and canny situational awareness. Russell blends those qualities with a modern belligerence forged in the unforgiving crucible of contemporary dog-eat-dog F1.

Crucially, also, I believe that he is now ready. There was a time when he was the bright young thing at Williams, dragging an uncompetitive car into positions it scarcely deserved. Then he became the heir apparent at Mercedes alongside Hamilton, learning, absorbing, but occasionally erring. Now he is the team’s star turn. Mercedes’ F1 operation is his in a way that it could never be while Hamilton’s aura was still shimmering from the other side of the garage.

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