Why Max Verstappen thinks F1 is now too easy

Has F1 become too easy in 2026? It's a question we've been pondering since Max Verstappen threw some serious shade on the performances of Red Bull's stand-in drivers Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda. Normally, when a driver comes into F1 at short notice, like Tsunoda did at Racing Bulls, or switches teams at short notice, like Lawson did at Red Bull in place of the injured Isak Hadjar, they'd be getting praise for each qualifying just over a tenth of a second behind their highly rated teammates. But when asked a leading question about whether this level of performance simply indicates these 2026 F1 cars place a limit on the difference a top driver can make, Verstappen's response was withering. He said, and I quote, Especially in qualifying, I think it's a lot easier nowadays with these cars to find the limit, because you're also, in quite a few places, a bit down on battery and everything becomes a bit easier to land. I think that demonstrated quite well this weekend compared to the previous cars. For me, that's not a surprise. I think you see it already the whole season. Everyone is always within 1 tenth, 2 tenths. If you have a very bad qualifying, 3 tenths. It's always the margins are small. Now, we need to say straight away how bad a look this is for Max when, less than 24 hours after he said this, he crashed his Red Bull out of the Dutch Grand Prix on the first lap. If F1 2026 is so easy, how did that happen, Max? But to be serious, we need to separate what he said from what happened to him in this race. On a slippery circuit, in a high-speed corner, the sort of crash that befell Verstappen could happen to any driver, in any car. It's a bad look, yes, but it doesn't suddenly remove all credibility from what the four-time champion is trying to tell us. But is Verstappen right in what he says? We're going to take you through what happened when we put Verstappen's comments to McLaren's Andrea Stella and take a closer look at the numbers to see whether or not there's some truth in what Verstappen's saying. Once we'd digested what Verstappen was saying, we tasked Ed Straw with putting these remarks to McLaren team principal Andrea Stella. Stella does not subscribe to Verstappen's view. As far as McLaren's drivers are concerned, he feels there is more scatter between them this year, meaning a larger gap between them in qualifying is actually more likely than it was last year, based on whether one or the other suffers a setback in foot. We'll tell you a bit later on whether the data supports his argument. Stella also listed several reasons this year's cars are difficult to extract the maximum from. Number one, lower grip in corners thanks to less downforce and smaller tyres. Number two, the negative effect that imprecise driving inputs in corners can have on energy deployment on the straights and the fact deployment is sometimes inconsistent regardless of what the driver does. Number three, the way constantly shifting energy deployment and super clipping from the energy recovery system can modify a driver's braking references from lap to lap. Stella says these factors, mostly related to the new power units, were even more extreme at the start of the season and have reduced in severity as drivers and engineers have become more familiar with the cars and engines. But he thinks the overall lack of grip and nervousness of the cars in the corners is still causing problems and making car behaviour difficult to predict. Stella also pointed out a fundamental difference between the driving challenge of this year's cars versus the 2025 cars. He described those ground effect 2025 cars as difficult for the drivers because everything was happening much faster, but also easier because normally you had one thing to cope with. What he means by this is the 2025 cars were smothered in grip from having much more aerodynamic load and so the driver's job was simpler in terms of how much they had to think about on a given lap. With the 2026 cars, Stella says there is a lot that can happen at any moment from a grip consistency point of view or even sensitivity to the wind. And so it's very difficult for the drivers to execute a clean lap in qualifying. When asked to make a call, Stella chose to say 2026 is more difficult than 2025. But essentially this argument boils down to whether the sheer speed and commitment required to extract lap time from the 2025 cars outweighs the nervousness and constant sliding that underpins the 2026 cars. Stella does caveat his judgment by saying this may depend on car characteristics or even the driver's characteristics. And that's an important distinction to make because drivers like Nando Norris, as Stella pointed out during the Zandvoort weekend, are more comfortable with the car constantly moving around, whereas drivers like Oskar Piastri and George Russell, for that matter, are more comfortable when the car is planted. But overall, there is a threshold at which the drivers will have more capacity to think through the problems Stella identifies, because things are no longer happening too quickly for their brains to process. At the heart of what Verstappen is suggesting is an idea that the latest generation of F1 cars have become more accessible to drivers with a lower ability threshold, while simultaneously containing drivers who have a higher threshold for controlling cars at ridiculously high speeds. Now let's take a closer look at the numbers to see whether Verstappen's contention that it's easier to be quick in F1 2026 actually stacks up. First, here's a table of the average qualifying gaps between teammate pairings for 2025, with the mean average gap for the whole Now we can see how this compares with a similar table for 2026. The cohort average for 2025 vs 2026 is 0.221 seconds vs 0.167 seconds, which is statistically not a particularly significant difference, though it's fair to say the average gap between all teammate pairings in 2026 has reduced compared to 2025 by 0.054 seconds. At McLaren, Williams, Aston Martin, Haas and Sauber-Audi, the gaps have actually grown in 2026, with the important caveat that of course we're barely more than halfway through the current season. However, we can see clearly from Verstappen's particular perspective how things would look different. The average gaps between him and his Red Bull teammates are significantly lower so far in 2026, down from a range of 0.4 to 0.9 seconds in 2025 to less than 0.3 seconds so far in 2026. So what's going on? Why is a driver so used to absolutely destroying their teammates in qualifying suddenly finding his advantage eroded so much? Well, there's likely several elements at play here. One aspect is the change of rules on both the chassis and engine sides, resetting the board, so all the drivers are pretty much starting from scratch in brand new cars. That was always likely to make this the best season to be Verstappen's teammate since the last time the rules changed significantly in 2022. And of course, early in that season, Sergio Perez won races and pushed Verstappen very hard. The second element is that Red Bull has become a bit stuck with its car development in 2026. Improvements have been made, notably in Miami and again for Austria, but the car isn't progressing the way Verstappen would like, or at the rate he would like. This line of thinking is backed up by Lawson's own comment that last year's Red Bull, already heavily developed under mature regulations, was on a knife edge, and if you couldn't find that edge, it was a lap-time killer. Whereas his first experience of this year's Red Bull is throwing a car into a corner and knowing and feeling what it's going to do. That characterisation of being able to throw the car into corners is the same one Sunoda used after narrowly missing out on Q3 at Zandvoort in Lawson's Racing Bulls. The third aspect of this is the more general phenomenon of this ruleset discouraging drivers from being super on the limit in qualifying, which then limits the capacity of an extraordinary driver to extract more from a faster but trickier car. This is something Charles Leclerc has talked about frequently, and he's probably the best example of a driver who used to rely on finding that extra bit of bravery and corner speed in qualifying to make the difference, who now finds himself punished for taking that approach. It's reasonable to conclude that if Leclerc is constrained by needing to think more and, in his words, restraining yourself from going to the absolute limit, so too is a driver of Verstappen's extraordinary quality. When you add this to the 2026 Red Bull's more benign characteristics compared with its predecessor, the overall lack of grip placing an artificial ceiling on what all the drivers can do compared to last year, and Lawson himself being A, more experienced in F1, and B, a driver who's made a big effort to understand and exploit these unusual power units, you can see why, on the face of things, he suddenly looks like a completely different driver next to Verstappen. Lawson and Tsunoda clearly did a good job jumping into unfamiliar cars at short notice and executing strong weekends, but it's hard to shake the feeling that Verstappen's onto something here, even if he didn't do his own argument any favours by crashing out of his race.