The British Grand Prix should be a celebration — record crowds, Silverstone's fast sweeps, a home race for half the grid. Max Verstappen thinks it might also be where Formula 1's 2026 rulebook meets its match.
After Austria, Verstappen ran some preparation laps on the simulator. The verdict was not kind. "Silverstone, I love the track, but I did a few laps on the simulator and I just started laughing," he said. "It felt like a different track, to be honest."
What changed is the energy. This year's power units depend heavily on battery deployment, and Silverstone offers almost no chance to recover it. "You barely have battery around the lap. It's just constantly flat," Verstappen said, comparing it unfavourably with the Red Bull Ring. "There, you have long straights but then a fast corner, so you can't really charge the batteries, and then the next straight you don't have a lot to spend. It's going to be a tough one." The feel of the car bothers him too: "I think this is less natural, but it goes hand-in-hand with the energy management. Because half of the time you cannot use the gears that are natural."
Lando Norris has been making the same case for months. "We've come from the best cars ever made in Formula 1 and the nicest to drive to probably the worst," Norris said. "It sucks, but you have to live with it."
George Russell, the Austria winner, will not have it. "Everyone's very quick to criticise things. You need to give it a shot," he said, before skewering the inconsistency of the complaints: "When we've had the best cars and the least tyre degradation and when we've been happiest, everyone moans the racing's rubbish. Now drivers aren't perfectly happy, and everyone said it was an amazing race." Each circuit, he argued, asks a different energy question — so Silverstone's extreme is not the whole story.
Why Silverstone in particular? The Mr Pulse preview channel laid out the math: full throttle for about 68.6 percent of the lap, braking for barely 12 percent. With so little time to harvest energy, drivers will clip — lift early — through the quick corners instead of on the straights, and the teams that manage their deployment best, Mercedes among them, stand to gain.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. The FIA already cut recoverable energy in qualifying this season, and new engine regulations are locked in for 2027 and 2028, partly to answer complaints like Verstappen's and Norris's. A sprint weekend with a single practice session only sharpens the challenge. "It's going to feel very different," Verstappen said — and at Silverstone, in front of the biggest crowd of the year, everyone will see whether he is right.
