For a year Max Verstappen has insisted the 2026 regulations are draining the life out of Formula 1. At the Hungaroring, host to the final round before the summer shutdown, the Red Bull driver said the grid is finally catching up to him - and he distilled the whole argument into one line: the quickest drivers can no longer stand out.
What's changed, he told reporters in Budapest, is the tone of the response. "I've spoken my mind about these regulations already a long time," Verstappen said. "In the beginning most people were saying, 'ah, he's complaining, he should shut up'. But I have to say that the last few races, more and more people are seeing the same thing that I could see coming already a long time ago." His motive, he insisted, has nothing to do with the scoreboard: "And it's not about me not winning anymore, it's just because I care about the product."
His technical gripe is with what the hybrid now rewards. Because energy deployment decides so much of a lap, pushing harder through a corner can leave a driver short down the following straight. "It's just your throttle input. By being faster sometimes in the corner, you lose more in the straight afterwards, which, of course, is not how it should be," Verstappen said. "In every kind of racing series, if you gain time in the corner, that's just free lap time. You would not then be penalised on the straight, normally."
It is, he reckons, why so few drivers have been able to break clear of their team-mates. "It's basically just neutralising a lot of lap time... sometimes you cannot make a difference," he said. "You're not allowed to make a difference because it will just penalise you on the next straight." Asked about a barbed Spa remark that certain people might "shoot" him for keeping it up, Verstappen smiled it off: "No, I was joking about that one."
Crucially, he now has company. Oscar Piastri, leading McLaren's title charge, stood up for George Russell after the Briton's miserable Spa and lent his own weight to the complaint. "When you've got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving, that is a pretty crap way of going racing," Piastri told media including RacingNews365. He allowed that Russell was "obviously going to exaggerate it and make it look a lot worse," but agreed with the core of it. Russell's Spa unravelled for exactly the reason Verstappen keeps flagging: no battery energy left to deploy on the straights.
The grid is not unanimous. Lando Norris took the opposite line months ago, after Verstappen first called the cars "anti-racing" during pre-season running in Bahrain. "A lot of fun. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, if he wants to retire, he can retire," Norris said of the retirement talk. His view is that the cars are a puzzle to solve, not a stick to beat the sport with. "We get paid a stupid amount of money to drive, so you can't really complain at the end of the day," he added. "Any driver can go and find something else to do - it's not like he has to be here."
The authorities have already blinked, agreeing to tilt the engine balance back toward the combustion side for 2027 and 2028. Budapest's energy-rich layout should mask the problem this weekend more than Silverstone or Spa did. But Verstappen's central complaint isn't fading - and, as he tells it, the chorus telling him to be quiet is thinning out.
