Three years ago, Max Verstappen was the first driver on the grid to say out loud what almost everyone in the paddock had been saying privately about the 2026 regulations. In early 2023, he told media he had seen the numbers and the simulations and did not like either.
"26 is not that far away and it looks very bad from all the numbers and what I see from the data already."
He went further. "The 2026 cars look pretty terrible. Whoever has the strongest engine will have a big benefit." It was, at the time, treated as a champion complaining about a rule set designed partly to bring his dominance back to the pack.
The Formula1Unpacked channel has now published a retrospective that reads very differently in April 2026.
The channel's argument is that Verstappen's warning was not sulking — it was forecasting. Three rounds into the new regulations, the Dutchman's own situation is the most dramatic case study F1 has produced in a decade. "Three years later, he is knocked out in Q2 at Suzuka, finishing eighth in races he used to win from the back. His own teammate is faster than him, and a 19-year-old nobody had heard of is leading the championship."
The sentence is brutal and factually accurate. Verstappen has been eliminated in Q2 in Japan, outpaced by new teammate Isack Hadjar, and overtaken in the drivers' standings by Mercedes rookie Kimi Antonelli. The four-time world champion's 2025 form — which included a run to the title — is gone, and gone with the specific thing Verstappen had warned the regulation would remove: the ability of a great driver in a great chassis to beat a merely good driver with the best engine.
Mercedes' power unit has emerged, as Verstappen predicted it would, as the dominant piece of hardware on the grid. Their combined car-plus-engine package has given Antonelli the single greatest head start any F1 rookie has ever had. Ferrari and Red Bull, meanwhile, are both visibly wrestling with engines that cannot deliver the energy profile the 2026 rules demand. Ferrari principal Fred Vasseur has conceded a seven-tenth engine gap. Red Bull's Isack Hadjar has said the chassis is "terrible" but the engine is fine — which in the 2026 context means Red Bull are doing their best work on the half of the car that now matters least.
Verstappen's 2023 warning, in that context, deserves its moment of vindication. He told the sport the regulations would make the best engine king. They did. He told the sport the cars would look bad. THE RACE's testing coverage, showing a two-second lap-time deficit on 2026 machinery in Barcelona, suggests that was correct too. He told the sport the racing would be compromised. Suzuka produced a 50G Bearman crash triggered by an energy-deployment differential that could not exist under the 2025 rules.
The broader lesson, Formula1Unpacked concludes, is political rather than technical. F1's decision-makers had one of the most credentialed drivers on the grid telling them exactly what would go wrong, with lap-time numbers attached, three years before the regulations came into force. They wrote the rules anyway. The emergency tweaks being negotiated before Miami are, in the most literal sense, an admission that Verstappen was right.
Whether he gets the podium speech that goes with being right remains to be seen. For now, the sport is rescuing a regulation its loudest dissenter tried to stop.
Source: youtube.com