Verstappen puts Red Bull’s plan on pole as McLaren hit pause
Max Verstappen’s fourth British Grand Prix pole wasn’t just a lap; it was a statement. He edged the McLaren pair of Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris at Silverstone, then pointed the nose of Red Bull’s 2025 project squarely at Milton Keynes’ bigger bet: keep developing now, worry about 2026 later.
McLaren chose another road. With the Constructors’ Championship already banked and their drivers running 1-2 in the standings, Andrea Stella shut the factory door on late-season upgrades. No new bits, no last-minute aero flourishes. All focus shifted to the sweeping 2026 rulebook — lighter cars, active aero, the works.
Red Bull? Different mood entirely. Helmut Marko said they still had “something up our sleeves,” and the team promptly turned up in Mexico with a revised floor among four new parts. The car didn’t love the altitude — it rarely does — but Verstappen still landed on the podium behind Norris and Charles Leclerc, crucially finishing ahead of Piastri. What had been a triple-digit points gap after Zandvoort shrank to 36 by the time the paddock packed up in Mexico City. With four weekends left, that’s not a margin; that’s a target.
McLaren’s logic is clear enough. The 2026 cars aren’t a gentle evolution; they’re a clean-sheet rethink stitched to an all-new engine formula. That demands bandwidth. Stella has been forthright about it: winning the future beats polishing the present. He’s also hinted that Red Bull’s had specific handling imbalances they’re tidying up now, and perhaps they’re comfortable sacrificing some 2026 runway to sort them.
Marko has heard it all before. Back in 2021, Toto Wolff warned Red Bull would trip over the regulation reset. They didn’t. Red Bull marched into the ground-effect era and took the lot. So when Marko shrugs and says this is “the same story” as last time, he’s not being coy. He’s pointing to a process: run development deep, plan the handover, execute without drama. “It needs an exact plan and very disciplined people,” he says. “We don’t think there is a handicap for 2026.”
You can scoff at the bravado, but Red Bull’s muscle memory through regulation pivots is hard to ignore. And this is a year where strategy matters as much as lap time. Teams are rationing wind-tunnel runs, CFD hours, money, and attention. The trade-off is brutal: cash in now or compound for later.
There’s also the power unit elephant in the room. 2026 will be Red Bull Powertrains’ first crack at a full F1 engine, built with Ford. Whispers suggest it’s not yet where Ferrari or Mercedes are. The line from within the camp is calm, measured. As Laurent Mekies put it, they’re not underestimating rivals who’ve been doing this for decades, but they’re scaling up the program “the Red Bull way,” step by step, people and infrastructure first.
If that sounds like a split-screen approach — upgrades flowing on the RB in late 2025 while a new factory in Milton Keynes hums away on tomorrow’s hybrid — that’s the point. Red Bull’s convinced it can land both. McLaren’s convinced you can’t hedge the future and expects to be paid back when the active aero era begins.
The sporting subplot is delicious. Norris wrestled the points lead from Piastri just as Verstappen slammed the door shut on the runaway narrative, carving roughly 70 points out of the deficit in five races. It leaves McLaren’s duo managing each other while Verstappen keeps shading their margins on Sundays and nicking poles on Saturdays. Upgrades or none, that’s pressure.
There’s a touch of irony that this all played out at Silverstone, where McLaren’s renaissance first felt real last year and where they turned many believers into subscribers. Now they’ve lifted early and left Red Bull to brake last. That’s a brave call when Verstappen’s in your mirrors and Marko’s rifling through the upgrade drawer.
Is there risk in Red Bull’s confidence? Of course. But that confidence has receipts. And if Verstappen turns this late-season surge into something louder, the narrative flips again: McLaren, the team that bagged the big trophy early, suddenly forced to look over its shoulder at a driver and a squad who’ve made a habit of feasting in the final act.
Silverstone set the tone. The championship might yet shift on the margins — a floor tweak here, a rear wing there, a strategy call in changeable English weather. But the bigger swing is philosophical. One team lifted early. The other stayed flat. We’ll find out soon enough who chose wisely.
