Sebastian Vettel doesn’t tend to do loud predictions, but he’s got a fairly clear read on what 2026 might reward — and it isn’t just raw speed. Asked to cast an eye over the new season, the four-time world champion has landed on George Russell as his pick for the drivers’ title, leaning heavily on something teams rarely put on a timing screen: how quickly a driver can understand a shifting rulebook and turn that understanding into points.
It’s an endorsement that fits the mood around Mercedes coming out of pre-season running in Bahrain. The Silver Arrows arrived at the first proper look at the new chassis and power unit era with the kind of expectation they’ve spent years trying to re-earn, and they left still considered among the frontrunners. McLaren boss Andrea Stella, whose team comes in as the reigning double champion, has already framed Ferrari and Mercedes as the “teams to beat” at the start of this season — a neat bit of deflection, maybe, but not one without substance.
Vettel’s angle is less about who has found the most downforce and more about who will thrive in a season where the driver’s workload has changed shape. The 2026 regulations have pushed everyone into new habits: energy management, re-harvesting, understanding the boost system, deploying overtake modes, working the active aero. It’s not that drivers didn’t have complexity before, but this is a different sort of complexity — the kind that punishes the slow learners and hands the edge to those who can build a clean mental model quickly and stick to it under pressure.
“On the one hand, based on what can be seen so far, it is probably not a bad choice to tip Mercedes,” Vettel said in comments widely reported from ServusTV’s Sport und Talk aus dem Hangar-7. “But quite deliberately, McLaren also runs Mercedes engines, and they have not done a bad job in recent years.
“However, I would pick George, because I consider him very intelligent, because I know how hard he works on himself, and because I think he is smart enough to understand what he personally can contribute as a driver to make the difference.”
That last line is the interesting one, because it hints at the way top drivers separate themselves when the margins compress. The sport loves to pretend the fastest car tells the whole story, then spends March and April reminding itself it doesn’t — not when the new era has half the grid still figuring out how to consistently arrive at the same performance twice in a weekend.
Russell’s stock rose through 2025 even without a title push, with plenty in the paddock rating it among the strongest seasons on the grid given what Mercedes had under him. The ground-effect years were, at various points, an exercise in Mercedes trying to unlock pace that other teams seemed to access more naturally. 2026 offers the cleanest reset the team’s had in a long time.
That’s also why Russell being installed as the early bookmakers’ favourite has felt less like hype and more like a reflection of two overlapping beliefs: that Mercedes has started this era well, and that Russell’s skillset is tailored for seasons where understanding and execution matter as much as aggression.
Russell, for his part, has treated the “favourite” tag with the kind of shrug you’d expect from someone who’s been told variations of “your time will come” for years. Asked what it feels like to be talked up as the man to beat, he didn’t play the game.
“Didn’t really feel anything from hearing that, to be honest,” Russell said. “As I’ve said for a long time, I feel ready to fight for a World Championship. Whether we have that comment above us or not, that does not change my approach one single bit.”
If there’s a tell in Russell’s answer, it’s that he immediately frames 2026 as a collective sprint — not to the first race, but to understanding. “I’m working so hard, the team, everybody here has been working flat out to really maximise this new set of regulations,” he said, before listing off the areas that will decide early-season form as much as any wind tunnel plot: energy management, re-harvesting, boost, overtake modes, active aero.
“There’s a lot of things we need to learn very quickly, but I feel I can take advantage from that, and I feel confident with myself and my team.”
It’s not hard to see why Vettel would lean that way. Over a long season, the championship often becomes a contest of error rates: who can keep their weekends tidy when the car isn’t perfect, who can steer development direction without chasing ghosts, who can adapt their driving to a platform that changes as upgrades arrive. In a reset year, those traits are amplified. There will be tracks where the “best” car on paper isn’t the best car in practice because someone hasn’t nailed the operational side — the energy targets, the deployment choices, the active aero behaviours in traffic. Drivers who can internalise that quickly will look like magicians.
Of course, Vettel isn’t blind to the wider picture. He explicitly nods to McLaren’s strength and the fact that it shares Mercedes power, which is a reminder that being “favourite” in February can turn into being “second-fastest” in April. But his gut feeling — his phrase — is that Russell plus Mercedes is the pairing most likely to turn early promise into a full season that holds together.
In a year where everyone is learning in public, that might be the most valuable compliment of all.
