Bernie Ecclestone has never been one for keeping the field wide when a championship starts to take shape, and four rounds into 2026 he’s already decided this one isn’t going to be a sprawling, multi-team arm wrestle. In his view, it’s a straight shootout — and it isn’t a Mercedes in-house scrap.
Yes, Mercedes has started the year like a team that’s read the regulations quicker than most. Kimi Antonelli and George Russell have locked out the top two in the standings, with Antonelli 20 points clear of his more experienced team-mate. The teenager’s taken to the role of pacesetter with an ease that’s been slightly jarring even by modern F1 standards: he became the sport’s youngest-ever championship leader after edging Russell at Suzuka, then backed it up by winning in Miami.
Miami, in particular, felt like a weekend that should have ended the debate about whether Antonelli is ready to lead a title campaign. Three poles, three wins converted — nobody in F1 history has opened their pole account by turning the first three into victories. That’s the sort of stat that doesn’t need context or caveats.
Ecclestone’s read is that Antonelli has effectively planted his flag as “the” Mercedes driver for this championship push. But the 95-year-old also isn’t buying the idea that Mercedes can simply manage the season from the front, because in Miami there was a different kind of message being delivered in the background: Red Bull has finally shown signs of life.
Red Bull arrived with seven new parts, and the change in their competitive picture was immediate enough to turn heads up and down the pitlane. After being “at least eight-tenths” off in the early qualifying sessions of the season, Max Verstappen ended Saturday only 0.166s shy of Antonelli. It wasn’t just a cleaner lap or a lucky slipstream, either — it looked like a car that could actually be leaned on again.
Verstappen then did Verstappen things on Sunday, even if the headline result doesn’t scream resurgence. A spin on the opening lap effectively torpedoed any realistic podium chance, and it forced him into a recovery drive shaped by an early pit stop and a long, 50-lap run to the flag on hard tyres. Still, he dragged it home in fifth. In isolation that’s not earth-shattering; in context, after the start Red Bull’s had, it’s the sort of damage limitation that suggests the ceiling has moved.
For Ecclestone, it was enough to narrow the title picture to two names.
“Antonelli or Verstappen will be world champion,” he said, speaking to Swiss newspaper Blick. “Red Bull has apparently overcome the slump. Max has caught fire again – and then he’s dangerous.”
That last line is classic Ecclestone — blunt, a touch theatrical, and rooted in the paddock truth that Verstappen doesn’t need many invitations. Give him a car that’s in the conversation and he tends to turn the sport into a private argument between him and whoever’s unlucky enough to be in front.
The problem, of course, is the size of the hill Verstappen is staring at. After four rounds he’s 74 points behind Antonelli. That’s not a deficit you casually shrug off, even with a long season still ahead. Verstappen’s own history doesn’t offer many comforting parallels either: he’s only once overturned more than that 2026 gap in a title fight, and that was a 46-point swing back in 2022 against Charles Leclerc.
Yet if there’s a reason people in the sport don’t dismiss him at this stage, it’s because of what he did last year. He hauled himself out of a 104-point hole to Oscar Piastri after the Dutch Grand Prix and still finished just 11 points behind the McLaren driver in the standings — two points short of a record-equalling fifth consecutive world title. You don’t do that without a particular kind of relentlessness, and you don’t inspire Ecclestone-style certainty without a reputation for making seasons bend in your direction.
The interesting tension in Ecclestone’s verdict is that it effectively writes Russell out of the story, despite him sitting second and only 20 points adrift of his team-mate. That’s harsh on paper, but it reflects the way the last two rounds have felt: Antonelli has carried the sharper edge in the big moments, and F1 history is littered with championships where the intra-team fight dies not with a single dramatic incident, but with a gradual acceptance inside the garage about who’s got the higher ceiling.
For now, though, the bigger question might be whether Miami was the first glimpse of a genuine Red Bull fightback — or simply a good weekend made to look better by Verstappen’s ability to wring something out of whatever he’s given. If the upgrades are the start of a steady climb, the championship could pivot from a Mercedes management exercise into something far more awkward: Antonelli trying to see off the sport’s most complete racing machine of the last decade, now re-energised and, in Ecclestone’s words, “dangerous”.
And if that’s the shape of 2026, it won’t matter much who’s second in the Mercedes queue. It’ll matter who can absorb pressure when Verstappen starts arriving in their mirrors with a car that finally belongs there.
