Max Verstappen’s long-term F1 future has become one of those paddock stories that keeps returning, no matter how many times the protagonists try to swat it away. This week, though, the conversation has shifted from the usual vague “will he, won’t he” to something far more telling: the rulemakers have moved, and the immediate read in the pit lane is that it helps keep the sport’s biggest current draw exactly where it is.
Esteban Ocon has been the one to say the quiet part out loud. In his view, Verstappen isn’t about to walk away next season — and the key detail is what’s happened behind the scenes with power unit governance. “He will not go away,” Ocon insisted, framing it as more than simple guesswork: lose a driver of that calibre at the same time as the sport is trying to bed in a new technical era, and you’ve got a headache nobody in authority wants.
The timing matters. The FIA World Motor Sport Council has now ratified changes to the power split for the 2027 and 2028 seasons, nudging the formula back towards internal combustion and away from an over-reliance on the battery side. It’s official: 58-42 in favour of the ICE in 2027, then 60-40 in 2028. After weeks of it being discussed as a “provisional” direction, it’s now a stamped decision — a proper piece of the regulatory framework that teams can plan around rather than just speculate about.
For a sport that has spent the better part of two years selling the 2026 reset as a new peak of efficiency and electrification, it’s a notable correction in tone. The FIA is dressing it as ongoing stewardship of the regulations rather than an admission anything was wrong, but nobody in F1 misses the subtext: concerns about how the show would look — and how it would race — have had an impact.
Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s statement leans heavily on process and collaboration, stressing that major rule changes don’t stop evolving once cars hit the track and that the championship is weighing “innovation, sustainability, performance and fan appeal”. All fair. But in the paddock, “fan appeal” is usually the phrase that tells you the sport has been listening to the uneasy noises coming from teams, drivers, and manufacturers.
That brings us back to Verstappen. Ocon’s line isn’t that Max has suddenly fallen in love with the concept of a 58-42 split; it’s that the sport has removed a potential frustration point. The more the formula tips towards harvest-and-deploy management, the more you risk turning the best drivers into passengers at key phases of the lap. Verstappen’s camp has never hidden its impatience for anything that feels artificial or overly constrained. If F1 wants its headline act to stay, it can’t build a rulebook that makes him feel like he’s driving with one hand tied behind his back.
And, inevitably, the other thread in all of this is where he’d be staying. The question isn’t simply “F1 or not”; it’s which project has the best platform under the current and coming regulations. Red Bull versus Mercedes remains the axis around which the speculation turns — the sort of binary choice the paddock loves because it’s neat, even if real-life contract politics rarely are.
While the FIA was finalising its power unit shift, another technical-politics subplot was bubbling away: the ADUO initiative, and the accusation that teams are already trying to outsmart it.
Damon Hill says he understands that some outfits have been “gaming the system” — in other words, deliberately obscuring the true performance of their internal combustion engines to avoid being “penalised” via the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities framework. The first round of ADUO assessments has already created a pecking order, with Red Bull’s ICE identified as the benchmark ahead of Mercedes, Ferrari, Audi and Honda.
The knock-on effects are exactly why the idea of sandbagging has taken hold. Despite winning six of the first seven grands prix, Mercedes received one additional development opportunity, while Ferrari, Audi and Honda were handed two. If you’re a manufacturer staring at a system that doles out extra tokens based on where you sit, you don’t need to be especially paranoid to wonder whether rivals might be tempted to keep their best work out of sight until it suits them.
Then there’s Honda, which has found itself needing to do something F1 power unit partners hate: reassure everyone, loudly, in public.
Its first season supplying Aston Martin has been bruising, yielding just one world championship point. That’s the kind of stat that inevitably kicks off whispers — about commitment, about focus, about whether the “long-term project” language is just PR armour. Honda’s response has been blunt. HRC president Koji Watanabe reiterated that the company has a “long-term commitment” to F1, calling the challenge part of Honda’s DNA and insisting: “We will never give up, no matter what.”
Honda also confirmed it met with Aston Martin during the Barcelona weekend to dig into the issues. That’s not unusual in itself, but mentioning it now feels like a deliberate show of unity: this is still a partnership, still a plan, still something they believe can be fixed.
Put all of that together and you can see why the Verstappen story won’t die — not because he’s about to vanish, but because he sits at the centre of so many forces shaping the next phase of the sport. Engine rules, manufacturer politics, competitive balance mechanisms: they’re all being adjusted in real time, and every adjustment invites the same question. Who benefits? Who’s boxed in? And who decides they’ve had enough?
If Ocon’s read is right, the sport has just made one decision designed to ensure Verstappen doesn’t feel boxed in at all. The rest — the team choice, the power-unit arms race, and whether ADUO becomes a genuine leveller or just another battleground for clever lawyers and cleverer engineers — is still very much in play.
