Max Verstappen eyes a fifth title in a season built on unknowns: “None of us have any idea”
Max Verstappen may be the most battle-hardened man on the grid, but even he’s walking into the new power unit era with raised eyebrows. As Formula 1 pivots to its next-generation hybrid rules and welcomes Red Bull–Ford and Audi as suppliers, the four-time world champion isn’t pretending he knows how the first laps will look.
“None of us have any idea of the new car, of the engine,” Verstappen told Blick when pressed for early predictions. That’s not sandbagging. It’s the reality of a reset so deep that even champions are bracing for a messy learning curve.
This is the season where the sport’s power units flip the script: a 1.6-litre V6 hybrid architecture running on sustainable fuel, with the electrical component stepping up to a roughly 50/50 split with the internal combustion engine. Expect fresh tactics too. The much-talked-about overtaking mode — deploying the new energy configuration to give the hunter more punch than the hunted — is set to become a live weapon from the front of the field to the back.
For Red Bull, the Ford badge joins the story as the team moves on from its Honda-era mix and leans into a fully fledged, in-house project with the Blue Oval. Audi, meanwhile, has turned its Sauber acquisition into a true works effort, engine and chassis under one roof. Who lands the first punch? Pick your guess — Verstappen isn’t picking at all.
“I think at the first tests in Barcelona we will be more in the garages than in action on the track,” he said, half-wry, half-serious. The opening shakedown at the end of January is behind closed doors, a sensible move given there’ll be plenty of head-scratching between runs. The Bahrain tests that follow — 11–13 February and then 18–20 February — will be the public’s first real look at who has a handle on the new formula before everyone decamps to Australia for the season-opener in March.
There’s a temptation to assume that Red Bull will simply Red Bull their way out of the unknown. Verstappen isn’t ruling that out, but he’s not underestimating the opposition either — especially not a freshly minted works program with heavyweight backing.
“It will certainly take some time as a new team,” he said of Audi’s prospects. “But after a year or two, Nico might be able to ride at the front. Why not? Maybe Audi will succeed in surprising us all.”
It’s the right read. Works projects can look sleepy until they don’t, and the new ruleset is exactly the kind of discontinuity that rewards clarity and integration. Audi has both: a factory effort with control over its destiny and a driver lineup built to grind. If the baseline is solid, the curve can be steep.
Red Bull–Ford, for its part, has the sharpest reference point in the field: Verstappen’s relentless meter. He thrives on feel, and his feedback loop tends to find lap time where others don’t. But “new engine, new aero, new deployment rules” means even the champions will spend January and February with a checklist — cooling maps, MGU-killjoys, deployment windows, ride height tricks — and a lot of back-to-back runs. The stopwatch won’t mean much until long runs in Bahrain settle the noise.
Verstappen did add a small caveat when looking further ahead: “The same question will be even more difficult to answer in 2026.” Translation: the real shape of this shift may take more than a single campaign to reveal. Teams will bring the first cut now, then iterate hard — and the ones who respond quickest when reality disagrees with simulation will rise.
So don’t read too much into an early garage queen or a headline-grabbing low-fuel lap. Read the body language when the cars queue up for race stints in Sakhir. Watch who nails energy deployment while defending into Turn 1 and who still has juice to counter down to Turn 4. That’s where this era’s story will start to write itself.
For now, Verstappen wears the uncertainty well. He’s been here before — just not quite like this.
