Oscar Piastri doesn’t sound particularly interested in the paddock parlour game of “will he, won’t he?” when it comes to Max Verstappen’s future. But he is clear on one thing: if Formula 1’s new era manages to push out the driver he calls “the benchmark”, the sport will have managed a self-inflicted wound.
Verstappen has been the most vocal opponent of the 2026 regulations, and he hasn’t softened his language. During pre-season testing in Bahrain he compared the new-look cars to “Formula E on steroids”, and at Suzuka he admitted his dissatisfaction could force him to think hard about whether he even wants to stick around.
That context matters, because F1 has spent the first part of 2026 doing two things at once: selling a bold new direction while quietly accepting that, yes, it still needs work. The FIA announced a batch of tweaks on Monday, due to come in for next weekend’s Miami Grand Prix, aimed at reducing the energy-management demands and addressing specific safety concerns around race starts and wet running. Verstappen’s immediate reaction was essentially that patching around the edges won’t fix something he believes is “fundamentally wrong” in its DNA.
Asked about the possibility of Verstappen walking away, Piastri didn’t lean into the drama. He simply framed it as a credibility problem for the championship.
“It would be a shame if that does end up happening,” Piastri said. “Clearly, the Red Bull doesn’t look like the most competitive car at the moment, but I think the regulations are… they’re obviously being worked on, but they’ve needed quite a lot of work and they’re certainly more complex.
“I think it would be a shame for the sport to lose Max, especially at this point in his career as well. I think would be a big loss for the sport as a whole.
“I think for us, as drivers, we want to race against the best and try and prove ourselves against the best. I think Max has shown his calibre in the last 10 years and I think, especially the last five or six, he’s been the benchmark. So I think for everyone it would be a pretty big shame and obviously not a great look.”
It’s an interesting moment for Piastri to say it, too, because McLaren’s season finally looks like it has a pulse. After failing to start the first two races of the year in Australia and China, he delivered McLaren’s first podium of 2026 by finishing second at Suzuka — a result that did as much for morale as it did for points.
And yet Suzuka also underlined why the political temperature around these regulations remains so high. The Japanese Grand Prix weekend was overshadowed by a terrifying 50G accident for Haas driver Oliver Bearman. Piastri’s own weekend included a “pretty close call” in Friday practice when he received an official warning for impeding Nico Hulkenberg’s Audi — an incident he attributed to closing speeds that caught him off-guard.
Claiming Hulkenberg arrived “three times” faster than expected on the approach to 130R, Piastri was blunt about what the sport needs to do next.
“I think we understand as a sport there’s a lot of things we need to tweak, a lot of things we need to change,” he said. “And especially on safety grounds, yes, there’s some things that need to be looked into pretty quickly.”
That’s the tightrope for the rulemakers now. The FIA is already moving — the Miami changes are proof of that — but F1 can’t afford to look like it’s designing on the fly while simultaneously asking everyone to buy into a new identity for the championship. That’s doubly true when the most successful driver of the modern era is publicly questioning whether the product still resembles the thing he signed up for.
From Piastri’s perspective, Verstappen leaving wouldn’t just remove a superstar; it would remove the measuring stick. Every driver on the grid wants the cleanest answer to the same question: am I quick enough? The easiest way to validate that is to beat the best over a season. If Verstappen chooses to go elsewhere because he’s had enough of what F1 has become, the sport doesn’t just lose a champion — it risks handing its rivals a marketing campaign.
There’s still time for this to calm down. Miami’s tweaks are at least an acknowledgement that the early-season feedback hasn’t been shrugged off, and the paddock knows 2026 is a moving target even without the noise. But Verstappen has made it plain that he’s not looking for small concessions; he’s questioning the direction.
Piastri’s warning is less about Red Bull, or even Verstappen’s temperament, and more about optics. F1 has built plenty of eras around great cars. It builds lasting ones around great drivers. If the regulations become the story that drives the benchmark away, it’s not just “a shame” — it’s a headline the sport won’t be able to spin.
