The first proper Friday of the 2026 season hasn’t even delivered a wheel-to-wheel lap in anger yet, and already the paddock is doing what it does best: finding the grey areas, arguing over the wording, and positioning itself for the first vote that could actually matter.
At the centre of it is a niche-sounding but potentially season-shaping question: how, exactly, you measure an engine’s compression ratio under the new power unit rules — and whether the way it’s currently written leaves room for a clever interpretation that’s worth real lap time.
What’s made this one rumble louder than the usual pre-season noise is the cast. Mercedes is named in widespread reports as one of the manufacturers benefiting from the alleged loophole. Red Bull Powertrains is the other. And yet the twist is that Red Bull’s stance — not Mercedes’ — could end up deciding whether this gets closed down before Melbourne.
The argument, as it’s being framed in the paddock, is straightforward: if a loophole creates a meaningful performance offset, rival manufacturers want it tidied up now, not after a handful of races when everyone’s already spent millions chasing a moving target. The counterpoint is just as familiar: if the regulations are written in a way that allows a certain solution, then “changing it” isn’t clarification, it’s moving the goalposts.
That’s where Red Bull becomes the hinge. If RBPT is indeed exploiting the same reading of the rules, it would be entirely rational for it to protect the status quo — unless it believes Mercedes gains more from it than Red Bull does, or unless it wants to avoid starting its first full season as a works manufacturer under a cloud of politics and protest. Either way, the vote dynamics matter, and the bigger picture matters more: in a new rules era, the early technical directions don’t just win races, they set the economic tempo of development. Nobody wants to be the one who backed the wrong interpretation, then had to pay twice to undo it.
And while that story plays out in meeting rooms and late-night WhatsApp groups, Red Bull also has a much more mundane headache: people.
Four senior members of the team’s administrative staff — Joanna Fleet, Julia George, Simon Smith-Wright and Alice Hedworth — have departed ahead of the season. It’s not the sort of change that alters the aero map or the tyre model, but anyone who’s been around a front-running F1 operation knows the “non-technical” layers are what keep the machine turning over. Travel, HR, operations, commercial coordination — the stuff that doesn’t get photographed but absolutely gets felt when it’s disrupted.
There’s also a context here that’s difficult to ignore. Red Bull has been through a visible internal clearing-out over the last year, and this latest set of exits reads like more of the same: a team still re-ordering its structures and lines of control on the eve of a rules overhaul that will punish inefficiency as ruthlessly as it punishes poor engineering.
Elsewhere, the tone was lighter — at least on the surface. Zak Brown has again talked up the idea of Fernando Alonso returning to the Indianapolis 500 with McLaren. It’s an easy headline because it’s Alonso, because it’s Indy, and because the pairing has history — including the sort of history that isn’t neatly heroic. Alonso’s three previous attempts with McLaren brought a best finish of 21st and that unforgettable failure to qualify in 2019, a bruising episode for a programme that was still trying to remember how to do IndyCar at the sharp end.
But Brown’s interest says something about McLaren’s modern identity across series: it likes the big stages, it likes the crossover storylines, and it’s comfortable being ambitious enough to risk the occasional public black eye. Whether Alonso has any appetite to jump back into that particular furnace is another question — and one that doesn’t need answering until it’s suddenly very real.
Back in F1, Lando Norris provided the most telling quote of the day, warning that 2026 could bring “more chaos” once the new cars are properly racing. Norris isn’t throwing out a lazy “new rules = unpredictability” line; his point is rooted in the regulation shape. With both chassis and power units overhauled at the same time — and with energy deployment now an even more central performance lever — race craft is going to include a layer of battery tactics that drivers can’t simply ignore and engineers can’t always perfectly script from the pit wall.
That’s likely to be felt most in the messy middle of races: the lap-to-lap compromises, the moments when you want to attack but can’t afford the energy cost, the defensive driving that’s less about placing your car and more about forcing the car behind into the wrong phase of its own deployment cycle. If the cars are harder to optimise, the sport will look less tidy — and, for spectators, probably more alive.
And finally, a new team keeps quietly stacking up the boring-but-essential mileage. Cadillac will run a filming day in Bahrain on Monday, February 9, just ahead of the second pre-season test at Sakhir. It’s their second such day of the year after Silverstone on January 16 — and in a season where everyone is adapting, the newest operation on the grid can’t afford to waste any controlled running it’s allowed.
None of this guarantees what we’ll see once the lights go out in Australia. But it does underline the real theme of this winter: 2026 isn’t waiting for the first race to start reshaping F1. The power plays are already in motion, the staffing churn is already happening, and the drivers are already bracing for a year where the cleverest management — of rules, people, and energy — could be as decisive as outright pace.
