F1 Round-Up: Wolff’s 2026 teaser, Verstappen picks a new digit, and Norris gets two wheels curious
Mercedes haven’t forgotten what a regulation reset can do for them. The last time F1 rewrote the rulebook on power units, the Silver Arrows ran the table for the better part of a decade. With 2026 creeping into view, Toto Wolff says he’s already watched their next-era machine stretch its legs in the simulator — and he liked what he saw.
“I just came out of the simulator watching the car drive,” Wolff said via the team’s channels, calling what’s coming “fascinating.” It’s a tell without being a tell, but the message is clear enough: Mercedes think they’re in the game as F1 prepares to marry new aero philosophies to a heavily revised hybrid package. If you’re looking for early-season subtext in 2025, it’s that Brackley isn’t planning to be a passenger when the switch flips next year.
Max Verstappen, meanwhile, is changing numbers — and sending a quiet signal about where his head’s at. After three seasons running the champion’s No. 1, the Dutchman will shift to 3 in 2026 following his dethroning by Lando Norris. It’s not a return to his long-time 33, and that’s the intrigue. The number 3 is forever linked with Daniel Ricciardo in recent Red Bull lore; Verstappen adopting it feels both fresh and a little bit nostalgic, a clean break from the title-holder status while still keeping a totem he likes on the car.
Norris, for his part, is having the kind of post-title glow that invites unusual offers — like one from MotoGP. Guenther Steiner, now CEO at Red Bull KTM Tech3, wants to put the reigning F1 champion on a MotoGP bike for a test. On paper it’s a lovely crossover. In practice, you can hear Zak Brown’s eyebrows climbing through the MTC roof. McLaren’s boss isn’t likely to rubber-stamp his star man sampling an outrageously fast two-wheeler, no matter how friendly the invite. Still, that a MotoGP team is publicly pitching the idea tells you where Norris sits in the wider sporting zeitgeist right now: box-office enough to move the needle beyond F1.
Over at Ferrari, the story isn’t horsepower or paint — it’s language. Karun Chandhok reckons Lewis Hamilton’s trickiest adaptation this year hasn’t been red over silver but the switch on the pit wall headset. After a career spent crystallizing a near-telepathic shorthand with Peter Bonnington at Mercedes, Hamilton’s building a new vocabulary with Ferrari race engineer Riccardo Adami. That sort of rapport isn’t conjured overnight. It’s timing, tone, trust — the delta between a good call and the perfect one. No great drama, but the small gaps matter in a title fight, and Hamilton’s margin for error in a new environment is thinner than most.
And if you needed a reminder that drivers are just big kids who like going fast, enter Kimi Antonelli’s weekend. The teenage F1 newcomer turned up for some karting at Daytona Motorsport under the wonderfully cheeky alias “Henry Shovlin” — a nod, of course, to Mercedes trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin — and promptly earned himself two penalties for, in steward-speak, “pushing too hard.” No harm done, just a little paper trail and a story that tracks with everything we’ve seen of Antonelli so far: fast, feisty, and not exactly shy about it.
Back to 2026, the drumbeat is getting louder. Team principals are choosing their words carefully, but you can hear the optimism — or nerves — in how they say them. For Wolff and Mercedes, this next reset is an opportunity to reset the pecking order after seasons spent chasing. For Red Bull and Verstappen, a new number won’t change the intent: they’ll want their dominance back. For Norris and McLaren, the question is whether the first title was the start of a run or a hard-won one-off. And for Ferrari, the Hamilton project is all about compressing years of chemistry into months.
We’ve got a full season to argue about it before the stopwatch makes the truth plain. For now, the clues are peeking out: simulator smiles in Brackley, a No. 3 stenciled in Milton Keynes, and one very fast world champion being courted by MotoGP. The 2026 grid isn’t here yet, but you can feel it taking shape in the margins.
