Max Verstappen has no interest in becoming the public face of Formula 1’s latest technical squabble, even if it’s one that could shape the pecking order before a wheel has properly turned in 2026.
With the new power unit era finally here — sustainable fuel, and a 50/50 split between electric power and the internal combustion engine — the paddock has already found something to argue about. The talk doing the rounds is that two manufacturers, reported to be Red Bull Powertrains and Mercedes, may have spotted a way to interpret the rules that offers a performance edge. An FIA meeting is planned this week to address the differing readings of the regulations, as the sport heads towards its first behind-closed-doors test in Barcelona on 26 January.
Verstappen, though, is doing his best to keep it at arm’s length.
“It’s impossible to know,” he told Bloomberg when asked what the controversy might mean. “Everyone is just trying everything they can.
“From our side, and especially from my side, I have to focus on the driving. I’m not there to be the engine technician and explain everything in detail to you.
“At the end of the day, it’s also something between the FIA and the engine manufacturers to sort out. I drive the car, and I trust that, from our side, we always try to do our very best to get the most performance out of the engine.”
It’s a familiar Verstappen move: keep the noise outside the garage door, let the engineers fight the battles in the background, and reserve judgement until the stopwatch is doing the talking. But it also speaks to the slightly awkward reality for Red Bull this season — for the first time, it isn’t simply a customer team at the sharp end of an engine debate. It’s a manufacturer, with Red Bull Powertrains bringing its own in-house unit to the grid with input from Ford, powering both Red Bull and Racing Bulls.
So when the rumours centre on a supposed “loophole”, it lands differently. Not as paddock gossip about someone else’s cleverness, but as a direct implication that Red Bull might have started this new era with something up its sleeve.
The specific flashpoint is a line in the 2026 Technical Regulations relating to engine compression ratio. Article C.5.4.3 states: “No cylinder of the engine may have a geometric compression ratio higher than 16.0.” It also specifies that the procedure to measure this ratio will be detailed by each power unit manufacturer and carried out at ambient temperature, with the FIA Technical Department required to approve the procedure as part of the homologation dossier.
That last part is where the arguments begin. The reported concern is that some manufacturers might meet the 16.0 limit under the approved ambient measurement procedure, while operating at a higher effective ratio under real on-track conditions — potentially unlocking a small but meaningful gain in power output.
This is exactly the kind of grey-area wrangling the sport promised it had locked down with this rules reset. It’s also exactly the kind of thing F1 reliably produces the moment new regulations are printed.
From Red Bull’s side, powertrains director Ben Hodgkinson has been making it clear he doesn’t recognise the panic — and, crucially, that if there is an edge to be found, everyone will be chasing the same one. Speaking at the team’s 2026 livery reveal in Detroit, Hodgkinson said he sensed “nervousness” among rivals about “clever engineering”, but dismissed much of the chatter.
“I’m not quite sure how much of it to listen to, to be honest,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a very long time, and it’s almost just noise. You just have to play your own race really.
“I know what we’re doing, and I’m confident that what we’re doing is legal. Of course, we’ve taken it right to the very limit of what the regulations allow. I’d be surprised if everyone hasn’t done that.
“My honest feeling is that it’s a lot of noise about nothing. I expect everyone’s going to be sitting at 16, that’s what I really expect.”
Hodgkinson’s more interesting point was less defensive and more revealing: he doesn’t sound like someone thrilled with where the regulation set the ceiling in the first place. “From a purely technical point of view the compression ratio limit is too low,” he said, arguing the combustion technology now available could make a higher ratio viable. “We could make 18:1 work with the speed of combustion that we’ve managed to get, which means there’s performance in every tenth of a ratio that you can get.
“Every manufacturer should really be aiming at 15.999 as far as they dare when it’s measured.”
That last line is the tell. Whether or not the reported interpretation issue becomes a formal clampdown, the underlying message from Red Bull is that this is going to be an era defined by teams living on the edges of the wording — because the performance is there, and because leaving it on the table is not an option.
For Verstappen, the bigger picture is simpler: Red Bull is stepping into the unknown on the engine front, and no amount of pre-season posturing will substitute for laps. He’s been careful not to sell certainty where none exists.
“Time will tell,” is the gist of his stance. Speaking to Sky Sports News, he admitted the obvious: nobody yet knows how the order shakes out.
“I mean, we don’t know,” Verstappen said. “The only thing that I do know is that everyone is giving it everything that they have.
“We are trying to push ahead. We’re really trying to maximise everything, but it’s not going to be easy. We know that.”
And that, more than the compression ratio argument itself, is what makes this worth watching. The new formula was meant to reset the game. Instead, it’s already forcing the FIA into early-room clarifications, and it’s placing Red Bull’s brand-new power unit project under a microscope before Barcelona has even begun.
The irony is that Verstappen’s refusal to bite may be the most credible response in the paddock right now. The engineers can argue about measurement procedures all week. In a few days, the cars will run — and the story will stop being about who found a loophole, and start being about who built the fastest package.
