F1 2026 So Far: How the New Rules Flipped Formula 1 Upside Down
Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing Formula 1 Race Preview. There is no Grand Prix this weekend, so this is a between-races feature on the story of the season instead.
The Short Version
Formula 1 tore up its rulebook for 2026, and the pecking order came back unrecognizable. Mercedes has 379 constructor points and eight wins. Red Bull has zero wins. A driver who was a rookie last year, Kimi Antonelli, leads the championship by 50 points with six wins and six poles. F1 is on its summer break now and does not race again until the Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort on Sunday, August 23, at 9:00 AM ET. Here is how the sport got flipped over in eleven races.
The Rules Reset That Started All of It
2026 is the biggest rule change F1 has made in more than a decade. The engines went to roughly a 50-50 split between the gas motor and the electric side, with the battery output jumping from 120kW to 350kW. The fuel is fully sustainable. DRS is gone, replaced by active aerodynamics, meaning the front and rear wings physically move. They flatten out on the straights for speed and close back up in the corners for grip. Instead of DRS, a chasing driver who gets within a second at a set point on the track gets an extra shot of electrical power for the next lap.
Change that much at once and somebody guesses right and somebody guesses wrong. That is the entire story of this season.
Mercedes Read the New Rulebook Better Than Anybody
Mercedes came out of the winter with the best car and has not let go of it. The team has eight of the eleven wins. Antonelli has six of those, plus six poles. George Russell has the other two and sits third in the standings on 160 points.
Antonelli is the headline. He was the kid Mercedes gambled on, and now he is 219 points up top with a 50-point cushion over Lewis Hamilton. He turns 20 on August 25, two days after the Dutch Grand Prix. He has also stopped needing to win to lead. In Hungary he took a grid penalty for a yellow flag infringement, started seventh, watched a one-stop plan fall apart, and still came home third and left Budapest with a bigger lead than he arrived with. That is what a title run looks like.
Red Bull Is Winless and Max Verstappen Is Sixth
This is the part nobody had on their card. Red Bull has not won a race in 2026. The last time the team went a full season without a win was 2015. Verstappen, a four-time champion with 71 career wins, is sixth in the standings on 109 points. His last win was the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix on December 7, 2025.
The car is the problem, not the driver. Verstappen has spent the season complaining about balance he cannot trust, especially in slower corners, and about degradation his own team's data does not show. Then Hungary happened. He put a car most people rated fourth-fastest on the podium in second, and he did it by outbraking Hamilton twice on the opening lap at a track where nobody passes.
Max Verstappen grabs P2 for Red Bull, smart call to stay out during the VSC and gain track position. Antonelli completes the podium in 3rd place.
— Luke Smith (@LukeSmithF1) July 26, 2026
Zandvoort and Monza tell us which Hungary that was. If Red Bull is still up there at both, the recovery is real. If not, Hungary was one great drive covering for a bad car.
Ferrari Got Its Moment, and the Champion Had to Wait
Ferrari is second in the constructors on 307 points with two wins, and one of them mattered a lot. Hamilton won at Barcelona in June. That was his first win in Ferrari red, his 106th career win, and his first win of any kind since the 2024 Belgian Grand Prix. He is second in the drivers' standings on 169 points. Charles Leclerc took the other Ferrari win at Silverstone and sits fourth on 138.
Then there is Lando Norris, who won the title last year and then went eleven races into 2026 without a win. He finally got one in Hungary, 15 seconds clear of the field, McLaren's only win of the season. His teammate Oscar Piastri is seventh on 92 points and still looking for his first win of the year. McLaren team boss Andrea Stella has said Piastri's natural driving style has not taken to the new cars the way Norris's has.
THE TOP 10 IN HUNGARY
— Formula 1 (@F1) July 26, 2026
The Teams the Reset Broke
Aston Martin hired Adrian Newey, the best car designer the sport has ever had, and has one point to show for the season. Fernando Alonso got it with a tenth place at Monaco. Early in the year the new power unit sent vibrations through the car so badly that neither driver could go the full race distance. Newey has said he is not writing the year off, but there is no quick fix for a car that wrong.
Cadillac joined the grid this year as F1's eleventh team, with Sergio Perez and Valtteri Bottas driving. The team is still on zero points. That is what year one looks like for a brand-new operation, and the two veterans are there to build the thing, not to win right now.
The Fan Debate
Here is the argument to have during the break. Is this new formula good for racing, or did it just hand the title to whoever guessed the engine right? Mercedes has eight of eleven wins and Red Bull has none. That is not close racing at the front. The counter is that F1 has a 19-year-old leading the championship, Hamilton winning in a Ferrari, and the reigning champion fighting for scraps. That is a better story than the last few seasons gave us.
The Bottom Line
F1 changed everything at once and the sport landed somewhere nobody predicted. Mercedes is on top, Red Bull is looking up at three teams, and a kid who turns 20 in August has a 50-point lead with 12 races left. Zandvoort on August 23 is where we find out whether anyone can still take it from him.
Formula 1 Gear
We stock real Formula 1 gear, not knockoffs. A few pieces tied to the drivers in this story:
- Red Bull Racing Max Verstappen RB16B Dutch GP 1:18 Model Car - a Zandvoort piece, with Zandvoort next up.
- Scuderia Ferrari Garage Crew T-Shirt - for the Hamilton and Leclerc side of the story.
- McLaren F1 New Era 9Fifty Camo Hat - Norris finally got one in Hungary.
- Mercedes AMG Petronas George Russell 1:2 Scale Helmet - one left, from the team running away with it.
- Formula 1 Tech Limited Edition Belgian GP Hat - from the track where Antonelli got win number six.
More hats and team gear in the F1 hats collection. Sizes run out fast on the one-off pieces.
