Adam CooperIn the aftermath of a scintillating British Grand Prix, it appears that approaching the halfway mark of the 2026 Formula One season it’s all up for grabs.
With nine races down here’s our take on what we learned from the Silverstone race ahead of the Belgian GP at Spa.
Max Verstappen’s frustration at Red Bull is increasing
Max Verstappen did little to hide his frustration over the British GP weekend as he struggled with balance and PU issues amid ongoing speculation about his future at Red Bull.
On top of that following his Q3 crash in Austria for a second time in two races he was pitched off the road at high-speed after a rear wing issue saw the air not re-attach properly.
At least on this occasion he avoided contact with the barrier, but his P3 was lost.
“When the rear wing doesn’t close fully, you lose a lot of downforce, and you spin off the track,” he said when asked about the incident by this writer.
“One time, okay. But two times – this is becoming dangerous for myself. And obviously, I don’t want that.”
Naturally Red Bull boss Laurent Mekies was adamant that Verstappen was “right to be unhappy”, and he confirmed that there would be a full investigation.
“We certainly understand what happened at Red Bull Ring,” he said. “We are not going to go into the details, because I don’t think it will be right, but we understand the failure, yes.
“And yes, from the early analysis of today’s, we have suffered a different type of failure.
“It doesn’t make it better, but it is clear that in front of the successions of events, whether or not the failure is different doesn’t really matter.
“We are going to review the area to make sure we leave zero chance for that to happen again.”
All very frustrating… time to recharge before Spa. pic.twitter.com/9IAzE2zaJQ
— Max Verstappen (@Max33Verstappen) July 5, 2026
Verstappen’s disappointment with the car over the course of the weekend was clear, to the extent that he had wanted change setup to drop out of parc ferme and sacrifice his P7 on the grid.
“It’s just painful, frustrating,” he said. “You’re trying everything you can.
“The whole weekend, I’m not happy with the car balance, I’m down on top speed on my side of the garage. Same again today in the race.
“If it was up to me, I would have started from the pit lane. But at the moment I’m honestly just looking forward to going home and not think about F1.”
Ferrari surprises itself with pace at high-speed tracks
It’s no secret that Ferrari is losing out to the Mercedes power unit (and in theory to the ADUO benchmark Red Bull Ford engine).
However the team was competitive in both Austria and Silverstone, two tracks where the PU plays a huge role, as the overall level of the package improved.
At the Red Bull Ring Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton qualified second and third but faded in the race due to tyre management issues – and it’s not too simplistic to suggest that was because they had to work harder in the corners.
Tyres less of a concern at Silverstone, where Leclerc scored a memorable win.
We will never know if he would have been caught by Kimi Antonelli on fresher rubber after his later stop, but there’s no question that Ferrari did better than the team had expected to do at such a PU-focussed venue.
“We still have a deficit of performance, this we know,” said team boss Fred Vasseur.
“And for sure it’s more difficult when you are going to Silverstone than when you are going to Monaco. That’s why we were not very optimistic.
“On the other hand, I think it pushed us to chase the last amount of seconds everywhere, and we did a small step by small step all over the weekend to have a strong pace today.”
Vasseur’s view was that Ferrari coped well with the inherent nature of the track, and the tricky conditions.
“I think for sure it’s much more engine related, Silverstone, than Spain two weeks ago.
“But it was also the first time that we had windy conditions, and front limited – the characteristic of the track is completely front. It’s not just about the engine, and I think we did pretty well with all these topics.
“It will be another challenge in Spa. First the weather will be probably a bit different, but we have to start to start from scratch every single weekend.
“There is nothing magic. We can’t imagine making a step of five or six-tenths in one weekend, and it’s just the addition of small gains everywhere to make a difference.”
Toto Wolff paid Ferrari the ultimate compliment: “They said before the weekend that they’re going to be lacking energy over this track. They haven’t.
“They were a strong competitor, and this is to be expected now for the for the rest of the season.”
Do you agree with Jenson? 💭 pic.twitter.com/YUa2NOuHEa
— Sky Sports F1 (@SkySportsF1) July 9, 2026
New Mercedes PU adds to tension with McLaren
In Austria both Mercedes drivers took a new power unit, and in Silverstone it was the turn of both Alpine drivers and Carlos Sainz at Williams to get the latest version.
However, there was no such joy for the McLaren drivers, who will have to wait until Spa to get their chance.
In the case of Sainz there was little choice – he had a major failure in the Austrian GP, and lost that PU, so he needed a new one. In terms of the Alpine/McLaren arrangements, there was something of a grey area.
On Friday at Silverstone, Zak Brown was a little cagey when discussing the subject.
“You’ve got to cycle through your engines, and we’ve got life left on our current engines,” he said.
“So we need to wait till we do an engine change, Williams got theirs because Carlos had his issues. He needed an engine change.”
Looking across at Alpine’s Steve Nielsen he said: “I don’t recall exactly the scenario, but I think you’ve got two of them. So, it’s just a timing sequence.”
Pressed on the timing he added: “You’d want it as quickly as you can, but you need to run the cycles through the engines.
“Obviously, you can move things in and out, but we’ll have it soon. Hopefully next race?”
The bottom line is that a good finishing record has meant that the Alpine drivers have done more overall mileage this year than the McLaren guys.
Don’t forget that between them Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri failed to start three races, and there have been other non-finishes.
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So there was some logic to Pierre Gasly and Franco Colapinto joining Sainz in getting hold of the new spec.
However, McLaren was clearly not happy at being at the bottom of the HPP pecking order, and tensions were exacerbated when it became apparent that the works drivers were lifting before the line in qualifying to aid deployment – a strategy that McLaren didn’t know about.
Team principal Andrea Stella was more candid than Brown in his assessment.
“There’s definitely conversations ongoing with HPP at technical level to make sure that we use what is available in this power unit,” said the Italian.
“Which is brilliant and is a really a piece of great technology.
“There is a lot of performance, which is also in the details of the exploitation, and we are now waiting to see if we can upgrade our specification. And if this helps exploitation somehow…
“It should be just a reliability upgrade, so I’m not sure that the case, but definitely there’s some other factors that we need to keep discussing with HPP.
“Because when we look at the performance in the straights, even taking into account with the fact that may have less drag, there’s still some question marks.”
McLaren has a lot of work to do
The power unit saga aside McLaren had nowhere to hide at Silverstone as the team’s true form became very apparent. Painfully, the MCL40 was the fourth fastest car in both sprint and main qualifying, with P6 and P7 the best position in each.
The actual races went a little better, with a good start for Lando Norris propelling him to third in the sprint, and trouble ahead handing him P4 in the Grand Prix. However Stella was under no illusions.
We loved seeing our special livery out there for our home Grand Prix 🤩#McLarenF1 | #SparkWhatsNext | #BritishGP 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/OsH8BvLGPk
— McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team (@McLarenF1) July 5, 2026
“Overall the race confirmed that our performance today was in line with qualifying,” he said when asked about the performance by this writer. “So we still exhibit a decent gap to Ferrari and Mercedes – probably around half a second.
“On Lando’s side we took advantage of accidents that happened to other people. I think actually the strategy was working very well. Lando did a good job of being able to drive the car with old tyres, and he kept going at decent pace.
“This put us in a strong position for the second stint with fresher tyres, and he was getting closer and closer to the guys that were fighting at the front, with Verstappen blocking Hamilton and Russell.
“P4 I think it’s an overachievement – not on our own merit, it’s more because other people had trouble.”
Stella admitted that the team is lagging behind in the development race, but he also highlighted the sort of track-specific issues that worked in favour of Ferrari, and against McLaren.
“I would say that here the grip is very low,” he noted. “The conditions are difficult. The car slides, it’s quite unpredictable with the wind, and there’s a premium on cars that have more grip and more downforce, because the car is just a little bit easier to predict.
“There are possibly some opportunities, let me say, by exploiting more out of the power unit that we have available.
“And I would not mention the tyres, because I think when I look at the degradation in the race, pretty much all cars have very similar degradation.
“Certainly, we don’t have any of the advantage that we had in 2025. So even this one is an area in which we need to try and create some competitive advantage.”
Williams banking on Azerbaijan “B-spec” package
While there has been much focus on Aston Martin’s plans to bring a substantially different car to Spa Williams has quietly been pursuing a similar plan, with Azerbaijan now earmarked for a what James Vowles has described a “B-spec” version of the FW48, so different will it be.
Silverstone was a tough weekend. We added performance, but not as much as we need or as much as some of our rivals.
Setbacks are part of elite sport and every high-performance organisation goes through them. What defines you is how you respond – and Williams has always been a… pic.twitter.com/UmcOGhYGco
— James Vowles (@JV_F1) July 6, 2026
Unlike Aston Martin the team hasn’t put all its eggs in one basket, and smaller steps are ongoing, and not just in terms of weight saving.
A new front wing was introduced at Silverstone, although ultimately it didn’t provide the hoped-for gains.
“This was a front wing that was supposed to come to Spa,” said Carlos Sainz.
“The team is pushing flat out to bring parts, we’re learning how to produce quicker, how to manufacture quicker from all the mistakes we did at the beginning.
“And it’s a front wing that made it in time for Silverstone, so we managed to gain two weeks. So, kudos to the whole factory for pushing flat out to arrive here with two front wings.”
However the Spaniard made it clear that there’s work to be done: “I don’t know if that with this set of regulations we are not understanding the flow dynamics well, or what is happening.
“But my feeling is that at Suzuka, we were 1.6-1.8 seconds off with a very overweight car, here we’re two seconds off with a much better weight.
“And it means that something is not going into the car, there’s some load there missing somewhere, and we need to go find why, and we need to be serious about finding the issues and create some bounce back from here.”
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