Are Aston Martin a dark horse to sign Verstappen?

After a three-week break, the Formula 1 season resumes this weekend with the Belgian Grand Prix at the much-loved Spa-Francorchamps circuit.

Following Christian Horner’s dismissal as team principal, Laurent Mekies will take charge of Red Bull for the first time.

With Adrian Newey at Aston Martin and his history of making cars that Verstappen is strong in, does that make them dark horses to sign Max if he does leave Red Bull? – Dan

For 2026, Aston Martin already has two drivers committed.

Fernando Alonso’s contract runs out at the end of next season, and Lance Stroll will drive there for as long as he wants.

The team effectively serves him because Stroll is Lawrence Stroll’s son.

That implies that Alonso and Verstappen would need to work out a deal if they wanted to switch from Red Bull to Aston Martin.

Given that Alonso gets his first chance to drive an Adrian Newey-designed car next year, the chances of him being especially amenable to that are low. In such a situation, any benefit would have to be quite substantial, one might think.

After all, there doesn’t seem to be any movement in this direction at the moment, and while nothing is impossible in F1, one can always be surprised.

If Verstappen is to leave Red Bull, it is most likely to be to Mercedes. He’s still undetermined at this time.

How difficult is it for a team principal to transition halfway through the season? Particularly at Red Bull where the outgoing team principal seemed to have a lot of the control and responsibility. – Steve

Christian Horner’s position as Red Bull team principal has changed significantly. This weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix will be the first time in Red Bull’s 20-year history that someone else other than Horner is in charge of the team.

Laurent Mekies, his replacement, is a very capable and well-liked player in Formula One.

Mekies already comprehends the Red Bull structure well. He had been working as team principal at their second team since the start of last year and before that spent a decade there as an engineer before moving to the FIA in 2014. From 2018 to 2018, he also worked for Ferrari.

Mekies will undoubtedly be familiar with his new environment because Racing Bulls will have a lot of their parts obtained from Red Bull.

He will have spent the past two weeks getting to know Red Bull as well as he can at their Milton Keynes base – as well as a test day that he attended in the days immediately following his appointment.

Mekies already recognizes that he is joining a highly capable team. He won’t want to immediately make significant adjustments.

Interesting that so many teams have added new floors over the past few races in the context of teams that are focusing on 2026 cars. Do floors offer the best value for money performance upgrade over other parts, or are they more reusable than other parts? – Sam

The introduction of new floors by teams this year is not in any way connected to the new rules for the following year.

The floor is undoubtedly where teams’ attention will be as they try to make their cars more quickly throughout the season because it is the most powerful component of the design on the current F1 cars.

But any floor that is introduced this year is not relevant to next year because the technical regulations for 2026 are completely different in aerodynamic philosophy.

The cars that have been in Formula One since 2022, known as the “venturi floors,” will be retired next year.

Instead, F1 switches to “step-plane” floors, which are used before 2022.

These have a central section which is the lowest part of the floor, and then a ‘ step ‘ either side to a higher section which, from the front of the floor to ahead of the rear tyres, is flat, rather than curved in a wing shape as now.

Due to the FIA’s string of regulations governing what teams can do to control airflow in the backseats, the cars will have to be run differently from that time.

These restrictions in the rules “make it more difficult to hold on to the downforce at high ride heights,” according to Mercedes technical director James Allison.

In the era from 2017-21, there was a lot of discussion about the cars ‘ rake.

Mercedes ran a low and Red Bull a high rake, a steeper angle from the front to back. In other words, the Mercedes’ rear was higher than the Red Bull’s. Red Bull’s was the style followed by most teams at the time, even though this was the era of ground-breaking Mercedes success.

These strategies involved various philosophies of handling a phenomenon known as “tyre squirt.”

Where the rear tire’s inner shoulder meets the ground, there is a messy airflow. It disturbs the clean flow of air teams want through the diffuser, the upswept part of the floor at the back of the car.

Teams want to clean up the airflow in an effort to reduce the diffuser’s downforce, and there were a number of methods before the previous regulations. However, the new regulations contain provisions meant to limit that possibility.

According to Allison, this will likely mean that the cars next year typically run lower at the rear than in the previous generation – but not as low as the ground-effect cars of the current era.

When the manufacturers presumably keep everything as secret as possible, how can teams get a sense of who is ahead with developing the new engines for 2026? – Alex

No one should actually be aware of the relative performance of the next year’s engines because the manufacturers are all working on them separately, so this is a good question.

However, F1 may be a big deal and have a sizable following, but it’s a small world and people talk.

For a start, the manufacturers have to discuss their engines with governing body the FIA for a whole bunch of reasons.

Then, there is a shift in employment between teams and manufacturers: people leaving one engine company for another. They will obviously be able to tell their new employer where their former employer was when they arrive and share that information with them.

And then there is just general gossip between people in the paddock.

Therefore, while each manufacturer makes an effort to prevent performance figures from creeping out, they inevitably do so in some cases.

An impression develops in that manner.

The last time there was a major change of engine design, there was a lot of talk about Mercedes being ahead of the rest. Before the cars first started testing in the pre-season, it became clear that it was true, but no one knew for sure until that was the case.

This year’s situation seems to resemble it greatly. Again, no one knows for sure, but the grapevine says that Mercedes are ahead.

The new rules are incredibly complex.

With the removal of the MGU-H, the component of the hybrid system that recovers energy from the turbo, the engine architecture is changing.

The power split of the engine is changing, with the electrical part of the engine now set to produce about 50% of total output, up from about 20% currently.

The need to recover that much energy has resulted in a change in aerodynamic regulations due to the removal of the MGU-H, which had a significant impact on recovery.

F1 has introduced moveable aerodynamics, with high- and low-drag modes available on both the front and rear wings. The idea is that drag can be reduced on the straights, to increase speeds, to make braking distances longer, to increase the time energy can be recovered during braking.

The engines’ deployment and recovery functions will also be fundamentally different from what they are now.

For instance, the engines will likely be turned on high revs during corners just to conserve energy for use on the straights. In that situation, the internal combustion engine is effectively being used as an energy generator for the battery.

Then there is the entirely renewable fuel, which is produced without the use of fossil fuels. These will also affect performance.

Effectively, snippets of information about all these aspects of the new engines creep out one way or another, and a sense of who is in a good place and who is less so starts to coalesce.