Verstappen, unusual numbers
Eight points in the championship and a gap from the top which already amounts to 43 points. Max Verstappen he used to dig these furrows to his advantage, when he accumulated victories in series to break every record (2023) or put that decisive hay in the farm in the second part of the year (2024). 2026, however, is telling a very different story, to which Red Bull, Super Max and its fans were no longer accustomed: a dimension of mediocrity that was difficult to predict until a few months ago.
A fact testifies to the crisis of one of the most successful duos in the history of the Circus: for the first time in his ten-year career in Red Bull, the four-time world champion finished two consecutive weekends outside the top-5 in both qualifying and the race. It hadn’t happened to him since the start of the 2016 World Championship, but then he was driving for Toro Rosso, now Racing Bulls.
After two races, Verstappen scored points exclusively in Melbourne, where an overly aggressive energy recovery generated by the ERS software sent him off the track in Q1 and forced him to recover from 20th to sixth place in the race. In China, Super Max even remained empty: ninth in the Sprint (starting eighth) and knocked out in the GP (again starting from eighth place) due to a problem with the cooling system of the hybrid component of the power unit.
In Shanghai, not even McLaren’s double withdrawal (no matches at all) helped Verstappen, who suffered from problems at the start (“As soon as I release the clutch, the engine is not there“), of pace and also of communication with the team, considering that in turn 6 he performed in vain lift&coast for 36 laps without the team correcting him.
