Are the very respectable stand-in performances of Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda at the Dutch Grand Prix evidence that Formula 1 has become too easy in 2026?
That’s certainly what four-time world champion Max Verstappen was hinting at after qualifying, where his stand-in Red Bull team-mate Lawson was just 0.115s slower than him.
Yuki Tsunoda, who replaced Lawson at Racing Bulls and hadn’t driven the 2026 cars with just a single day of simulator work aboard the VCARB-03 prior to this weekend, was just 0.102s off regular Racing Bulls driver Arvid Lindblad in Q2.
Verstappen thinks this is evidence of how much easier it is to get to the limit of these cars in qualifying, given their unique energy demands have taken the emphasis away from swashbuckling, elbows-out one-lap efforts - much to the frustration of drivers like Verstappen and qualifying specialist Charles Leclerc.
“Especially in qualifying, I think it's a lot easier nowadays with these cars to find the limit, because you're also in quite a few places where you're a bit down on battery and everything becomes a bit easier to land,” Verstappen said when asked if Lawson and Tsunoda’s gaps were evidence drivers can make less of a difference this year.
“I think that demonstrated quite well this weekend compared to the previous cars. For me, that's not a surprise.
“You see it already the whole season; everyone is always within one tenth, two tenths.
“If you have a very bad qualifying, three tenths. It's always the margins are small.”
Lawson’s one-lap gap to Verstappen: Dutch GP
FP1: +0.536s
SQ1: -0.165s
SQ2: +0.374s
Q1: +0.102s
Q2: +0.427s
Q3: +0.115s
Lawson is very familiar with the 2026 Red Bull Ford power unit, as it’s powered his Racing Bulls all year, but he’d never driven the Red Bull RB22 prior to Zandvoort.
Take an average of the gap to Verstappen from his two Zandvoort qualifying sessions and you get 0.245s, very close to Isack Hadjar’s average gap to Verstappen in 2026 so far (0.232s), albeit over a much bigger sample size.
That Hadjar gap is considerably lower than any average Red Bull team-mate qualifying gap to Verstappen since Daniel Ricciardo was his team-mate in 2018.
But of course that’s not necessarily all down to the new rules. Hadjar has done a sterling job this year, so much so that Red Bull isn’t even considering its number two driver for the first time in years.
And Lawson’s put in a stellar season with Racing Bulls, so his performing better in the senior team than he did at the start of 2025 also makes sense.
But Verstappen raises an interesting hypothesis. The Race, namely Edd Straw’s weekly driver rankings, have certainly been complicated by it being harder to separate the performance of the driver and car this year and make definitive intra-team judgements.
Drivers like Oscar Piastri have also complained that “computers behaving or misbehaving” are also often deciding qualifying sessions, so there’s less power in the driver’s hands.
Looking more generally at the gaps between team-mates in 2026 versus 2025, the gap between team-mates in six of the 10 teams (discounting newcomer Cadillac) has gotten smaller since last year. The average 0.303s gap between Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll is the largest intra-team gap this year, compared to the largest of 2025, the 0.735s between Verstappen and Yuki Tsunoda at Red Bull.
Perhaps it is the case though that it’s harder for Verstappen to destroy his team-mates like before, given the next biggest 2025 gap was 0.453s (George Russell-Kimi Antonelli).
Although that data again has caveats, like Lewis Hamilton and Antonelli’s increased competitiveness versus difficult 2025s, that aren’t necessarily to do with it being easier to get to the limit of F1 cars in qualifying. Plus the fact only half a season’s complete so there's plenty of time for those gaps to close or widen.
Stella thinks it's more difficult
But all of that is not necessarily evidence that things are easier for drivers in F1 2026, according to McLaren team boss Andrea Stella.
“These cars are classified by both our drivers - I don't know about the others - as difficult cars to drive,” Stella said when The Race put the topic to him.
“Definitely last year we could see much less scatter between the two drivers. Here, when a driver is a bit on the back foot, then this can be a large amount.
“They are difficult cars to drive for several reasons. At the start of the season, it was in the corners and then in the straights. In the corners because of the low grip, much less downforce, smaller tyres, and in the straights because of the inconsistencies of the deployment, or the fact that you may have a sudden superclip before braking and now you've lost your braking reference, or sometimes the frustrating element that you go on power early in high speed and now you're losing deployment later.
“So there were several angles from which driving this year's car was more difficult. Those related to the power unit, I would say that the drivers and the engineers are now more familiar with, have become more familiar with, and they are sort of more ready to cope with that.
“Still, in the debriefing of this qualifying, drivers refer to elements of the power unit behaviour which affect the consistency of pushing at the limit. So this is not completely gone, but it's much less than the start of the season.
“But the reason associated [with] the corners and the grip is still there. Even if all teams have added downforce, it's very difficult for the drivers to predict what the problem is going to be in braking, or whether the car will snap or not in traction.
“With the previous generation of cars, there was much, much more load aerodynamically and much more grip from the tyres, and it was easier. While it was difficult for the drivers because everything was happening much faster, it was easier because normally you had kind of one thing to cope [with].
“Here, there's a lot that can happen at any moment from a grip consistency point of view, or even sensitivity to the wind, which in Hungary, or here, played a major part in the fact that nobody here had a clean lap in qualifying.”
Asked about Verstappen’s comments that F1 2026 put less onus on drivers’ skill, Stella replied: “I'm not so sure, like I'm genuinely not sure, and I would be inaccurate if I commented for another team.
“If I comment for what I've understood at McLaren, based on what I said before, I would say that this year is even more difficult.
“Like in the past, like in 2025, you needed to get used to the speed, and how fast things were happening. But this year you have to get used to adapt to the fact that you can have any kind of problem, because the car slides a lot.
“So it's, maybe this may depend on car characteristics, or even the driver's characteristics. But if I consider the McLaren experience, I think it's more difficult this year.”
from The Race https://ift.tt/N5mFgjX
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