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Max Verstappen enters Formula 1’s summer break 110 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, but the four-time world champion is not anticipating another dramatic second-half recovery.
Last season, Verstappen launched a spectacular comeback from Zandvoort onwards, finishing on the podium at every grand prix during the second half of the campaign. Red Bull’s situation is more complicated this time, however, with weaknesses spread across both the car and its weekend execution.
The team began 2026 with a sizeable performance deficit. Its own power unit had been viewed as the principal pre-season question mark, yet the DM01 has proved surprisingly competitive. The greater shortfall has come from the chassis, compounded by the RB22’s excess weight. According to Paceteq figures, Red Bull was more than 1.3 seconds per lap off the pure race pace in Australia and China.
That gap had narrowed to two tenths in Belgium and Hungary, although Verstappen believes the headline figures do not capture Red Bull’s full problem. The latest issue emerged in Budapest, where he felt the car suffered from “car degradation” rather than conventional tyre degradation, losing performance as the weekend progressed and even within a session.
“We need to first find more overall performance. And then we need to fix our problems, where we sometimes just lose performance over a weekend, or even from the start of the race to the end,” Verstappen said. “So, yeah, that is actually a big priority.”
Asked to summarise the opening half of the season, Verstappen used one word: “Tough.” He acknowledged some bright moments but said Red Bull must become more solid and all-round, producing more straightforward weekends while eliminating the problems associated with its current package.
The assessment comes as the second half of the season prepares to begin, with five key storylines set to shape the remainder of the 2026 F1 campaign.
Technical director Pierre Wache says both drivers have raised concerns over corner-entry stability and mid-corner understeer. Isack Hadjar reached the same conclusion, saying entry stability “needs to be solved” before the team can improve elsewhere.
Wache also said Red Bull initially lacked load compared with rivals and suffered mechanical issues that prevented the drivers from properly feeling the car through the steering. Those problems were corrected at the beginning of the season, but they added to the overall performance deficit. Progress has been clear since the difficult opening rounds; the remaining task is to make that improvement dependable every weekend.
He’s a software engineer with a deep passion for Formula 1 and motorsport. He co-founded Formula Live Pulse to make live telemetry and race insights accessible, visual, and easy to follow.