There is an unusually straight line between a comment Max Verstappen made in 2023 and the shape of the 2026 championship standings.
Three years ago, Verstappen told reporters he had seen the numbers on the forthcoming regulations and did not like them.
"26 is not that far away and it looks very bad from all the numbers and what I see from the data already."
He went further in later interviews. "The 2026 cars look pretty terrible. Whoever has the strongest engine will have a big benefit." It was received, at the time, as a dominant driver complaining about rules designed partly to bring him back to the pack.
A new Formula1Unpacked retrospective re-reads those comments as a forecast the sport ignored at its peril. The channel's thesis is blunt: Verstappen was not sulking in 2023, he was predicting. And three rounds into the 2026 season, the championship is providing the evidence.
"Three years later, he is knocked out in Q2 at Suzuka, finishing eighth in races he used to win from the back. His own teammate is faster than him, and a 19-year-old nobody had heard of is leading the championship."
The sentence is uncomfortable and factually accurate. Verstappen was eliminated in Q2 at Japan. He was out-paced by new Red Bull teammate Isack Hadjar. He sits behind Mercedes rookie Kimi Antonelli in the drivers' standings. The four-time champion's 2025 form — which delivered the title — is gone, and gone with the specific thing Verstappen warned the regulation would erase: the ability of a great driver in a great chassis to beat a lesser driver with the best engine.
Mercedes' power unit has emerged, as predicted, as the dominant piece of hardware on the grid. The team's combined car-plus-engine package has given Antonelli arguably the best head start any rookie in modern F1 has ever had. Ferrari and Red Bull, meanwhile, are both visibly wrestling with engines that cannot deliver the energy profile the 2026 rules require. Ferrari principal Fred Vasseur has conceded a seven-tenth engine deficit. Hadjar has said the Red Bull chassis is "terrible" but the engine is fine — which, in 2026, means Red Bull is doing its best work on the half of the car that now matters least.
Verstappen's 2023 warning therefore deserves its moment of vindication. He told the sport the regulations would make the best engine king. They did. He told the sport the cars would look bad. THE RACE's Barcelona testing coverage, documenting a roughly two-second lap-time deficit on 2026 machinery, suggests he was right there too. He told the sport the racing would be compromised. Suzuka produced a 50G Bearman crash triggered by an energy-deployment differential that could not have existed under the 2025 rulebook.
Formula1Unpacked's closing argument is political rather than technical. F1's decision-makers had one of the most credentialed drivers on the grid, with simulation data in hand, telling them exactly what would break — three years in advance. The emergency tweaks being negotiated before Miami are, read in that light, a quiet admission that Verstappen was right.
Whether he gets the on-track rewards that typically go with being right remains to be seen. For now, Formula 1 is rescuing a regulation its loudest critic tried to stop.
