Has the row with Russell made Verstappen at Mercedes in 2026 less likely?

The 2024 Formula 1 season ended with Lando Norris’ victory in Abu Dhabi, securing McLaren’s 26-year constructors’ championship.

Ferrari duo Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc finished second and third, with Lewis Hamilton having just pipped teammate George Russell into fourth place in his final race for Mercedes.

BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your questions after the season finale in Abu Dhabi.

Has this weekend’s controversy made it less likely that Max Verstappen will go to Mercedes in 2026? -Tom

This is a reference to the row that broke out between Verstappen and George Russell over their experiences in the stewards’ room in Qatar. And the answer is no.

Verstappen’s future beyond the end of 2025 remains very open.

He has a contract with Red Bull until the end of 2028, but there are ways to get out of it if he wants.

He has several options.

Mercedes is the obvious solution: given the chance, Toto Wolff would sign Verstappen in a heartbeat, whether as Russell’s teammate or Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Lewis Hamilton’s replacement next year.

But Verstappen being Verstappen, he would be in demand everywhere.

At Ferrari, for example, what if Hamilton doesn’t do well? An opening could emerge.

At Aston Martin, Fernando Alonso is under contract until the end of 2026, but Verstappen may want to wait until 2027, then join Honda and Adrian Newey after that if the car goes well that year .

He’s in no hurry. He will take his time, see how 2025 goes and then decide.

Who got the better of each other over the three seasons: Lewis Hamilton or George Russell? -Lohit

In some ways this answer boils down to basic qualifying and racing statistics, although there are some nuances.

In qualifying, they were tied in their first two seasons together in 2022 and 2023 – in 2022 Hamilton had the advantage by 0.05 seconds on average, in 2023 Russell was faster by 0.004 seconds on average over the season.

That changed this year, when Hamilton really struggled in qualifying, and in 2024, Russell was 0.17 seconds faster, and Hamilton only outqualified him five times on merit.

The big question is: Why? Even Hamilton doesn’t seem to know that. But the answer seems to be that he’s not comfortable with the car, has had a harder time than Russell adapting to its particular demands, and sometimes survives.

In the championship, Russell finished ahead two out of three times – in 2022 and 2024. The points total was 697-695 in favor of Hamilton.

This is where the nuance comes in.

In 2022, the most notable Mercedes drivers were mainly Hamilton’s, with the exception of Russell’s victory in Brazil – think Spain, Silverstone, Hungary, Netherlands and the States Grand Prix -United. And in 2023, Hamilton was comfortably the best driver overall.

Even this year, although Russell finished 22 points ahead, there have been races where Hamilton has been much more impressive – for example, Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi, where he started several places behind Russell but fell behind. came close and finished just behind or even passed him.

Of course, there have been other races where Russell has also been more impressive than Hamilton.

The fact is, although Hamilton has faced some criticism this year, it cannot be ignored that Russell is exceptionally good, so being beaten by him is no shame at all, even for a seven-time champion.

In Las Vegas, I interviewed Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ director of trackside engineering, for a story on the end of Hamilton’s time at Mercedes. I asked why Russell had the advantage this year, and he began his answer by saying: “George is a particularly strong driver and he is particularly strong on Saturday.”

The fact that Hamilton started this season already knowing he would move to Ferrari at the end must also be seen as a contributing factor.

As Hamilton said on Sunday in Abu Dhabi: “It’s probably been the longest year of my life, knowing from the start that I was leaving.”

As the sport’s elder statesmen, do Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton get along after the trauma of their partnership with McLaren? – Ed.

At McLaren in 2007, as Alonso made clear on several occasions, their problem was not so much with each other, but rather with the management and the way they handled the season.

But to my knowledge, the relationship between Alonso and Hamilton has not changed much in recent years.

It’s quite simple. They will never be best friends. There seems to be some sort of character conflict there, and they each have quite different worldviews, although in some ways they’re probably more similar than they’d like to admit.

As Hamilton said in an interview with BBC Sport and some other media in 2022: “We are very different people and with very different values.”

But they have great respect for each other’s abilities and they get along quite well on a superficial level when they find themselves in the same vicinity, it seems.

However, as we have seen in recent years, the inherent clash of personalities sometimes comes to light, especially when there is a setback on the track.

Did McLaren make a mistake in not allowing Lando Norris to become number one driver sooner, which would have likely placed them as drivers and constructors’ champions? -Trace

One wonders – to say the least – whether favoring Norris earlier would have made him a world champion, because there are actually very few times McLaren could have done it, because he was usually ahead of Oscar Piastri.

The most obvious are Hungary and Monza.

In Budapest, Norris was on pole but Piastri took the lead at the first corner, and then there was the question of whether Norris should let Piastri back after the way the team applied strategy ended with Norris in the lead.

It would have been very hard for Piastri to keep Norris in the lead – he deserved the victory. But let’s say they did – that’s seven more points for Norris.

At Monza there is a strong case to be made that McLaren should not have allowed them to race on the opening lap, as Piastri’s brilliant pass on Norris at turn four resulted in Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari overtaking Norris to second place, from where he continued to win.

It’s impossible to know whether McLaren would have won if this hadn’t happened, as Ferrari might still have cheated them with the one-stop shop. But even if Norris had won instead of finishing third, that’s an extra 10 points.

Verstappen finished 63 points ahead of Norris. So it’s hard to argue that the team orders in these two events would have made Norris a champion – they didn’t.

But that doesn’t mean McLaren doesn’t think it has something to learn from the way it has handled this season.

McLaren Racing managing director Zak Brown was asked before the race in Abu Dhabi last weekend whether he thought it would have been better to favor Norris earlier.

He said: “No. I don’t tend to regret things. I tend to learn and say to myself, ‘I would have done that differently’. Otherwise you live in a series of regrets.

“It was hard, because Oscar has never been that far behind Lando [in the championship]. We started hearing that we should favor Lando mid-season, which was very early.

“I think what we learned at Monza was that we went into Turn 4 first and second and we came out first and third, but the instructions we gave them were more vague. ‘was subjective, it was: ‘Don’t take risks.’

“So Lando was thinking, ‘I don’t need to block as hard because I don’t need to take any risks.’ And Oscar was thinking, “Hey, the door seems pretty open to me.”

“Looking back, we could have been more categorical in saying, ‘The way you enter turn four is the way you should exit turn four. Eliminate everyone and then go racing.”

“I like that we let our guys race. But if I look at Monza, that’s what we learned. That we have to be more definitive, because a driver’s view of what is risky is subjective. “

Did Red Bull design its car so much around Max Verstappen that no other driver could make it competitive? -David

To the first clause of this question, Red Bull engineers would say no. But the real answer is “no, but yes, sort of”.

Red Bull would say they are not designing the car to favor Verstappen; they design the fastest car possible, then develop it in a direction that, from racing experience, suggests where it can be improved.

However, it is inevitable that if one driver is demonstrably and consistently faster than the other, any team is likely to give more weight to his comments than to those of his teammate.

So if Verstappen feels he can go faster if the car has a more responsive front end – which it usually does – they are more likely to develop it so that it has more downforce and grip at the front. ‘before than if his teammate said he wanted more rear stability, for example.

Alex Albon would say this is the situation he found himself in when he was Verstappen’s teammate in 2020 – Albon compared the Red Bull management’s response to a computer game controller set to maximum sensitivity.

But that’s a general answer. More to the point, this year, that’s not Red Bull’s problem.

The problem for them was that the balance of the car was not “connected”, as drivers say these days – that is, the front and rear behave differently, sometimes d ‘one turn to another, sometimes within the same turn. Aston Martin had a similar problem.

This makes the car very difficult to drive. And in this situation – in any situation, frankly – a great driver like Verstappen will always adapt better than a merely good driver like Sergio Perez.

The second part of the question is whether another driver would be able to handle this situation better.

It’s a safe bet that the best – Lewis Hamilton, Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Lando Norris, Fernando Alonso – certainly would.

Would this extend to Liam Lawson or Yuki Tsunoda, with both Red Bull drivers considering replacing Perez in 2025?

Well, as it stands, it looks like we’re going to find out and Lawson will be the last experiment.

Why does a misbehavior (a collision) that seriously handicaps another car never result in disqualification? -Graham

Because it is generally not considered a serious enough offense to warrant this punishment.

Drivers can be disqualified, but this tends to only happen in cases of the most blatant rule-breaking or ignoring orders from authorities.

A simple mistake in a racing situation – even if it is particularly clumsy, as was the case for a couple in Abu Dhabi on Sunday – does not cross the threshold.