Verstappen, 110 points adrift, identifies Red Bull's biggest weakness heading into F1 2026's second half

Max Verstappen heads into Formula 1’s 2026 summer break 110 points behind championship leader Kimi Antonelli, and the four-time world champion is under no illusion that a repeat of his stunning second-half comeback from last season is on the cards.

Last year, Verstappen recovered from a mid-season deficit with a run of podium finishes from Zandvoort onwards. This time, he says, the problems at Red Bull are more complex and harder to paper over.

The team began 2026 expecting difficulties, though not quite the ones that materialised. Red Bull’s own power unit, the DM01, proved surprisingly competitive — the bigger shortcomings emerged on the chassis side. Combined with the RB22’s excess weight, those issues left Red Bull more than 1.3 seconds off the pace in pure race trim at the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix, according to data from Paceteq. By Belgium and Hungary that gap had narrowed to around two tenths per lap, but Verstappen insists those numbers do not capture the full picture.

In Budapest, the Dutchman flagged a phenomenon he called “car degradation” — distinct from tyre degradation — where the RB22 simply gets slower as a race weekend progresses, and sometimes even within a single 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 first half of the season in a word, Verstappen did not hesitate: “Tough.”

“In general, it’s been very tough. Some good moments, some bright and shining moments, I guess, but in overall, it has been tough. So, I think we need to try and be more solid, a bit more all-round, to have more straightforward weekends. Plus, we need to find more performance. It’s as simple as that at the end of the day.”

Earlier in the season Verstappen had joked that the accumulation of setbacks would drive him to spend the winter break as a Buddha in Tibet. The tone in Hungary was noticeably more measured, reflecting a team that knows a quick fix is unlikely.

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache has also pointed to corner-entry instability and mid-corner understeer as persistent weaknesses of the RB22 that the team must address in the second half of the campaign.