Charles Leclerc bounces back as Red Bull’s problems mount: British GP winners and losers

Charles Leclerc bounced back to become the big Winner from the 2026 British Grand Prix, while things are less rosy for Max Verstappen.

Here is PlanetF1.com’s full list of winners and losers from the 2026 British Grand Prix.

Charles Leclerc and Red Bull headline British GP winners and losers

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Winner: Charles Leclerc

It’s been a rough few weeks for Charles Leclerc, on track at least, given the narrative shift that’s happened as a consequence of Lewis Hamilton’s waking up this year.

With Hamilton dominating the headlines in the aftermath of his Barcelona win, Leclerc’s crashes that weekend and in Monaco suggested he could have been losing his head, perhaps feeling that the team he’s so capably led ever since eclipsing Sebastian Vettel in 2019 may be more convinced by the seven-time F1 World Champion’s capabilities.

But Leclerc is no slouch and, while he may not have the immense C.V. his teammate does, Silverstone was a weekend in which he and his side of the garage got one over on Hamilton and the rest.

Would Leclerc have beaten Kimi Antonelli to the victory had the Italian not had his issues? That’s impossible to know now, but the Ferrari driver had a good shot and had shown strong pace throughout the Grand Prix.

This was after Hamilton had led the Ferrari charge through Friday practice and the Sprint running, only for Leclerc to step it up for the main event.

This was down, as Hamilton himself revealed afterwards, to a change of wing setting that led to a pace disparity in the race.

“Balance-wise, I noticed Charles went up on his balance, I think compared to qualifying, added more wing, and I felt the car was really oversteery with the diff settings that we had had,” Hamilton said.

“And so, I took out wing and then I had the biggest understeer at the beginning of the race. So, he just pulled away from me. I just couldn’t even turn the car until halfway kind of through that first stint, I managed to start turning the car a little bit better with some diff changes, but by then the gap was already huge.”

With Leclerc wresting back some of the momentum that has leaked out to the other side of the Ferrari garage, he was understandably relieved to have returned to the top step of the podium.

“It means a lot because when things get tough, and that’s literally the situation I’ve been in the last few races, obviously there’s a lot of negativity around me in general, with narratives being created, and it’s never a nice environment to work in,” he said.

“But to keep our head down and to keep working very hard and get the result that we got today, I’m super proud of the whole team that have been pushing me and helping me to find that feeling again with the car. On such a track where confidence is key, I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the feeling, and so that’s really good.”

Revealing that he has had to try not to get too lost in the world of social media negativity, as well as maintain a healthy perspective about the “noise” surrounding him and the team, he said that he “knew that I didn’t become a bad driver from one day to the other. It was just a matter of finding that feeling with the car. These cars are very specific, are very different to the way we’ve been driving since we started racing, and so it takes a bit more time to get used to it.

“I was very strong for the first part of the season, then I lost a bit of feeling with the car. We changed quite a few things with the car and it took a bit more time than what I had wished to get back to the level I wanted.

“It wasn’t a nice situation to be in, but I’m very happy to get out of this situation in this way.”

With Fred Vasseur bluntly shutting down any chance of Ferrari taking sides to favour a driver in the championship, Leclerc’s upswing in Silverstone means that, if the team can keep up the momentum, perhaps a title tilt could be on the cards.

The ADUO-upgraded Ferrari power unit was far happier in the lower temperatures and altitudes of Silverstone and, with the aero package performing well, it’s unlikely to be Leclerc’s last win of the season.

“It’s still the beginning,” he said.

“It’s only one race and I must not get carried away thinking that the war is over. I mean, the battle with this car has been quite a lot recently and I cannot take it for granted that now it’s behind me. So, I’ll keep working and try to get that feeling more often going ahead.

Loser: Max Verstappen

The optics of Max Verstappen’s race coming to a premature and “unacceptable” end in ignominious fashion due to an apparent rear wing aero attachment issue couldn’t have come at a worse time for Red Bull.

Not only was the car lacking the raw pace and poise that the upgrades in Austria had seemingly unlocked, but the Silverstone weekend also saw the reveal from the Dutch media that Verstappen has been feeling frustrated by feeling unlistened to by the engineers, as well as being overruled on his desire to start from the pitlane with a setup change.

“Ask the team, as I would have done things differently,” he said before the race, while Mekies explained afterwards that the team had felt a better result was still more likely from his normal qualifying position rather than going from the pitlane.

With Christian Horner returning to the paddock for the first time since the events of the same race weekend last season, the heroes’ welcome he received from fans at the main gates won’t have been lost on Red Bull’s senior management. Nor would the media melee that gathered around him as Horner made his way through the swarm to enter the F1 hospitality unit.

It bookended what has been an incredibly tumultuous year for Red Bull, and the fortunes of the Austrian-led squad can hardly be said to be any better than they were prior to Horner’s firing, as the performance of the car varies significantly based on the characteristics of each race track.

The British GP weekend saw the absence of stalwart chief engineer Paul Monaghan, who is widely expected to be off to join Cadillac after a period of gardening leave from Red Bull – would the full attention of someone of his wisdom and knowledge have spotted a possible issue with the rear wing?

There’s also the ongoing matter of the ADUO findings, in which sources have indicated that the better exploitation of the system by Ferrari and Mercedes has “exposed” Laurent Mekies’ lack of affinity for the political machinations of the F1 paddock – a critical skill that differentiated Red Bull under the previous regime.

This may explain why Red Bull owner Mark Mateschitz and CEO Oliver Mintzlaff are engaging directly with Mohammed Ben Sulayem on the topic as they seek answers as to how the RBPT ICE has been judged the best – an exemplary engineering feat, but not a political one.

Either way, Verstappen’s race came to an end in the gravel trap, with the Dutch driver left furious by the dangers of the situation: if he loses trust in the safety and stability of his car, does the sport’s best driver start leaving time on the table out of caution?

The firing of Horner a year ago may have reduced some of the noise temporarily as Austria won the political battle and set about reshaping the squad in its image but, a year on, Red Bull’s situation has not improved: the driver around which the team is focused exists in a Schrodinger-like arrangement in which he is simultaneously the epicentre of the operation and yet, somehow, feels not listened to. If he goes, surely more of the team will join him at the exit door – paddock sources have suggested team morale has taken a significant battering in recent months.

With Lambiase set to leave his role as Verstappen’s race engineer at the end of this season, which is also said to have seen him become increasingly iced out in his role, a Verstappen departure from either Red Bull or Formula 1 has a feeling of inevitability about it in the coming years, but the signs are the earliest opportunity will be 2028: Mercedes will stick with Russell and Antonelli next season, and Zak Brown has been clear in his messaging there’s no room at the inn at his team.

With Verstappen clearly having itchy feet, Red Bull GmbH now has to be wondering whether the succession ‘plan’ for a post-Horner existence it rushed through is the correct one… or whether it was a plan it should have executed in the first place, given that Verstappen’s loyalty now appears to be based on available options rather than his current seat being the most desirable.

However, while things might not be going great from a Verstappen perspective, it’s giving Isack Hadjar the chance to continue putting in a solid season out of the spotlight, and the French driver put in another decent showing to claim fifth place: he had a bizarre occurence of losing front wing downforce during the race, one that needed a wing change, which saw his aero load return to the tune of two seconds a lap.

Winner: Kimi Antonelli

Yes, Antonelli lost out in a major way, results-wise, at Silverstone, seeing his championship lead shrink again down to a mere 25 points.

But the Italian driver was, once again, the star of the show as he overcame Lewis Hamilton in the Sprint race before taking pole position.

The fast-starting Ferraris meant his job was made much more difficult in the Grand Prix, but the pieces were coming together through the tyre offset strategy that meant he was coming back rapidly against Leclerc in the closing laps.

We were robbed of a potentially cracking end to the race as a result, although Verstappen’s bringing out of the Safety Car may have ruined this regardless, but Antonelli’s application of pressure on Leclerc came to a sudden end when his wheel shield failed: a failure that was just disruptive to the overall feel of the car to mean it became very difficult to drive, although the Italian felt something deeper to the breakage.

“The car wouldn’t turn anymore,” Antonelli said.

“In some of the corners, the wheel was in the air, so there was something like fundamental that was broken. I

“know we only know now that the wheel shield broke, but we don’t know if something else broke, because by the loss it feels like it was more than just a wheel shield.

Despite this disappointment, Antonelli regrouped and, despite being told to box to retire, persevered with dogged determination as the points slipped through his fingers – an attitude that his seat predecessor didn’t always adopt when it came to car failures.

“I have the mindset that I try, every time I go on track, I do my best, that I try to give everything, and today, despite things that were already going against us, I saw there was the possibility to get one point, and I was just trying my best to achieve that, and I was going to achieve that, but then the Safety Car came, and I just didn’t really have the possibility to even try for that.”

With Antonelli and his side of the garage again coming out ahead of George Russell’s, despite the British driver’s ‘home advantage’, the gut punch of the failure means that the misfortunes suffered by both on areas outside their control have roughly balanced out now.

But, weekend after weekend, Antonelli is showing that Russell can’t best him on pace and, increasingly, execution.

Loser: McLaren

A year on from its triumphant 1-2 with Lando Norris winning his home race, this weekend at Silverstone was one of relative anonymity for Andrea Stella’s squad – although there was no particular surprise to the fact it couldn’t fight for the podium.

Fourth place for Norris was about as much as he could hope for, a result Stella hailed as an “overachievement, although not on merit”, having executed an excellent Sprint race to take an unlikely podium, while Oscar Piastri’s race was undone by contact with Liam Lawson on the first lap – the resulting damage resulted in wing failure and an early pit stop for repairs.

With the Woking-based squad being open about needing aerodynamic upgrades to have any chance of moving up from the bottom end of the top four teams, there’s another factor that Stella has earmarked as a clear performance differentiator between the two Merc-powered squads.

While there’s no doubt that Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains will be doing all that’s required of it from a regulatory perspective, McLaren do feel there is time left on the table in the area of power unit exploitation.

“I think when it comes to the power unit exploitation and the opportunities that we have in this area, it’s a fact that we have opportunities, but the implication is not necessarily that HPP is not trying hard enough,” he said, in response to a question on the matter from PlanetF1.com.

“Everyone is working at maximum pace, and there are a few things that can be left behind, so we accept that this is part of the conversations we are having with HPP. I never want to miss a chance to say that we always remain in excellent relationships, but, like anything in Formula 1 when you go at maximum pace, sometimes there’s a few beats that we could have done better, and I very much appreciate in my conversations that they do say, ‘Yeah, we see your point here, we could have done better’, you know, but it’s the same thing as a team.

“This is not something about HPP not trying hard. It’s about everyone trying to go as fast as possible, and I think it’s quite natural that, as a customer team, you remain a bit on the back foot.”

Another suggestion in the paddock is that Mercedes’s use of Mezzo intercoolers is a factor in differentiation between its advantage over its customer teams, and that customers have been given details of a PWR intercooler to order direct from the manufacturer.

Either way, it’s clear that McLaren’s form at this point means that Lando Norris’ title defence is as damp as Jacques Villeneuve’s was in 1998, following the regulation shift from ’97. Overnight, Villeneuve went from winning races and the title to scraping onto a few podiums as Williams slipped to third overall, and Norris’ position right now is no better.

Winner: Racing Bulls

Alan Permane’s squad has grown accustomed to double points finishes in recent races, and the Faenza-based team made it four in a row at Silverstone.

Even better, they weren’t in their customary ninth and 10th-places and, instead, capitalised upon the misfortunes of others and the timing of the Safety Car to take sixth and seventh overall.

A deployment issue on Arvid Lindblad’s car meant he lost out to Liam Lawson, while both cars made the most of what is emerging as a particular strength of the package: tyre management.

It’s meant that Racing Bulls is now just one point behind Alpine to compete for the best of the rest behind the top four teams, and Lawson praised the development progress made on the technical side, as well as in engineering to hit the ground running at the start of a weekend.

“It’s been working very well recently,” he said.

“Everything we’ve brought to the car has been positive. They’ve been working well each week, and we’ve been managing to find lap time, and I think the main thing, as well, is we’ve been starting really strong from the start of practice.

“We don’t really have to change much, so it’s always been a little bit of fine-tuning, and overall, that’s made it much faster to start.”

More from the British Grand Prix

British GP conclusions: Leclerc’s Hamilton answer, no Russell fear, in defence of FIA

British GP 2026 driver ratings: Hamilton penalty, Verstappen crash, Leclerc’s luck

Loser: Alex Albon and Williams

Starting from 16th, Albon’s race became academic almost immediately as he and Haas’ Esteban Ocon collided on the opening lap – an incident that was severe enough for the stewards to award a penalty, despite there usually being some leeway for that lap.

From there, and not for the first time this year, Albon’s race became a test session, allowing him to try out the updated car over a race distance as the team took the opportunity to scan the front wing in different settings, but he was retired towards the chequered flag anyway.

Returning to the media pen, Albon didn’t protest the penalty he’d been awarded.

“We have a lot of front locking and inside wheel lift, as you already know now; side by side with other cars, it gets 10 times worse,” he said.

“Sometimes, when a car wants to go around the outside, I feel a little bit like a passenger sometimes, which is what it was like in Turn 6 today.

“I was okay but, as soon as I saw Esteban committing to the outside, I knew I was gonna lock up. It’s kind of what we have at the minute, so I’ll get used to that.

“Sometimes you have to take a lot of caution on Lap 1, especially with our car for that reason, and I possibly could have taken a bit more.”

As for Carlos Sainz, who is set to decide his future over the summer break, the Spaniard revealed that he’s “worried” about Williams, given the reduced weight and upgrade package didn’t result in a big step forward.

Having felt that the “race was on” after moving up into the points after a great start, Alpine and Audi proved too fast, and Sainz said, “It’s clear to me now that we’re having serious issues when developing this car, and we are not bringing the performance that we thought we were.”

Winner: Franco Colapinto

Starting from 19th after a floor issue sent him flying off the road in qualifying, Colapinto made a great start to bring himself into contention for a points finish, and duly did so.

This was helped by an undercut on Pierre Gasly that resulted in the French driver finishing behind him, but Gasly wasn’t too irked when he spoke after the chequered flag – Colapinto had been within striking distance and, with Gasly emerging in traffic that cost him some time, lost out to the Argentine.

Ninth and 10th for Alpine, according to Gasly, was what mattered but, on this occasion, it was Colapinto who came out on top.

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