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

Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc claimed his first win of the F1 2026 season in the British Grand Prix at Silverstone.

Leclerc took victory after seizing the lead at the start, with Mercedes driver George Russell second and Lewis Hamilton third after Kimi Antonelli and Max Verstappen retired late on. Here are our conclusions from Silverstone…

Charles Leclerc’s revival will finally tell us where Lewis Hamilton really stands

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So is Lewis Hamilton back now? Is he back to his best? Just as good as he was before?

Even at 41, is he still at his peak – or close enough to it – to make thoughts of an eighth world championship realistic in 2026?

Hyperbole reigns supreme in the modern world and Formula 1 is far from immune to it.

So naturally, a driver claiming his first win in almost two years, coming off the back of the worst season of his career in 2025, was followed by breathless talk that he had just intruded on the 2026 title race.

Wait. A Minute.

Have we lost our collective minds? Where has our perspective gone?

One win in Barcelona did not make Lewis Hamilton a serious title contender any more than, say, one win in Budapest made Esteban Ocon a serious title contender in 2021.

It was much too soon to talk of Hamilton in those terms after a single victory.

Not only because of the doubts that came before Barcelona, but also because of the relative form of Charles Leclerc.

Complicating the picture surrounding Hamilton – and where he really stands at this stage of 2026 – is that his rise began just as Leclerc started to fall around the time of the Canadian Grand Prix.

How to accurately gauge the level at which Lewis is currently operating when the only other driver with identical machinery has been performing so far below his?

And might it be that Leclerc’s struggles over recent weeks have actually flattered Hamilton, making his results look better than they would be against a Charles at full flight?

Leclerc’s mini-crises come around every couple of years or so, lasting a few painful weeks before he starts to find his way again.

This year’s implosion centered around the brakes, specifically a sudden unhappiness with his own setup once Hamilton successfully made the transition to the Carbone Industrie discs he used to great success at Mercedes.

Since following him to CI discs in Barcelona, the weekend he hit rock bottom of his 2026 dip with a crash in qualifying, Leclerc has gradually been rising again.

An encouraging race drive in Spain, undone by a late DNF, was followed by him narrowly missing out on pole in Austria before Silverstone saw him at somewhere near full strength again for the first time since Miami.

If Hamilton finally remembered who he is in Barcelona, Leclerc has just rediscovered himself too.

Conclusions recap: How the F1 2026 season has unfolded

Austrian GP conclusions: Desperate Russell, Verstappen future, Newey’s Aston vision

Barcelona GP conclusions: Lewis Hamilton rediscovered, hidden Russell defeat, new Leclerc crisis

“I had two approaches recently,” Leclerc told PlanetF1.com and other media outlets of his renewed feeling for the car at Silverstone.

“There was either the one where I just changed my driving style completely and just try and reproduce what Lewis is doing, because clearly it’s working, or keep pushing in my direction and trying to find a way around where the car just fits my driving a little bit better.

“And I went towards the second route, which was to stick with what I know worked in the past and try to find a way around with the car and with every tool that I have available inside the car.”

The pattern of this weekend – at least the more serious second half of it – was more like what most have come to expect from the inter-team Ferrari battle: Leclerc holding a slight but telling advantage over Hamilton.

Charles has resurfaced just in the nick of time with Ferrari likely to enter some of the upcoming races – certainly Hungary and Zandvoort either side of the summer break – as favourites for victory, potentially setting up a couple of irresistible Hamilton-versus-Leclerc contests.

Is it the car or is it me?

That’s the question Hamilton has spent the last four-and-a-half years asking himself, unable to tell for certain if he has been underperforming in cars capable of more.

Leclerc’s revival means Lewis is finally about to get the answers he’s been looking for.

He might not like what he finds.

Unlike Abu Dhabi 2021, the FIA followed its own rules this time

You cannot have it both ways.

You cannot spend the last five years complaining about one of the greatest scandals in the history of sport caused by a governing body failing to follow its own rules… and then complain when it does.

Half a decade after Abu Dhabi 2021, you might have thought that Article B5.13.5 b) of Formula 1’s sporting regulations would be the most famous rule in motor racing by now, but apparently not.

“Once the message ‘LAPPED CARS MAY NOW OVERTAKE’ has been sent to all competitors,” it reads, “the safety car will return to the pits at the end of the following lap.”

And because the ‘lapped cars’ message only arrived at the start of Lap 51 of 52 at Silverstone, that was it. Race over.

Could the message for lapped cars to overtake have arrived, say, 20 seconds earlier? Towards the end of Lap 50, so at least there would have been one lap of racing at the end?

Could the whole process of swatting the lapped cars out of the way, and getting the safety car procedure over and done with, be sped up generally?

Potentially. But that’s not the point.

The decision not to restart the British Grand Prix was correct based on the rules as they are written – however poorly they might be written or however frustrating they may be.

In truth, the way this race ended should have been how the 2021 season finished too.

The point is that all of us – spectators, reporters, competitors – should think very carefully about what exactly we want before criticising this decision.

Because it is precisely the misguided belief that a race must never, ever finish behind a safety car that resulted in the abomination of Abu Dhabi.

And if you insist on races finishing under green flag conditions no matter what, without a strong race director you will end up with more Abu Dhabis and more rules being overridden on a whim.

Or – worse – red flags cynically being thrown for relatively minor incidents just because they occur within sight of the chequered flag and create an opportunity for a grandstand finish.

The line between sport and entertainment in professional sport – or at least a professional sport with aspirations of being taken seriously – must always be tiptoed with the utmost care.

Even setting aside the added safety concerns of these 2026 cars deploying and harvesting in an all-or-nothing sprint to the finish, the risk dial turned up to 11, there is a rank unfairness to a race being restarted so late in the day too.

It would not have sat comfortably had Charles Leclerc, a deserving winner of the British Grand Prix, seen his victory hijacked on the final lap.

Just as it has never sat right that Lewis Hamilton had an eighth world championship taken from right under his nose in 2021.

Like politicians, the minimum you can ask of a referee is competence.

Good old boring competence.

Someone prepared to do the right thing – the fair thing – rather than the most popular thing, or the thing that leads to the most thrilling outcome.

Ultimately, incompetence is how Formula 1 created a terrible mess for itself back in Abu Dhabi.

If the memo was missed and competence is now a crime, lock up the race director and throw away the key.

Kimi Antonelli has nothing to fear from George Russell

Long-term readers of this column will be familiar with the difference between manipulative drivers and reactive drivers.

For the uninitiated, a brief recap.

When it comes to driving style and technique, racing drivers can be split roughly into two camps: manipulative or reactive.

The manipulative ones are generally the best in the business (and usually the most successful), with soft inputs with the steering wheel and pedals ensuring that they remain ‘on top’ of the car at all times.

They are the embodiment of the ‘flat car’ philosophy – effectively minimising the load going through the car at any given time – advocated by the esteemed driver coach Rob Wilson.

To transpose this theory to a different sport, the ball is more likely to go where you intend if you kick it from a balanced body position.

The reactive drivers, by contrast, are defined by their harsher, jerkier inputs and will literally react to whatever the car is doing in real time, living almost entirely on their reflexes and car control.

Reactive drivers can be just as fast – even a little faster on a good day – than the manipulative ones (Ayrton Senna was the most famous reactive driver of all).

But they tend to be harder on the tyres and, with a considerably smaller margin for error, are more prone to mistakes – both the tiny corrections that add up over the course of a qualifying lap and the more serious, car-damaging offs.

The classic in the genre over recent years was the partnership between Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz at Ferrari: two very high-quality drivers, but poles apart stylistically.

Recall that, on most days, it was Leclerc at the centre of everything good about Ferrari with a natural pace advantage over Sainz, who at his worst would be made to look painfully second rate.

Yet every so often, when a cold weekend in Barcelona called for more aggressive inputs to generate crucial tyre temperature, Carlos would totally outclass Charles.

Roughly the same, albeit to a considerably lesser degree, is unfolding at Mercedes in 2026.

The differences between Kimi Antonelli and George Russell are not nearly as stark, but big enough to have made themselves felt so far this season.

Now the lessons of his debut season have been absorbed, there is little doubt that Antonelli was blessed with the same touch and feel for a racing car as the likes of Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton.

If it wasn’t plain enough from watching him on track, you can see it in the way Max and Lewis interact with him.

Game recognises game. He’s one of us, they might as well say when gushing about him to the media.

The sudden emergence of Antonelli has exposed the shortcomings in Russell’s technique.

You could see it in the way he was totally unable to make the tyres work in Miami and Monaco – still the lowest and most troubling points of George’s season, more so even than his retirement in Canada – on weekends Kimi won effortlessly.

It was revealing, also, that Russell faded on a hot, low-grip afternoon in Barcelona when tyre management was paramount as Antonelli came to the fore.

Yet few individual moments have illustrated the gulf between them more than Russell’s mistake at Luffield in Q1 at Silverstone on Saturday.

Invariably it is those change-of-direction sequences that really highlight the differences between drivers: the ones who keep the car ‘flat’ versus the ones who enter the corner with too much load on the car.

(It was no coincidence, for instance, that Franco Colapinto, probably the most reactive driver on the current grid, spectacularly lost control of the Alpine in the much faster change-of-direction Maggotts/Becketts section.)

Despite Russell’s attempt to distance himself from the error – “that was very weird, I’ve never locked up there in my whole career,” he said over team radio – almost certainly there was nothing more to his moment through the gravel than that.

Russell recovered well enough, also overcoming a lack of straight-line speed in his Mercedes to qualify fourth.

But assuming the same differences in style were present elsewhere around the lap, a final Q3 deficit of 0.370 seconds to Antonelli added up.

That four-tenth deficit to Antonelli in qualifying – the same as in Miami/Monaco (parts of Austria too before the yellow flag controversy) and the kind of gap you would typically find between a traditional lead driver and his wingman – is threatening to become a pattern.

All this is why, until the final sting in the tail on Sunday, Antonelli was closing in on Charles Leclerc for victory while Russell was busy batting off a penalised Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen in a mediocre Red Bull for the final podium spot.

If Antonelli was this quick at Silverstone, he will be quick everywhere.

Likewise, if Russell was not the quicker Mercedes driver here, entering this weekend on the back of what should have been a restorative victory in Austria, then where?

Antonelli’s two retirements from the last three races have had the effect of dragging him back into the pack, reducing his points lead from 66 points after Monaco to 25 after Silverstone.

Yet the more he sees from Russell, the more he will realise that there is nothing to fear here.

The uncomfortable reality for Russell is that Antonelli is already more advanced.

A year on, Red Bull is missing Christian Horner

Christian Horner’s departure from Red Bull last year was supposed to signal the start of a new era.

Red Bull, it was said, would be a more corporate place going forward. More dignified, less dramatic. Happier too.

Clearly Ole Schack did not agree.

Max Verstappen’s front-end mechanic had attended every race in the team’s history, stretching back to its debut season in 2005, yet it was only this year that he decided he wanted a change of scenery.

“The departure of Horner and the resulting changes made to the team are understood to have played a part in Schack’s decision to look elsewhere,” PlanetF1.com reported in April.

“The Dane [is] said to have cited a change in atmosphere and working environment in his desire to start afresh.”

Only last week in Austria, meanwhile, it emerged that Paul Monaghan, the last man standing as a familiar face from the Horner era, could be about to leave the team too.

Wasn’t the flood of departures meant to stop once Horner was taken out of the equation?

Maybe Christian was not the problem after all.

It was at Silverstone last year that Horner oversaw his final race in charge of Red Bull, expressing his confidence that the team would negotiate the challenges coming its way in 2026.

As he returned to the paddock for the first time since his dismissal on Sunday, attending a race free from the stresses of team management, he found a new-look Red Bull not faring too well without him.

This is a team that has relied far too heavily on Verstappen for far too long, its technical shortcomings leaving it all on him to keep Red Bull’s head above water.

It was a fight Max could only put up for so long before even he, this hurricane of a racing driver, began to succumb to the futility of it all.

His frustrated reaction to his retirement at Silverstone, where he was pitched into the gravel for the second weekend running due to a fault with the rear wing, told the tale of a driver finally reaching the end of his tether.

The sight of Verstappen stomping away could easily come to be remembered as his Singapore 2012, widely regarded as the moment Lewis Hamilton accepted that McLaren could no longer satisfy his needs.

Red Bull is fortunate that Max has nowhere obvious to go for 2027 – for now anyway – otherwise that famous exit clause in his contract would make for a nervy few weeks.

Off the track, meanwhile, life in this post-Horner world is even more damning.

It has been plain since the first day of testing that Red Bull Powertrains has produced a fine first F1 power unit in 2026.

But good enough to top the FIA’s ADUO ranking? Ahead of Mercedes? Ferrari?

Let’s put it this way: if Red Bull’s internal combustion engine is the world beater it is purported to be (the ADUO scheme only assesses ICE strength), it doesn’t say much about the other 50 per cent of the power unit. Or the chassis Pierre Waché and his technical team have come up with in 2026.

There is a suspicion that the ADUO ranking is less a measure of engine performance and more of a team’s political acumen, hence Red Bull’s desperate efforts to convince the FIA to reassess its initial findings.

If it is true that there has been some gameplaying going on here, the likes of Mercedes and Ferrari sniggering to one another as they shove an unwitting Red Bull in front of the teacher, would Horner have allowed himself – let alone his team – to be outsmarted and outmanoeuvred in such a way?

Over. His. Dead. Body.

Red Bull became the latest in a growing line of F1 teams to turn to an engineering-style team principal when Laurent Mekies was installed as Horner’s successor last summer.

Yet perhaps this episode is proof that, helpful as it may be for the boss to know his way around the car, there is still a place for an old-fashioned team principal in this unforgiving paddock too.

Red Bull’s loss will soon enough be another team’s gain.

Cross your fingers that the FIA’s V8 return plan comes to fruition

Sometimes a flare goes up and you get to see exactly where everyone is standing.

The semi-regular debate about Formula 1 returning to V10 – or, failing that, V8 – engines always provides such a moment.

Many are in agreement that F1 was never better – or at least never sounded better – than in the previous era and that the sport lost a significant chunk of its appeal when hybrids took over in 2014.

The day Fernando Alonso took his title-winning Renault for a spin at the 2020 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, resulting in Lewis Hamilton pausing an interview just to take in that noise again, should have been the day the paddock’s urge for V10s was reactivated.

Yet whenever the conversation about a return to V10 or V8 engines dares to get remotely serious, it always seems to be met with a strange hand-wringing unease.

So it was refreshing a couple of months ago when Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the FIA president, confronted the issue directly.

Speaking at the Miami Grand Prix in early May, Ben Sulayem declared that it is a matter of time before V8 engines return to F1, potentially as soon as 2030.

He went on to say that the FIA has the power to force a return to V8s without any input from the engine manufacturers.

All very grand words. But what will happen when they meet reality?

Even so, after the mess of the 2026 regulations – devised by committee like most bad ideas – it is this decisiveness so many have craved over the years.

In short: the FIA produces a set of rules and the teams and engine manufacturers decide whether they want to be part of it.

And if they don’t?

Off they pop to Formula E, where they can feel good about themselves while talking up their green credentials…

Until they realise nobody watches Formula E anyway and come scurrying back for the visibility only F1 can offer.

As noted in PlanetF1.com’s conclusions from Austria, there had been a sense over recent races that Formula 1 was just starting to settle into a new normal following the shock of the opening rounds of 2026.

Yet this latest double header has opened eyes once more to the lunacy of these rules.

It has been left to the traditional European circuits – and the sight of corners like Copse and Maggotts/Becketts being reduced to charging stations – to offer a reminder that any effort to ‘refine’ these regulations is the F1 equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig.

And if it was bad enough to watch Lewis Hamilton and George Russell battery blasting each other at Silverstone on Sunday, 24 hours after the unrestrained nonsense of the sprint race, picture what lies ahead in Belgium next weekend and wince.

If 2026-style Silverstone prompted Max Verstappen to laugh when he tried it on the simulator, expect a hollowed-out Spa to move him to tears.

Even with tweaks planned for 2027 and further adjustments for 2028, this, as Verstappen warned some months ago, is a ruleset likely beyond saving.

One can only wish Mr Ben Sulayem well in his efforts to bring Formula 1 kicking and screaming back to the future.

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