Only six rounds remain in the 2026 Formula 1 season, but the pressure never ceases in the world’s top motorsport category.
Despite both titles being all but wrapped up, there’s still much to prove for some of the sport’s key players, including the team that on course to claim the constructors championship — and the driver who’ll be beaten to the drivers title too.
When you’re only as good as your last race, these last races of the season will be crucial.
FRÉDÉRIC VASSEUR, FERRARI TEAM PRINCIPAL
Cause: being the Ferrari boss
Release: wins
He has the full backing of the board, but despite — or because of — this, there’s no doubting that Ferrari is ending the season under elevated pressure.
Vasseur’s defensive post-race press conference in Singapore was telling. It will have been pencilled in as a winnable race, but Red Bull Racing’s resurgence put it out of reach, and the race appeared peppered with some typical Ferrari tactical blunders.
Of course, one of those errors was down to Lewis Hamilton, who chose not to pit — or missed pit entry, depending on which version of events you go by — and Vasseur was at pains to make that point, biting back at journalists asking where the race had gone wrong.
“Don’t blame the team,” he emphasised repeatedly.
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Even accounting for Hamilton’s role in turning what would have been a two-three finish into a second and sixth place, however, the picture is broadly the same.
Ferrari had started the year hoping to challenge for the title. In the middle of the season it looked set to deliver on those expectations, with two wins in three races.
In eight races since its last victory, however, it’s stepped onto the podium just three times, its season all but obliterated.
Leclerc and Hamilton have also had their first examples of competitive tension this year now that the Englishman is back on form, which at times has exploded in Vasseur’s face, most notably via Hamilton’s claims that the team lacks rules for on-track battles.
They’ve played a role in the abundance of rumours in the Italian media that Vasseur’s relationship with the executive has become strained — since denied by both sides — and that he and Hamilton are no longer on the same wavelength, also rebuffed.
The top job at Ferrari is reliably the most pressured in Formula 1 even at the best of times. These are not the best of times at Maranello, and in his fourth season in charge, Vasseur is entering a critical phase ahead of a high-expectations 2027 campaign that could make or break his time in red.
Norris slummed for smug response | 01:40
STEFANO DOMENICALI, FORMULA 1 CEO
Cause: calendar uncertainty
Release: a safe ending to 2026
The Formula 1 CEO has had a more challenging year than he expected.
Not only has he had to juggle the fallout from the extremely contentious 2026 engine regulations, but he’s also been writing the calendar on the fly since the outbreak of the war in the Middle East following US and Israeli strikes on Iran in February.
Those strikes forced the calling off of two of the sport’s most lucrative races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, causing a commensurate blow to F1’s balance sheet.
Things looked up in the middle of the year, with a ceasefire agreement allowing F1 to reinstate Bahrain in early October. Then the fighting started again, and Bahrain did Formula 1 a solid by hosting its race in Malaysia.
But as the end of the season approaches, another big question over the Middle East looms.
Currently the sport is scheduled to end its campaign in Qatar and Abu Dhabi on 29 November and 6 December.
Despite the cancellation of myriad other events for around this time, Domenicali is adamant that this will be the case, and all signs are that F1 is planning to travel to the Middle East.
Both Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have declared themselves safe enough to host major sporting events, with hostilities in the Persian Gulf having faded, albeit not entirely subsided.
F1 has a contract and a clear financial interest in running both races. If it really is safe, why wouldn’t they happen? Why would the sport cop the hit for nothing?
That’s not to say the sport isn’t monitoring things closely.
It will have noted the US building up troop numbers in the region and will have read recent reports suggesting the United States has drawn up plans for fresh strikes after its 3 November elections.
It’s tapped Imola to prepare for hosting duties on 6 December in case things change at the last minute. It’s also pushed back its deadline to the middle of November, with the use of airfreight allowing greater flexibility and tighter turnarounds than its usual seafaring logistics network.
Domenicali’s last call of the year will be his biggest, with millions of dollars and the security of all F1 personnel on the line.
Kostecki speaks on famous Bathurst win | 02:27
GEORGE RUSSELL, FORMER TITLE FAVOURITE
Cause: being obliterated by his junior teammate
Release: crucial pre-2027 momentum
There was a brief few days, after winning the Azerbaijan Grand Prix, when George Russell genuinely appeared to believe his championship hopes were still alive.
He was still an improbable 66 points back, but he’d just dominated the weekend to claim only his third win of the year on the first genuinely ropy weekend of Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s season.
For a moment Russell seemed optimistic that he could turn the blowtorch onto his inexperienced 20-year-old teammate and make him sweat.
An engine failure just a week later in Malaysia put paid to that theory, and the knock-on back-of-grid engine change penalty in Singapore left his title hopes dead, buried and cremated, to use a phrase.
Now 102 points adrift with six weekends remaining, he and everyone else could be out of the hunt as soon as this weekend.
But that doesn’t mean Russell’s story has finished.
His 2027 season starts this weekend.
Momentum has been a fickle friend for him this year, but with nothing left on the line now, the remainder of the season must be the prologue of his 2027 title challenge.
It’s a formula used to good effect before.
When Nico Rosberg was belted by Lewis Hamilton in 2015, he used the final three rounds of the year to build himself up for the following campaign, winning all three races from pole ahead of the checked-out Hamilton.
He continued that great run into 2016, winning four on the bounce, even if aided by some good fortune in his favour.
After four rounds he was 43 points up on Hamilton. He won the championship by five points.
It took everything out of him to close the deal, and he promptly retired, sure that he couldn’t do it again.
Russell, up against what looks for all money like a generational talent, is in a not dissimilar scenario, albeit far further from the end of his career.
Antonelli, in only his second season, will get better again next year, and it will take everything Russell has to halt that momentum.
The job starts now.
Indonesia Grand Prix race highlights | 17:21
JAMES VOWLES, WILLIAMS TEAM PRINCIPAL
Cause: setting expectations too high
Release: correcting his pre-2026 errors
Williams boss James Vowles broke the cardinal rule in the lead-up to 2026: always under-promise and overdeliver, never the opposite.
The former Mercedes chief strategist talked too good a game about his team’s prospects under the new regulations.
He explained how he had revolutionised the team from running on a single unwieldy 20,000-cell Microsoft Excel document to instead using modernised systems that made the operation of the team more efficient and more responsive.
With those tools in place, he declared that Williams would be the first team to abandon 2025 development in pursuit of a 2026 head start that would send the team beyond the midfield and towards the frontrunners — expectations inflated by a better than expected 2025 performance, seemingly signalling the team’s readiness.
Instead that car arrived late to pre-season testing, and when it did hit the track, it was overweight and a handful to drive.
From fifth in last year’s standings, Williams is currently an underwhelming ninth — and only five points ahead of the struggling Aston Martin team, a gap that could see it finish 10th for the first time since 2022.
The team’s big upgrade in Azerbaijan improved things — mostly by getting down to the minimum weight — but only somewhat. It remains the only team other than Haas that isn’t moving closer to Mercedes as the season-long average benchmark.
This year Vowles has argued that the scale of the 2026 challenge revealed some deep-seated organisational weaknesses not previously apparent. Some of the software that replaced the infamous spreadsheet has also been discontinued, having been found to be more of a hindrance than it was helpful.
But the excuses are running out.
Next year is the 50th anniversary of the Williams team, the third-oldest continuously operating constructor in the sport. It will also be the 30th anniversary since the team’s last constructors championship and last drivers title, won by Jacques Villeneuve in 1997.
It will also be Vowles’s fourth year in charge. While he’s undoubtedly done much to modernise the ailing former giant, that won’t count for much without results.
“Celebrated very well last night!” | 03:29
MERCEDES, CONSTRUCTORS CHAMPION-ELECT
Cause: a potentially dodgy upgrade
Release: getting back on top this season
This would seem like a highly unusual entry on the eve of what’s likely to be a title-winning fortnight for the German marque.
But the fact that both championships will be won with multiple rounds to spare can’t hide the trend in plain sight.
The domination with which Mercedes started the year has almost completely melted away.
The team says Red Bull Racing is the brand to beat now — and after Max Verstappen won two of the last three victories and came within 0.196s of completing the set, it’s hard to disagree.
It’s not just that Red Bull Racing — and Ferrari and McLaren, all of them winners this season — has caught up, however.
It’s that Mercedes has opened the door with just its second major upgrade of the season, which it brought to the grand prix in Malaysia, which it promptly lost after delivering by far its worst qualifying result of the year.
That was always going to be a risk for Mercedes’s upgrade strategy, which relied on developing just a couple of major updates. Whereas those on more iterative trajectories could check their work as they went, Mercedes risked making so many changes at once that it lost its thread of performance.
The fact it raced its cars in two different specifications at the following race in Singapore tells you how much of a head-scratcher this upgrade was.
That experiment resulted in some important lessons about the new car, in particular that it’s far more sensitive to set-up than is predecessor.
But the critical question remains unanswered: is the car still fast?
That’s more important than it might seem on the eve of both titles being wrapped up.
These are critical months in designing next year’s car, which will be built to the same rules.
Red Bull Racing is obviously onto a good thing. Ferrari might still have the best aero package on the grid. McLaren has shown potential.
Has Mercedes lost its way at the critical moment?
Ferrari team boss goes in on Hamilton | 00:39
ESTEBAN OCON, OUSTED BY HAAS
Cause: getting sacked
Release: getting a new job
Only one driver has been confirmed to have lost their seat this year, with Haas notifying Esteban Ocon he’ll be dismissed at the end of the season.
Unless Racing Bulls bucks expectations and sends Liam Lawson packing — despite the Kiwi carrying the team to fifth in the championship so far this year — Ocon will be the only driver ousted in a season that started with as many as 17 drivers out of contract or with accessible escape clauses.
Ocon, though, isn’t done with Formula 1 after 9.5 seasons and what will be more than 200 grand prix starts.
“If I look at the results and what I’ve shown in Formula 1, I deserve to be in Formula 1,” he said. “There are other categories which are fantastic as well, but I want to be racing in Formula 1 in the next five, seven years.
“I will keep pushing to be in that position … that’s the only thing I’m looking at so far.”
His problem of course is that there are no seats available next season — and it doesn’t take long to fall out of the paddock consciousness, especially when you’re on the wrong side of 30.
His other problem is that he’s been ousted for a reason, having been comprehensively beaten by younger teammate Oliver Bearman since the middle of last season.
If he wants any hope of reviving his career, he has to start turning around his 0.236s qualifying deficit while levelling his 4-12 qualifying and 3-10 race head-to-head records.
There’s just the faintest hint of a carrot if he can do so.
Germany’s Blick has reported that Cadillac has been contemplating turfing Valtteri Bottas under new team principal Marcin Budkowski, who himself was suddenly parachuted into the role after inaugural boss Graeme Lowdon was unexpectedly fired during the mid-season break.
It would be disingenuous in the extreme to suggest Cadillac’s drivers have been the new team’s biggest problem this season, but there was always going to be a time limit on the double veteran pairing.
Reportedly looked upon fondly by Budkowski, who was high up at Alpine during Ocon’s time there, the Frenchman has the most slender — and most speculative — shots at keeping his career alive.
But only if he can prove he deserves the shot.
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