It seems that Max Verstappen’s longtime Red Bull race engineer, Gianpiero Lambiase, with whom the Dutch multiple champion has formed a very close and highly successful partnership since 2016, may now be looking to progress his career with either Williams or Aston Martin. Lambiase is British but has Italian parents and enjoys dual British and Italian citizenship.

He has very much enjoyed his time at Red Bull but is also keen to extend his F1 role beyond being a race engineer while perhaps reducing the amount of travel he has to undertake each year. We can but await further developments on this front, although a potential move for Lambiase to Aston Martin could be considered a precursor to tempting Verstappen to join him at the team in 2027. Meanwhile, Verstappen has admitted that he remains in regular and pretty much weekly contact with his former team principal, Christian Horner, including during most race weekends, after they too had formed such a close working relationship at Red Bull.



Elsewhere, the dominant McLaren team scored a mighty 833 points in 2025 as it easily won the Constructors’ Championship well before the end of the season, whereas the French Alpine outfit ultimately finished tenth and last, with a mere 22 points. However, there may well be developments on this front shortly after Alpine’s parent company, Renault, left F1 at the end of last season, with the outfit now set to use Mercedes power, which can surely only help.

Horner and his investor colleagues may be set to buy a majority shareholding in the Alpine team, something Horner was never able to do in his previous Formula 1 role as merely an employee of Red Bull, always envying Mercedes’ Toto Wolff, who owns a significant shareholding in his team. This is all simply another intriguing side story as F1 enters a highly unpredictable and exciting new era.



On another front, Lewis Hamilton consistently underperformed for Mercedes and then Ferrari during the four years of Formula 1’s ground-effect car regulations from 2022 to 2025, winning only two Grands Prix since 2021, and his debut campaign for the iconic Scuderia started poorly before becoming a nightmarish downward spiral as he experienced his worst season ever at the peak of world motorsport.

However, the veteran seven-time champion is still refusing to talk of retirement and hopes that he may be better able to cope with the challenges posed by the new technical regulations being introduced for 2026. It will certainly be fascinating to see if he can significantly up his game after a highly disappointing first year with Ferrari and get closer to the pace of his younger and faster teammate, Charles Leclerc. Time will, of course, tell.


Meanwhile, Ferrari’s still under-pressure team principal, Fred Vasseur, has unsurprisingly downplayed the importance of being on the frontrunning pace come the opening Grand Prix in Australia in early March, claiming it makes no difference “whether we are P1 or P10 in Melbourne” before the season progresses.

Formula 1 wouldn’t be Formula 1 if we weren’t already experiencing some inter-team fighting about the efficacy and eligibility of their yet-to-be-run all-new 2026 hybrid power units being within the regulations or otherwise, with Ferrari having already lodged official protests with the FIA governing body about the legality of some clever technical developments from Mercedes and Red Bull. As yet, this has failed to get the Italian team anywhere. Oh, how it is and always has been in the fiercely contested F1 world. If a team finds a highly effective way of interpreting new regulations, as was the case with Brawn back in Jenson Button’s title year in 2009, the natural reaction of rivals is to try to get the technology banned and, if not, simply copied as soon as possible.

Individual team livery and car launches are set to follow, with a behind-closed-doors initial pre-season test taking place from 26 to 30 January in Barcelona before two further and far more public three-day tests follow in Bahrain ahead of the opening race weekend of the new season. Only then will it become evident which teams and drivers are performing well and which are not. Bring it on.