Why F1's 2026 Title Odds Look Nothing Like 2025's
The most dramatic rules reset in modern Formula 1 history has upended the sport's recent hierarchy — and compressed years of potential change into one unpredictable season.
Someone wise1 once said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
Well, in Formula 1, there are plenty of seasons where nothing really happens to shake up the existing hierarchy of haves and have-nots in the sport. And even when there are transitional moments — like when McLaren’s Lando Norris unseated Red Bull’s Max Verstappen last season to end the latter’s run of four consecutive titles — it usually just portends a new run of dominance by some other team.
Since 1998, only four of a possible 27 titles (excluding Norris last year, whose title-defense fate is unknown) were won by drivers not on a multi-year championship streak. Simply put, most F1 seasons are just chapters in somebody’s dynastic story — whether confirming who’s already in charge or revealing who’s about to be.
But the 2026 season, which begins Saturday night (11:00 p.m. ET)2 with the Australian Grand Prix, is shaping up to be one where years worth of F1 upheaval might just happen all at once.
Don’t believe me? Just take a look at the Polymarket odds to win the 2026 Drivers’ Championship:
In a rarity, the preseason favorite is neither the defending champ (Norris) nor the erstwhile four-time champ (Verstappen), but rather Mercedes’ George Russell — the 28-year-old former Formula 2 champ who’s never finished any higher than fourth in the F1 standings, driving for a team that hasn’t won the title since 2021. According to archived betting odds compiled from a variety of sources, this is just the second time since at least 2000 that the preseason title favorite was neither the defending champ nor a multi-time previous champ:3
What accounts for the break with history? It’s very simple: F1 in 2026 will be a drastically different sport than it was in 2025 or earlier.
Starting this year, the FIA has introduced a full reset to its rules package — featuring smaller, lighter cars with active aerodynamics, replacing the traditional DRS system4 with movable front and rear wings and a special engine setting known as “Overtake Mode”. The engines have also shifted away from the MGU-H model to power units with a 50/50 split between internal combustion and electric power, using 100 percent sustainable fuels and supported by the entry of new manufacturers like Audi, Cadillac and Ford. And the ‘26 cars will feature a flatter underbody that moves the sport away from an emphasis on ground-effect aerodynamics while reducing “dirty air” for trailing cars in the wake of the leader.
In theory, these changes prioritize closer racing and environmental sustainability while simultaneously making the sport safer. But they also represent what ESPN F1 reporter Laurence Edmondson called “the biggest regulation change in [Formula 1] history.”
“New rules [are] impacting the car’s power units, aerodynamics, tires and fuel,” he wrote. “If you’re struggling to get your head around the changes or you simply haven’t paid attention to F1’s news cycle since Lando Norris was crowned the champion last year, the scale of the change can seem a little overwhelming.”
The changes will require us all to learn a dictionary’s worth of new technical jargon, like “X-mode” and “Z-mode” on the wings to regulate speed along the straightaways and downforce in corners.
They will also, inevitably, come with winners and losers.
As I’ve written before, F1 dynasties typically rise and fall as much on the basis of rule changes and technical regulations as anything else. For decades, teams have introduced innovations that exploit the rules to radically change the “meta” around what wins races — usually leading to prolonged multi-year stretches in which the first team to figure out the new best practices wins a disproportionate share of races. These eras only tend to end when the FIA introduces a new meta with new rules and new best-practice exploits, at which point the team best suited to the sport’s new landscape has its own time of dominance, and so forth.
Sometimes rival teams can figure out a better approach to the existing meta than the original first-mover, of course, which explains how McLaren was able to loosen Red Bull’s grip on the sport in 2024 and fully break through with both the manufacturers’ and drivers’ titles in 2025. Years of incremental improvements under CEO Zak Brown and team principal Andrea Stella manifested in a sudden torch-passing at the end of the previous rules era.
But that’s rare. More often — especially in today’s era, when cars matter more relative to drivers than ever — shifts in the balance of power come through a technical reset, where the FIA introduces an entirely new set of rules that render the old best-practices obsolete. And that’s exactly where we are now, heading into 2026.
Russell and Mercedes are the favorites because they (along with Ferrari) did the best in preseason testing at Bahrain, they have a history of dominance in the realm of hybrid energy-management — a key pillar of their success during the earlier “split-turbo” meta of 2014-2021 — and, perhaps most importantly, the ground-effect edge of Red Bull and, later, McLaren, has been phased out under the new regulations.
Verstappen is still fairly close to Russell in the drivers’ title odds, a measure of respect for his talent, determination and adaptability as a driver.5 But despite being the defending champion, Norris barely even cracks the Top 5 of the market odds, and teammate Oscar Piastri — who led last year’s championship standings with five races remaining on the schedule — checks in at seventh. That’s an unthinkable shift for the reigning champs in a sport as dynastic as Formula 1.
Or it would be unthinkable, at least, in the absence of a major rules shakeup. But since we aren’t just getting a normal one of those, but rather what is perhaps the most dramatic year-over-year regulatory overhaul in F1 history, you can throw all of the previous record books out of the cockpit and run over them with your fancy new Nimble Car.
The kind of market upheaval we’re seeing ahead of this season goes beyond merely reshuffling the order at the top, instead dismantling it entirely — making 2026 the kind of year where seasons’ worth of power-shifts happen all at once, and the only certainty is that the old rules no longer apply.
Filed under: Formula 1
Though probably NOT Vladimir Lenin.
From my perspective here stateside, at least — it’ll be Sunday at 3 p.m. local time.
Joining Kimi Räikkönen in 2007, who’d moved on from McLaren to Ferrari going into that season.
Or “Drag Reduction System”, which allowed the rear wing to be opened up to reduce aerodynamic drag and make passing easier.
Remember, Verstappen won the 2024 drivers’ championship even after the meta shifted out from under his team, and he fought back to finish 2nd in 2025 — even giving the season finale against Norris some actual stakes — in a year where his hopes seemed all but dead at midseason.