George Russell Is Dominating F1 2026 — But Here Is Why Red Bull's Max Verstappen Is Still the Favourite

George Russell has won every race of the 2026 F1 season. Yet Max Verstappen and Red Bull have history on their side. Here is the full picture of the new F1 era.

Three races into the 2026 Formula 1 World Championship, George Russell is doing something that has not happened since Michael Schumacher at the height of his Ferrari dominance: winning every race of the season to date. Australia. China. And on March 29, Suzuka, where the Japanese Grand Prix delivered the kind of dominant performance that makes rivals quietly recalibrate their expectations about what this season might look like.

The numbers are stunning. Russell's average race winning margin in 2026 is 8.7 seconds. His qualifying advantage over the next fastest car on the grid has been between 0.4 and 0.7 seconds per lap — in a sport where thousandths of a second separate the top ten. Mercedes' new W16, designed from a clean sheet to exploit the 2026 regulations' extraordinary emphasis on electrical power deployment, is operating in a different performance envelope from any other car on the grid.

And yet — and this is the thing that makes the 2026 championship genuinely fascinating rather than a foregone conclusion — experienced Formula 1 observers are not writing off Max Verstappen. Not because they doubt Russell's current form, but because they know that Formula 1's regulatory reset cycles almost always produce the same pattern: early dominance by the team that best decoded the initial regulations, followed by increasingly rapid convergence as rivals understand the architecture of the advantage and begin closing the gap.

Red Bull's technical director Enrico Balestre has been publicly calm about the team's current deficit. 'We understand what is happening,' he said after Suzuka. 'We know what changes need to be made. The question is time.' That sounds like corporate communications boilerplate. People who know Red Bull's development culture believe it is also completely accurate.

The Miami Grand Prix in late April will be the first real test of whether the gap is closing or growing. If Mercedes still has a half-second advantage at a circuit as different from Suzuka as Miami, the championship conversation begins to look very different.