Why Verstappen is 'keystone' to driver market - F1 Q&A

It's just over two weeks until the 2026 Formula 1 season resumes with the Miami Grand Prix, following the cancellations of the races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions.

Of the drivers, whose contracts are up this year and who has something to prove? - Christopher

This is a really tricky question to answer because Formula 1 teams have become increasingly secretive about the lengths of their driver contracts in recent years.

However, some things are known for certain.

The big one is Max Verstappen. He's the keystone of the driver market because he is regarded by everyone as the best out there.

The four-time champion has a contract with Red Bull that runs until 2028. However, it has performance clauses in it, which mean he is free to leave the team if he is not in a certain position in the championship by a certain point of the season.

The way Red Bull are performing at the moment, there is absolutely no chance that Verstappen will be high enough in the championship to lock him in by the summer break unless they have a massive turnaround in form.

So, we can assume that Verstappen is a free agent this summer if he wants to be.

The questions then would be: a) does he want to leave Red Bull; b) does he want to go to another F1 team and if so which one; and c) might he leave F1 and go and race elsewhere? In Japan, he confirmed he was considering the last option.

If he wants to stay in F1, the obvious destination would be Mercedes. Team principal Toto Wolff has been courting Verstappen pretty openly for the past two years.

However, both George Russell and Kimi Antonelli are said to have contracts that lock them in at Mercedes beyond the end of this year.

Wolff said in an interview with Austria's OE24 last month: "We have two drivers with whom we have long-term, multi-year contracts. I couldn't be happier with both of them.

"Both are delivering top performances, so there's absolutely no reason to even consider a line-up change, or other drivers. I say this with the utmost respect for Max."

Of course, in F1 no contract is completely concrete, there is always room for manoeuvre. But on the face of it, that does suggest the door at Mercedes is shut for Verstappen for now.

McLaren might also be appealing to Verstappen, especially with his race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase heading there.

Both Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri are under contract at least until the end of 2027, according to the team. And McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown has said on a number of occasions that he believes they have the best driver line-up in F1.

It's also hard to see how Verstappen would fit in with McLaren's racing philosophy and the way they operated with their drivers in the championship fight last year.

The other leading team is Ferrari. BBC Sport's sources say that Lewis Hamilton signed a firm three-year deal when he joined the team for the start of the 2025 season - and certain things Hamilton said last year strongly implied that was indeed the case.

Assuming that's accurate, the seven-time champion is locked in to the end of 2027, and Charles Leclerc's deal is at least that long.

The other big name to think about is Fernando Alonso. His Aston Martin contract definitely runs out at the end of this season.

Alonso said in a BBC Sport interview at the end of 2024 that he would go into 2026 thinking it was his last season, but see how he felt in the course of it. I know that was still his mindset through last year.

Amid all the noise about Aston Martin and Honda's struggles at the start of this season, Alonso has not yet been asked how he feels about his future.

He will be 45 in July, and he has just become a father for the first time. But he loves driving with a passion. And if you want to drive all the time, why not do so in the fastest racing cars in the world if you can?

How will Alonso view the prospect of racing in F1 in 2027 in the context of Aston Martin's struggles?

On one level, it's hard to imagine he wants his final season in F1 to be as bad as it is right now. And having finally joined forces with Adrian Newey, will he want to stop before he's had a chance to drive a car that has not been designed under such a short and compromised timeframe as this year's?

On another level, though, F1 is a brutal schedule and Alonso has been doing it for a long time. Does he have the energy to continue? And do the team want him to?

He may be getting on a bit now, but he's obviously still extremely good. And it's difficult to imagine that Aston Martin are especially appealing to other top drivers at the moment.

Might Alonso in the end give it one more trip around the sun in F1?

With the recent news of Gianpiero Lambiase moving to McLaren, how do F1 journalists typically verify information from 'senior insiders' before a team makes an official announcement? - Leo

It's a journalist's job to be as well informed as they can be. In the case of working in F1, that means building relationships and trust with important and influential people.

The BBC takes accurate, impartial reporting extremely seriously. It's the cornerstone of the organisation's reputation.

We would never publish information unless we we were very confident it was true, and it was backed up with solid sourcing. And we would always seek to inform the audience as much as possible as to the source of that information and the level of confidence we had with it.

In the case of the Lambiase story last week, the initial report came out of the Netherlands. In my case, I contacted people who would definitely know what was going on. It's my job to know who to call in this sort of situation to get the answers we need.

These are people I have known for a long time and with whom I have built up good relationships with mutual trust. Once I'd spoken to them and they had said the story was true, we were good to go.

Is F1 already making contingency plans if the regional conflict in the Middle East continues until the end of this year? - John

There are still more than seven months before the next scheduled grands prix in the Middle East - Qatar and Abu Dhabi at the end of the season, on the last weekend in November and the first in December.

So there is absolutely no need for F1 chairman Stefano Domenicali and his team to take any action at this moment. Right now, all the sport can do is monitor the situation and hope for the best.

There are all sorts of factors which could affect F1 long before the end of the season, including the global supply of oil and its impact on international travel.

The safety of personnel will always be F1's first priority. Beyond that, the sport has proven many times that it is able to adapt.

What do you think is the chance of an all-British podium this season? It hasn't happened since Watkins Glen in 1968, but the British field now looks stronger than at any time since then - Mike

There has to be a reasonable chance, doesn't there, given the drivers in the top teams?

There are British drivers at Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari - George Russell, Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton. Right now, those are the three top teams.

So, it stands to reason that there is a possibility the three of them might end up on the podium together soon.

Having said that, those three have been in top teams for the past three years, counting from when McLaren became competitive midway through 2023, and they have only once ended up all in the top three in a classification.

That was in qualifying at the 2024 British Grand Prix, when Russell led Hamilton to a Mercedes one-two ahead of Norris.

Does the fact that it has only happened once in that time mean that the odds are greater that it will happen again soon? Or does that underline how unlikely it is to happen?

At the moment, for them to be on the podium, first of all, they would all have to beat their team-mates. And Hamilton and Norris would have to beat Kimi Antonelli. Given the pace of the Mercedes right now, that's a tough ask. But who knows how the season will pan out?

Why do we never hear 'marbles' mentioned any more? - Dave

I'm not sure, because they definitely exist!

'Marbles' is motor racing lexicon for small pieces of rubber that come off tyres as they degrade, which are then deposited off the racing line.

They are part of the reason why the track is more slippery off line than on it, and why sometimes it is hard to overtake - because there is less grip off the racing line, so that means it takes longer to slow down for a corner.

At the end of races, on the slowing down lap before returning to the pits, you might notice drivers going off line or even through the run-off areas.

That's to pick up as many of these pieces of rubber, or 'marbles', as they can, get them to stick to their hot tyres, to give the team leeway to ensure the car is over the minimum weight limit.

So the marbles are still there.