Verstappen, "Deployment" and 147 Points: Decoding Steiner's Winless Prediction for 2026

The Spanish Grand Prix at Madrid ended, and I replayed the pit-lane footage four times. Max Verstappen stepped out of the car in second place, pulled off his gloves, and set them on the sidepod — slowly, square, the way you set a tool down on a workbench. No fist into the air. No shake of the head. A four-time world champion had just stood on the podium, and his reaction belonged to a man clocking off a shift. Three days later, on The Red Flags Podcast, in a segment called “Gas or Brake”, Guenther Steiner made a prediction: Max Verstappen will not win a single race in the 2026 season. He added that Mercedes and McLaren are too strong, that the car is the limit, and that Verstappen will still be Super Max, will still reach the podium, but that this is the ceiling. What stopped me was not the prediction itself. It was how fast it travelled. An opinion delivered inside a binary-choice game show format — gas or brake — became a sports-news item in under two days, and by the time I opened my own dataset it was being retold as a description of the current state of things. I need a few technical markers before going further. 2026 is the first year of the new power unit regulations: the split between combustion power and electrical power is close to even, the MGU-H heat recovery unit has been removed entirely, and the fuel must be 100 percent sustainable. The direct consequence is that how a team manages and deploys electrical energy across a lap becomes one of the largest performance levers in the sport, rather than a supporting system as it once was. Red Bull entered this cycle as a first-year power unit manufacturer, working with Ford. Before this they ran Honda engines, then took the programme in-house and rebranded it. This is the first time they carry the entire integration chain themselves — design, software calibration, durability, and energy distribution. Mercedes has done this continuously for more than a decade. That is the kind of gap that never shows up on a lap-time sheet. It shows up in an organisation's history. The championship table: Verstappen sits sixth on 145 points, 147 behind the leader — which puts the leader on roughly 292 points. That leader is Kimi Antonelli, in a Mercedes. Verstappen's best results this season are three second places, in Austria, Hungary and Spain. Not a single win. I logged these numbers into my personal spreadsheet, the one I have kept since 2026, after readers pointed out that my World Cup analysis in Russia could not explain why the host nation kept generating dangerous counter-attacks. Since then, every transition phase of every team I follow gets its own row. The summer of 2026 taught me this: a gap is never empty, it is only waiting for the right reader. When I apply that reading to Red Bull's 2026, what emerges is not a driver in decline. It is a car failing in exactly the area the new rulebook placed at the centre. Verstappen says so himself, in the technical language of a man who does not want to assign blame. After Madrid he described the deficit as “a mix of things”, added “maybe a little bit of deployment”, and said “the car itself that we still need to improve on”. Those three statements, placed together, are not a complaint. They are a diagnosis. The word “deployment” is the most valuable word in the whole story. Under the 2026 regulations it does not refer to raw combustion power. It refers to how electrical energy is released and recovered across each section of track: how much is spent on the exit of a slow corner, how much is held back for a long straight, and which software logic decides that. A shortfall here points toward the power unit and its software calibration, not toward pure aerodynamics. And that is a far more expensive problem to fix mid-cycle, because it touches component homologation limits and in-season allowance quotas. How I read a signal like this: I redraw the circuit as a strip of energy points, marking by hand where I believe the car loses time. Every tactical diagram begins with a shaky hand-drawn line in PowerPoint. Whether those lines are right or wrong matters less than the fact that they force me to commit to one hypothesis instead of nodding along with everything. Then comes the results data. Red Bull's three second places fall in Austria, Hungary and Spain — clustered in the back half of the European swing. On a sample that small, I do not have enough to say whether this signals a development plateau or simply a calendar that happened to suit the car's characteristics. But if it is the first case, the story shifts from a stable gap to a widening one, and those two scenarios require two different responses. And the Madrid podium needs to be separated from the bigger picture. Lando Norris took pole. The race turned when a virtual safety car period arrived at an unfavourable moment for McLaren, and Norris's subsequent pit stop took longer than it should have. Verstappen inherited second from that sequence, then defended it with discipline for the remainder. But to hold it, he needed one more condition: a circuit with almost nowhere to overtake. Madrid is one of those. When overtaking is close to impossible, the value of track position spikes, and the front runner's job shifts from attacking to controlling. That result came from circuit geometry and from an opponent's error, not from pace. I call it a result better than the car. It helps the points total. It does not change the verdict on the real gap. The geometry of the space gives me a different view from the championship table. The table says Verstappen is sixth. The geometry says his car can finish in the top three at circuits where starting position decides the outcome, and is only good enough for the top five where real overtaking is required. The deficit I estimate from the descriptions is somewhere between two and four tenths per lap — enough to turn a car that finishes second regularly into one that never finishes first. This is an estimate, not a measurement. I say so plainly because I have no sector-split data to back it. The shape of the season currently has two teams ahead of Red Bull. Mercedes leads with Antonelli, a driver at the exact breakout phase of his career and benefiting from a machine matured across several regulation cycles. McLaren sits there with Norris and a stable operational structure. Steiner says Mercedes and McLaren are too strong, and that phrasing places Red Bull as best of the rest. With a 147-point gap and a season running down, the championship fight no longer includes Red Bull. What remains to measure is finishing position and podium count. That is the data. Now the part I doubt. When Steiner says Verstappen is “not good enough”, he is not talking about driving ability. His full sentence is structured this way: first he states that the limit is the car, then he says Verstappen will still be Super Max and will still reach podiums, then he closes with “but I think that's the limit”. The phrase “not good enough” sits inside a chain whose real subject is the machine. Lifting that sentence out of context reverses its meaning entirely. I say this not to defend Verstappen. I say it because I have made exactly that mistake several times, and because it is the kind of mistake a short news item makes easily when it has to trim a sentence to fit a headline. Second point: the source of this prediction is an opinion, not a report. Steiner is a former team principal with professional credibility, but he no longer works inside Red Bull's structure and carries no insider information. He is inside a binary entertainment format called Gas or Brake. The speaker's motive is to keep the conversation moving, and that creates a very mild pressure toward saying things louder than necessary. None of that makes the prediction wrong. It only places it correctly: a grounded hypothesis, stated by someone with expertise, in a setting that rewards sharpness. The lifespan of this story is short. One race win and the entire “Super Max winless” frame collapses in a single evening. That tells me the heat is running ahead of the data foundation, rather than the data foundation pushing the heat up. So I keep the verifiable part. That part is: the car is slower, the driver himself confirms it, and the technical suspicion centres on energy distribution. The question I actually want answered is not whether Verstappen wins a race. It is what kind of deficit this is. If it is a software calibration and per-circuit energy allocation problem, it can be narrowed within a few rounds. If it sits at the hard limit of homologated components, then it is a multi-year problem, and 2026 is only the first year of a long sequence. Those two possibilities lead to opposite conclusions about Red Bull, and right now I do not have enough to pick a side. There is one more variable the spreadsheet cannot measure: how Verstappen talks. He describes the problem in technical language, distributes responsibility across multiple causes, issues no ultimatum. That is internal-stability behaviour. But I have watched him long enough to know his patience is always tied to the competitive trajectory. A prolonged winless run is the kind of signal history shows correlates strongly with seat-change speculation — correlates, not causes, and I have no data to say more. One further detail I have not raised: there is no record of reliability failures or grid penalties anywhere in Red Bull's results sequence. If that holds, it leads to an interesting inference: their first-year power unit may be reliable but not fast. Reliability is the easier thing to build first. But that is an inference from missing information, not from information, and I have to say so. So what do I watch in the coming rounds? Azerbaijan, from 24 to 26 September, is the first observation point I have flagged. It is a circuit that permits overtaking. If this car only survives on starting position, it will be exposed at Baku faster than anywhere else. I do not need to know who wins. I need to know who Verstappen passes, and how. Signal two is deployment. I will listen to the radio clips and reread the post-race press conferences, looking for whether the word “deployment” returns, and if it does, whether it arrives alongside the word “calibration”. Those two words together signal a fixable problem. One word standing alone signals a limit. Signal three is McLaren. The slow pit stop in Madrid may have been a one-off. If it repeats, it becomes a variable in the championship fight between McLaren and Mercedes, and at that point the Red Bull story becomes a side note. I keep one thing in mind when reading anything on this subject. A misplaced pass is not a mistake. It is data the system is trying to send you. An inherited podium is the same. It does not confirm the car has improved. It only confirms that under certain conditions, that car can still hold a position. And that is why I am not writing this to declare that Verstappen will go winless, or will win. I am writing to mark a blind spot: most of the debate revolves around the driver, while the only clue supplied by the driver himself points toward the energy system. If I am wrong, I will correct it in the next column of data.