The Formula 1 world is ablaze with a fierce battle for the highly coveted 2026 race seats, a high-stakes game where the very careers of multiple drivers hang in the balance. This isn’t just another race; it’s a fight for survival that will determine whether they continue their illustrious careers or are forced to make a bitter exit from the most prestigious racing series on the planet. At the heart of this conflict are the Red Bull teams, where every decision will send shockwaves through the entire F1 landscape for the foreseeable future.

While the phenomenal champion Max Verstappen has his seat locked in at Red Bull Racing for 2026, the futures of the other three drivers in the Red Bull stable—Yuki Tsunoda, Liam Lawson, and Isack Hadjar—are shrouded in uncertainty. They could be shuffled around, or worse, squeezed out entirely. Compounding their precarious situation, the door to other teams appears to be slamming shut. Alpine, another key player on the grid, has publicly declared that it will not consider any of the potential Red Bull rejects for its own vacant 2026 seat. This stark reality means that for those cast aside by Red Bull, there may be no alternative path to remain in F1.

The Head-to-Head Battle to Be Verstappen’s Teammate

The race to partner Max Verstappen in 2026 has become a straight fight between the struggling incumbent, Yuki Tsunoda, and the high-flying rookie, Isack Hadjar. Despite Tsunoda’s current position, Hadjar is widely considered the clear favorite. All signs point towards him getting the nod, and Hadjar himself has shown no reservations about the promotion being too soon. He believes that stepping up to Red Bull to coincide with the new regulations and the consequent change in car characteristics will be far easier than the challenge Tsunoda and Liam Lawson faced when they had to adapt to the current car and its idiosyncrasies—a car that only Verstappen has truly been able to master.

Red Bull’s advisor, Helmut Marko, has stated that the team won’t finalize its 2026 lineups until next month’s Mexican Grand Prix. However, with only three races remaining, the momentum in the fight for Verstappen’s neighboring seat is trending heavily in one direction. Baku offered a slight plot twist, with Tsunoda delivering his best Red Bull Racing weekend yet while Hadjar blew a chance to finish much higher than 10th. But it will take more than that to change the overall trajectory. The German publication Auto Motor und Sport even declared that Hadjar’s 2026 Red Bull deal was done after Monza earlier this month. When asked in Baku if he knew who he’d be racing for next year, Hadjar coyly replied, “No, I have an idea, but I don’t know.”

The Precarious Futures of Tsunoda and Lawson

While Hadjar’s move to Red Bull looks all but certain, Tsunoda cannot count on having a Racing Bulls seat to fall back on. Red Bull’s long-term ideal plan has been to place its F2 driver, Arvid Lindblad, into one of those seats in 2026. This creates a direct showdown between Tsunoda and Lawson for the single remaining Racing Bulls seat, with a strong chance that whoever loses this fight will be out of Formula 1.

Following a messy Monza, Racing Bulls Team Principal Laurent Mekies declared that demonstrating better race pace was the key to Tsunoda’s chances of holding on to his seat. Mekies wanted clean samples of what Tsunoda could do on Sundays, and he was impressed with the performance in Baku. Although Tsunoda still got stuck in DRS trains, was overtaken by Lawson on cold tires, and finished only sixth as Verstappen dominated, Mekies called it “not only his best result but also best race pace with us.” Mekies reckoned Tsunoda was within two to four-tenths of a second per lap of Verstappen’s pace when traffic allowed, a satisfying result given how dominant Verstappen was in Baku.

Tsunoda arrived in Azerbaijan with a much more confident mindset, a change that began when he canceled his summer holiday and went straight from a depressing Hungarian Grand Prix to the factory for a series of extra simulator sessions. One of those sessions after Monza brought what Tsunoda called a “massive breakthrough” that he felt truly worked in Baku. He wouldn’t reveal the specifics, whether it was a setup or driving style change, but he felt it made a huge difference in how he could manage the tires during a race stint. It’s clear that Mekies, who knows Tsunoda well from their years together at the team now known as Racing Bulls, wants him to succeed and show the performance he is sure he is capable of.

However, with the clock ticking before Red Bull’s 2026 decision, this breakthrough may be too little, too late to convince the team to commit to another year of Tsunoda in its top car. But if the improvement sticks, it might bolster his chances of at least returning to Racing Bulls—though even that is not entirely in his hands.

Lawson’s Perfectly Timed Peak

Unfortunately for Tsunoda, his best Red Bull weekend coincided with a new F1 peak for Liam Lawson, culminating in Lawson’s Racing Bulls car beating Tsunoda’s Red Bull to fifth place. Lawson could not have picked a better time to put together his most complete F1 weekend yet. He excelled in tricky qualifying conditions to take third on the grid and then only dropped behind the faster Mercedes cars in the race. After a couple of off weekends—with Zandvoort ruined by a clash with Carlos Sainz and a general struggle at Monza that included a clash with Tsunoda—Lawson was firmly back to the form that had brought him four top-eight finishes in the seven races before the summer break.

There didn’t seem to be much separating Lawson and Hadjar’s pace all weekend, as has been the case in recent months since Lawson shook off the funk from his abrupt Red Bull demotion. However, Lawson absolutely nailed the execution when it mattered in Baku, while Hadjar was left ruing costly errors at the same corner in both qualifying and the race. This will only help Lawson as Red Bull makes its final driver call.

Unlike Hadjar, Lawson isn’t in the mix for the senior team. That’s definitively off the cards for now after his painful two weekends as Verstappen’s teammate at the start of this year. But if Lawson continues to prove he is a dependable point-scorer, he could perhaps convince Red Bull that he’s the ideal benchmark driver for Lindblad in the second team, especially because a benchmark will be sorely needed.

Lindblad’s F2 rookie season built up nicely to a first feature race win in Spain, but it’s been a messy three months since then, and he’s fallen from third to seventh in the standings. Red Bull firmly believes in the 18-year-old’s potential, hence pushing for an exemption to get him an F1 super license when he was still 17, just in case he was needed early. The team is focusing on the very high peaks rather than the inconsistencies in between, much as anyone scrutinizing Ollie Bearman’s and Kimi Antonelli’s 2024 F2 seasons needed to.

When Red Bull began leaning towards putting Lindblad into Racing Bulls for 2026, both Tsunoda and Lawson were struggling. If both now turn a corner, it’s not impossible that Red Bull could decide to stick with them and keep Lindblad in F2 for another year. But Lawson and Tsunoda can’t count on that and are better off assuming this is a “two-into-one-won’t-go” scenario. Before Baku, Lawson admitted he’d spent his whole career focused on getting to F1 and then into a Red Bull Racing seat. He has done both; one just didn’t last very long. Now, he might have to think about alternatives. He intimated he might have had some talks with other F1 teams, but it doesn’t look like he or the loser of this fight will have any other options.

The Door Slams Shut at Alpine

Alpine is the other F1 team that has spent 2025 puzzling over its second seat. Given that both Tsunoda and Lawson have looked quite decent when not in a Red Bull Racing car, you would have thought that whoever gets the boot might land at Alpine. But no, that door is closed. Team boss Flavio Briatore revealed to us in Baku that his team is not looking beyond incumbent Franco Colapinto and reserve driver Paul Aron for Pierre Gasly’s 2026 teammate.

Briatore doesn’t view anyone on the current F1 grid as a viable alternative. His summary of the field was to say, “take away Max, the rest…” accompanied by a shrug and a frown. Sorry, Liam and Yuki, but that shrug includes you and everyone else who isn’t Max Verstappen. If it’s any consolation, and maybe Alpine’s 2025 form softens that blow too, Flavio was pretty dismissive of everyone on the F1 ladder right now, saying, “We see other ones, but we don’t feel it because the good guys go ‘boom’.”

The man who took Michael Schumacher and Fernando Alonso to F1 titles under the Benetton/Renault banners referenced Schumacher’s Mercedes sports car pace and Alonso’s early F1 tests as that kind of “boom.” He also said he finds the current up-and-down F2 impossible to read compared to the days of Nico Rosberg and Lewis Hamilton starring in GP2. So, with the rest of the 2025 F1 grid and the current F2 grid all dismissed, that leaves Colapinto and Aron on his list.

Aron, a 21-year-old who finished third in F2 last year, could become Estonia’s first F1 racer and has impressed in FP1 outings. Briatore called him “a very nice guy, a very quick driver,” which wasn’t quite a “boom” but was higher praise than most of the current F1 field got. As for Colapinto, Briatore now seems to realize there might have been too much pressure on him when he was given Jack Doohan’s seat and told to score points, be fast, and not crash—three targets he initially missed comprehensively. With Colapinto finally getting more comfortable, Briatore now thinks he just needed six to eight races to settle in.

That gives Colapinto some breathing space, but it’s hardly a ringing endorsement. If Aron gets the nod, it’s hard to see Colapinto getting back on the grid with anyone else; his F1 career could be over already. While Alpine is currently stuck at the back of the grid, it expects much better things at the start of the new rules era next year. Briatore’s logic seems to be that if no one on the grid is wowing him, it’s better to take the benefit of known quantities who already understand the team.

But that means the very year in which both Lawson and Tsunoda earned the top F1 team seat they had dreamed of all their lives could end with one of them dropping right off the F1 grid. This battle is not just about speed and skill; it’s about resilience, timing, and a bit of luck to keep the ultimate F1 dream alive.