F1 2026: We ranked the grid based entirely on vibes

Angry Vasseur on the phone edited behind Hamilton covering his face with his hand in Ferrari F1 kit — Photo: © IMAGO

F1 2026

We ranked the 2026 F1 grid based entirely on vibes

It's the only way we know how

Chris Deeley

Saturday 31 January 2026 12:57

You know who’s going to win the F1 championship this year? No, nor do we.

Last year’s designs aren’t going to carry over into 2026. Last year’s engines aren’t going to carry over into 2026. We have nothing to go on, and pre-season testing has taught us something between ‘little’ and ‘nothing’, as ever.

A power ranking of the teams, then, is out of the question and would only serve to provide my personal enemies with fodder to screenshot and send to me in a sneery tweet later. I’m wise to that game! I dealt with Football Twitter for a decade!

Article continues under video

Instead, all 11 teams are getting ranked on vibe alone. How does it feel to look at this team right now? Are they having fun? Are they interesting? We’re asking questions of that ilk.

F1 2026 - pre-season team rankings

So here it is, on the back of five days of shakedown action in Barcelona that nobody could see (apart from the odd glimpse from a hill far away).

Every single team, ranked, on vibes:

1. Mercedes

It’s good to be good. The end of last season tells us very little, but Mercedes managed to string some results together toward the end of the year while keeping their focus on next year’s development. Everyone’s happy – and that’s a good vibe.

There’s a lot to be said for institutional memory, and Toto Wolff’s crew might’ve projected the most calm over the winter, with their solid veteran driver paired up with a rapidly improving youngster.

The fact that their car might just be really, really fast this year is just a bonus.

2. Cadillac

This is the point at which we repeat this disclaimer: this is a VIBES-BASED ranking. Cadillac will not be the second best team on the grid. But they are, right now, the second vibiest.

Valtteri Bottas spent the weekend before the Barcelona test leading a bike ride down to an Australian beach in a pair of speedos. Checo Perez seems liberated by getting out of the Red Bull dream-crushing machine. They know the results aren’t going to matter this year. The vibes are good. That’s what matters right now.

3. Audi

New to the sport and making an attempt to act like a real F1 team, Audi should take a nice jump forward after waiting in the wings for Sauber to take their bow.

They’ve even got a driver development programme now, which Allan McNish is heading up. Remember Allan McNish! Lovely stuff.

4. Haas

Full disclosure, Red Bull were pencilled in for this spot and had to get knocked down for reasons that we’ll come to shortly.

Haas are worthy of it though, with a second full year of Ollie Bearman to look forward to and a little home pressure taken off them, as the title of ‘America’s team’ gets passed to Cadillac.

5. Red Bull

Good in theory. Max Verstappen ended last year like a rocket to boost the mood around the team, while the departures of Christian Horner and Helmut Marko in a six-month span should do a lot to alleviate some of the culture questions around them.

That’s the good bit. The other bit is that they’re in a massive transition – Horner, Marko and Adrian Newey had been the backbone of the team for nearly two decades – at the worst possible time.

They’ve also got a young driver in the most cursed seat in the sport, who managed to biff the new car into a Catalan wall and put the team behind their testing schedule. Oops.

6. Racing Bulls

A team with fundamentally middling vibes. If the vibes are too good, a vibe vacuum comes and siphons some away to Red Bull. If the vibes are too bad, up comes the next development driver and potential team principal.

Vibes inextricably tied to their senior team, so here they sit.

7. McLaren

I do not for a moment believe that a team who were so internally tense for the second half of 2025 have just gotten over that because Oscar Piastri’s soaked up some sun in Australia and Lando Norris has spent a couple of months doing whatever it is that generationally wealthy posh boys do. Not for a moment.

McLaren went through a normal team’s cycle of dominance in a single year – get hyped up over the winter, come out firing, run the best car to a bunch of wins and a big championship lead, start bickering, let your rivals catch up, get passed in the development race.

It took Red Bull three years and a generational internal collapse to manage that. McLaren did it in a year. Speedrunning the Red Bull method is not good vibes.

8. Aston Martin

Would be higher if anyone had a modicum of faith in their engine provider. As it is, there are two outcomes for the 2026 season. One is that Adrian Newey works a piece of absolute genius and puts a great car under Fernando Alonso, while his brilliance is wasted on 50 per cent of the team’s drivers.

The other, arguably more likely, is that the Honda power unit hamstrings the team in a way that even Newey can’t overcome, leaving Alonso wasting possibly his last year in the sport at the back of the pack while Lance Stroll just...exists.

That’s not an appealing bet.

9. Ferrari

They have no idea if their car’s fast. Lewis Hamilton’s race engineer got kicked out to the driver academy (and they didn’t have a replacement lined up). They’re having to whinge to the FIA because the Mercedes and Red Bull power unit designers thought up a concept that their own engineers didn’t.

Fans: Furious

Drivers: Fed up

Vibes: Stinky

10. Alpine

Don’t give your team over to Christian Horner!

11. Williams

It’s not good when January is ending and your car is entirely hypothetical. Stories of failed crash tests would be one thing. Reports that the car’s very chubby and failed a bunch of crash tests is another. Nothing at all that’s come out of Williams all year has been remotely positive, and they appear to be sinking fast.

They’re not here because they’re going to be slow (cards on the table – I still expect them to outpace Cadillac, at the least), but because their struggles have been so embarrassing, and public. Make a slow car, fine. Just do it without the clown shoes on.

F1 TESTING RESULTS: Barcelona shakedown times as Hamilton roars back

F1 Red Bull Ferrari Mercedes McLaren