Racing Bulls Chief Calls F1 Unhealthy as Top Four Take 88% of Points

Racing Bulls’ team principal has said Formula 1 “isn’t a healthy sport”, according to PlanetF1, reviving the argument over whether the cost cap is delivering the competitive balance it promised. The remark comes with three rounds of the 2026 season left and a constructors’ table that reads like two separate championships. Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren have 1,975 points between them. The other seven teams have 261.

That is an awkward thing for a team boss to say about his own sport, and a revealing one from this particular boss. Racing Bulls, listed in the standings as RB F1 Team, is fifth on 114 points and comfortably the best of the rest. If the team leading the second division thinks the structure is unhealthy, the view from Williams, Aston Martin or Cadillac is unlikely to be any brighter.

Eight cars on the lead lap at Interlagos

The Brazilian Grand Prix on 8 November made the case better than any spreadsheet. Qualifying promised an unpredictable race. Liam Lawson put his Racing Bulls car third on the grid, Nico Hülkenberg was fourth for Audi and Oliver Bearman sixth for Haas, with Fernando Alonso eighth and Alexander Albon ninth. The race then sorted the field back into its familiar order.

Lando Norris won from pole for McLaren. Max Verstappen started 21st and finished second, while Lewis Hamilton climbed from 20th to ninth. Going the other way, Bearman fell from sixth to 17th, Albon from ninth to 15th and Alonso from eighth to 12th. Hülkenberg salvaged a point in 10th, though a lap down. Lawson was the exception, turning third on the grid into seventh and six points.

Only eight cars finished on the lead lap, and Lawson’s was the only one not entered by the big four. Of the 101 points on offer, the midfield took seven. The short Interlagos lap makes it easier for the leaders to put cars a lap down, but it does not explain why cars starting third, fourth and sixth were overwhelmed by cars from the back of the grid.

The pattern is a familiar one. Over a single lap, with low fuel and fresh tyres, a well-sorted midfield car can reach the front. Over a race distance, tyre degradation, energy deployment under the 2026 power unit rules (which have the engines draw roughly half their output from the electrical side) and sheer downforce expose the real gap. Saturday flatters the midfield. Sunday tells the truth.

A constructors’ table split in two

With 20 of 23 rounds complete, the standings show how wide the divide has become.

Team	Points	Wins
Mercedes	652	12
Ferrari	510	2
Red Bull	415	3
McLaren	398	3
RB F1 Team	114	0
Alpine F1 Team	69	0
Haas F1 Team	31	0
Audi	28	0
Williams	12	0
Aston Martin	7	0
Cadillac F1 Team	0	0

The top four hold just over 88 per cent of all points scored. The gap between McLaren in fourth and Racing Bulls in fifth is 284 points, which is more than every team from fifth to 11th has scored combined. Racing Bulls, in turn, has more points than Haas, Audi, Williams, Aston Martin and Cadillac put together (78). Every one of the season’s 20 Grands Prix has been won by a big-four team.

The drivers’ standings follow the same line. The top eight places all belong to drivers from those four teams, with Isack Hadjar eighth on 122 points. Lawson is the leading driver outside that group, ninth on 89 points, and Pierre Gasly is next best on 42. At the front, Andrea Kimi Antonelli’s 111-point lead over Verstappen is beyond what three rounds can overturn.

The 2026 regulation reset was supposed to be the moment the order could change, and at the top it did: Mercedes has turned new rules into 12 wins. Further down, though, the reset reshuffled the midfield without bringing anyone closer to the front. Williams, the best of the rest last season, has 12 points. Aston Martin, despite its new factory and wind tunnel and the arrival of Adrian Newey, has seven.

What the cost cap was built to fix

The cost cap arrived in 2021 with two goals: financial sustainability and closer competition. Before it, the leading teams spent sums the rest could never match, and the sport’s most dominant era, Mercedes between 2014 and 2020, was built on that advantage as much as on its engine.

On the first goal, the cap has been an unambiguous success. Teams that once relied on owners covering losses now operate as viable businesses. Valuations have soared, Audi bought its way in through Sauber and Cadillac joined as the 11th team after a long negotiation over who was entitled to a share of the sport’s revenue. The rules have also proved enforceable: Red Bull’s breach of the 2021 limit brought a fine and a cut to its aerodynamic testing allowance.

On the second goal, the record is thinner. The fight at the front became genuinely competitive after 2021, with all four leading teams winning races in 2024. The fight between the front and everyone else did not close. Since the cap was introduced, a team outside the current big four has won once, when Esteban Ocon took victory for Alpine in Hungary in 2021.

That distinction is what gives the Racing Bulls remark its edge. Formula 1 can be a healthy business and an unhealthy sport at the same time. Rising franchise values do not help a driver who qualifies fourth and is a lap down by Sunday afternoon.

Why a spending limit cannot close the gap on its own

PlanetF1’s framing asks whether the cap is actually hurting the sport. The better question is why it has not done more, and the answer lies in what a budget limit can and cannot touch.

First, the cap froze spending rather than advantage. The leading teams built their wind tunnels, simulators and engineering organisations before 2021, and the separate limit on capital expenditure restricts how quickly rivals can match that infrastructure. Even an equal budget buys less performance when it has to fund catching up as well as racing.

Second, the engine is not the explanation. Racing Bulls uses the same Red Bull Ford power unit as Red Bull. Alpine and Williams run Mercedes engines, and Haas uses Ferrari’s. McLaren has proved a customer team can win. The gap is in chassis, aerodynamics and organisation, which take years to build and cannot simply be bought.

Third, the tools meant to redistribute performance work slowly. The sliding scale of aerodynamic testing gives lower-placed teams more wind tunnel and CFD time, but the benefit is incremental, and it shrinks as soon as a team climbs the order. Big regulation changes, meanwhile, reward the teams with the best simulation and correlation, which are usually the ones already at the front. The 2026 reset was meant to be an opportunity for the midfield. In practice it was an exam in which the best-prepared candidates did best.

A cap worth keeping, and a structure that needs changing

The conclusion some will draw is that the cap is the problem and spending should be loosened. That would be a mistake. Remove the limit and the four teams with the deepest resources would simply outspend the rest again, rebuilding the gap the cap was designed to prevent.

The cap is not hurting Formula 1. It is necessary, but not enough on its own. If the sport wants the competitive health the Racing Bulls boss says it lacks, the levers are elsewhere: steeper aerodynamic testing allowances for the teams furthest behind, more room in the capital expenditure limit for teams below a set championship position to modernise their facilities, and prize money weighted more firmly towards the lower half of the grid. None of these would hand a midfield team a win. Together, they would make Lawson’s Saturday less of an exception and more of a platform.

The final three rounds begin in Las Vegas on 22 November, and they will not change the shape of this table. History suggests the order will compress in 2027 as teams converge on the second year of a rule set. Expect the gap between first and fourth to narrow; expect the gap between fourth and fifth to narrow far less. If it is still larger than the entire bottom seven’s combined total at the end of next season, Formula 1 should treat this week’s warning as a diagnosis rather than a complaint.