Ohhhh, impossible question to answer but I'll share my thoughts
Ferrari, think they'll be at the front end, most established team, hasn't suffered any recent disruptions to affect their stability/continuity
Mercedes, the strongest team of the current hybrid era, RB Powertrains poached a lot of experience staff, not enough good experienced people to go around in F1 so they will have definitely been weakened
Honda, currently the strongest or one of the strongest teams of the current hybrid era, recently shutdown their F1 programme, many people transferred back to road car/motorbike parts of the business, established team but experience/knowledge needs time to rebuild up again
RB Powertrain, newly set up, big influx of Mercedes people, newest facility but mixing people from rival teams can cause a little competitive internal friction which can hamper progress and it takes time for a newly established team to work effectively
Alpine, no longer
Audi, very experienced in sport car racing but F1 is a whole another level of detail/pushing the limits, parent company not looking financially strong so real risk they might not be around for 2026
If I had to choose how 2026 will shake out if there was a PU Championship I rank the teams as
Ferrari, Mercedes and Honda for 1st, 2nd and 3rd in any combination, will depend who has the fastest chassis and strongest driver pairing
RBPT 4th
Audi very distant 5th
What I can say is 2014 was an incredibly difficult transition year when the current hybrid era was introduced, on my complexity/effort scale we went to 11 out of 10
Having spent the last year on 2026 PU design, I'm exhausted, in 23yrs of F1 I've never worked so many hours, so hard, taken on a more difficult challenge, pushed the limits so far or worked on anything more complex
Add the new active aero chassis rules, keeping weight to a minimum to offset the increase in battery capacity I think the complexity/effort scale will easily hit 13 out of 10
So far, really enjoying being in the middle of a PU war but admit there are days when I doubt I've still got what it takes for working at such a high intensity to incredibly short timescales
Starting to think I'll be done with F1 by 2026, want to try other motorsport categories before I'm too old and slow
