Max Verstappen's increasingly inevitable stay at Red Bull for the 2026 Formula 1 season, when the regulations will reset, will have an impact on drivers up and down the grid - but probably on none more so than George Russell.
This is probably quite obvious, so I'll go a step further. Verstappen staying at a new-engined Red Bull before potentially surveying the market in 2027 is what Russell deserves. It would mean he gets to finally enter a season as the anchor of a Mercedes team that's actually fighting for something.
A new Mercedes deal is now a foregone conclusion, though surely interesting conversations still await over the length of said deal. But some form of it will get done. And it's 2026 anyway that's most interesting right now.
Russell has won races in the weekend's best car - and also lost a couple - but he has spent all of one F1 weekend in a car that's been a genuine championship proposition, as the Sakhir Grand Prix stand-in to Lewis Hamilton in the Mercedes W11 in 2020.
Being thrust into that level of Mercedes car full-time, even after three seasons of backmarker work at Williams, would've been a bit of a "born with a silver spoon in your mouth" scenario - but, famously, Russell's timing was just off, his arrival to Mercedes coinciding with a return to 2010-13 levels.
Russell held up his end of the bargain. Without relitigating his time alongside Lewis Hamilton at Mercedes in detail, he was basically an exact match: better in qualifying, worse in races, the differences nullified and the end result by and large the same across both cars.
There's a perception now that he's the best he's ever been in F1, though that might just be the benefit of being compared against a team-mate who is two years removed from navigating a Formula Regional European title battle.
"I think it is my best season, but probably because this is probably the best car that I've had in F1 as well," Russell himself said ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix - a race that may have changed his mind a little bit on that last point, and he's surely excluding the W11 anyway.
"So you're always dependent on that."
Had rookie Kimi Antonelli run him close, questions would've been rightly asked about Russell's suitability for a title tilt down the line, about his ultimate potential to head up a programme like Mercedes.
Those questions have been batted off: he's 14-2 in the qualifying head-to-head against Antonelli (including sprints), their average gap hovering around four-to-five tenths, which is borderline Verstappen-at-Red-Bull territory.
Only so much can be extrapolated from dominating such a raw team-mate, who was always going to be a 'project' in F1, but it at the very least falls very neatly in line with what we'd seen from Russell against Hamilton in previous years.
But 2025, like 2024 before it, is a spinning of the wheels. It is a lot like Charles Leclerc at Ferrari - with the promise of real title challenge always over the horizon but never quite in their hands, except at least Leclerc enjoyed a couple of half-seasons where it looked like a reality.
There is no guarantee of that in 2026 for Russell, but staying on at Mercedes, next to a team-mate who he has obvious and demonstrable seniority over, is the realest it's ever looked.
The 2026 pecking order is pure quantum mechanics right now - everyone and no one is the favourite - but whispers of an early 'engine formula' period have been persistent, and Mercedes is most people's pick to capitalise with a difference-maker power unit, like it did in 2014.
A Mercedes power unit is already going to win the drivers' and teams' title this year, yes, and the part of the game where McLaren is doing the damage right now, total control over rear tyre temperatures, won't suddenly become obsolete.
"Some things will move in a good direction," Mercedes technical chief James Allison said of 2026.
"I think the rather unhappy formula with very, very large end-of-straight loads disappears and you will have much more moderate end-of-straight loads, which is to the benefit of everybody. But other things will move in a trickier direction.
"Making smaller tyres because you need less drag means that the tyre does more work. Still wanting to run very low [tyre] blanket temperatures [per the regulations] means that Pirelli will still have to create rubber that says hello to the road at lower temperatures than older tyres would.
"So I would say that it's likely to be as big a thing next year as it is this year, even though aspects of it have gone in a good direction."
Still, the car reset is such that advantages can be negated, and the highs and lows of the current W16 can be forgotten. How often, for instance, do you think about the W04 of 2013?
Mercedes, with its resource, know-how and (surely) presumed understanding that 2025 was doomed from a very early stage, should be in as good a position as anyone.
Now imagine if Mercedes puts a championship-winner on track next January, and Russell isn't driving it - instead sent to Red Bull via a swap with Verstappen and having to navigate the potentially choppy waters of its debut as a power unit manufacturer.
Russell being discarded with such ease feels unlikely. But, OK, imagine if he stays, but Verstappen, the greatest driver of the current F1 era whose demolitions of successive Red Bull team-mates have only continued to elevate his mythos even as the RB21 has disappointed, jumps into the other car.
So what, right? To be the best, you have to beat the best? Sort of - but not always, not really. This year, one of the McLaren drivers will seal the F1 title without having had to really beat the best. It's a sport of timing.
Russell would have faith in himself to take on Verstappen, but whenever F1 drivers say they always want the best team-mate, they're either naive or they're lying. Nothing raises your stock better than a beatable team-mate, and nothing juices up your title hopes more than a beatable team-mate in the best car on the grid.
Russell/Verstappen at Mercedes would've been fireworks. Maybe it still will be - but if it happens, it feels right for it to happen in 2027.
'Deserve', they say, has got nothing to do with it, but if Mercedes has a chance of putting the best car on track next year, Russell deserves to be first in line to benefit.
He has done enough for a straightforward championship window, for at least a single year before Mercedes invites someone else into his house.
