Can i say one of my most disliked narratives pushed by f1 pundits this year is "these regs don't suit max and that's why he struggles". Max dislike of current regulations doesn't mean he's not capable of adapting to them. When the car not actively trying to fall apart around him, which practically all the time, Max still showing great defending and overtaking. He still out driving his teammate.
Of course you can make an argument that new regs flatten a need in exceptional drivers skills all together. It's still doesn't mean Max, as one of the most adaptable drivers in my opinion, couldn't crack them.
You're 100 percent right. It's obvious from watching Max's races that, skill-wise, he's still driving at a significantly higher level than the rest of the grid. I would even argue that Max has cracked the regulations, as much as he may hate them. Silverstone was one of the worst tracks we've had in a while in terms of batteryslop (to the point that even the reporters were acknowledging it), and Max still drove the wheels off his car all weekend. This is in spite of Red Bull giving him a terrible deployment map throughout Friday and Saturday, as well as the engine problems he had in quali and the race. I will die on the hill that while Red Bull did not deserve a podium, Max absolutely did. He was able to keep Lewis and George behind him for a significant portion of the race despite both of them being in significantly faster cars. His issues so far this season have stemmed entirely from Red Bull giving him a shit car, one that has on several occasions been even worse than Hadjar's because the experimental setups they insist on making Max run never make anything better.
If anything, this season has actually proven more than ever how incredible Max is. He's driving in regs that significantly limit driver talent, and his car is more often than not either slow as fuck or actively trying to kill him. The RB22 genuinely makes the 2025 Ferrari car look like a rocketship by comparison. And all of this is happening while his team is going out of their way to protect his teammate at Max's expense. Despite that, he's managed to snag two front-row starts (coincidentally, on the two tracks so far where driver ability actually made more of a difference) as well as two podiums, which would have been three if not for RBR fucking up his car yet again. Yes, he's currently only P7 in the championship standings, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that if any of the drivers ahead of him were in his situation, most of them would probably have a hard time cracking the top ten.
It's also worth noting that some of the loudest voices when it comes to claiming that Max doesn't like the current regs because he "can't adapt" to them are LH fans. Which to be fair isn't surprising considering their favorite argument for why Lewis performed so poorly during the GE regs is because...he couldn't adapt to them. For the entire four years they were in play, apparently. Honestly (and I've said this before), we could have a whole discussion about how coddled Lewis is by the broader F1 fandom that his fans can openly say he was incapable of learning an entire regulation set and somehow it isn't considered a knock on his status the way it apparently is for Max, but then we'd be here all day.
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