Max Verstappen should be your premium driver for F1 Fantasy in 2026. Here’s the math as to why

With the 2026 F1 Fantasy season about to light up the grid, managers face a single, make-or-break decision before filling the rest of the roster: which marquee driver is worth the heavy price tag? Four headline acts enter the campaign priced above $25 million—Max Verstappen ($27.7 M), Lando Norris ($27.2 M), Oscar Piastri ($25.5 M) and George Russell ($27.4 M)—and every dollar spent on one of them is a dollar unavailable for the remaining five seats. The numbers say only one choice is rational.

Points-per-million (PPM) is the quickest sanity check. By dividing each driver’s 2025 Fantasy output by his 2026 salary, we learn how efficiently last season’s points were bought. Verstappen laps the field at 28.01 PPM; Norris, Piastri and Russell lag well behind. Even in a “down” year that saw Red Bull cede outright pace to McLaren, the Dutchman still outscored Norris in 13 of 24 Grands Prix and posted a 52-point average in his eight strongest events, compared with 45.2 for the Briton.

The counter-argument is that PPM is rear-view-mirror analysis, and 2026’s sweeping aero, power-unit and tyre changes could scramble the competitive order. So we flipped the metric around: how good would each rival need to be this year simply to match Verstappen’s 28.01 PPM?

George Russell must climb to 32 points per race—eight beyond the metronomic 24 he managed in 2025, when he famously never registered a negative round. Oscar Piastri needs 29.8 per start, a tall order if McLaren’s Papaya Rules again force him to cede position to Norris. Lando Norris comes closest, requiring 31.8 points per race—only a one-point bump from last season’s average—but that masks a worrying trend: he hemorrhaged 143 Fantasy points after the summer break, including two negative weekends.

Early Bahrain test times hint Ferrari and Mercedes may have leapt forward, yet history warns not to over-weight winter laps. What we can weight is cost efficiency. Verstappen, priced only $500k above Norris, offers a higher statistical floor (one negative score all year) and a demonstrably higher ceiling. Unless you foresee a dramatic drop-off for the three-time champion and simultaneous career-best consistency from Norris, anchoring your lineup around anyone else is paying boutique money for mid-tier yield.

In a game decided on margins, the math is decisive: Max Verstappen is the premium driver to build your 2026 F1 Fantasy title run around.