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F1 Season 66 Review: Disappointments

21.09.2026 - Disappointment: Andrej Vidmar (4th) - The Champion Who Couldn't Finish the Job

Vidmar's story may be the most painful of the entire season.

After winning the championship in Season 65 through remarkable consistency, expectations were naturally high. And for most of Season 66, Vidmar looked more than capable of defending his title. After 18 races, the Porsche driver had scored 257 points, while de Saint-Germain III had 263.

Six points.

Then the momentum disappeared.

Vidmar scored just 59 points over the final six races, comfortably the weakest total among the five drivers still fighting for the championship. At exactly the same time, de Saint-Germain produced his decisive late-season surge, scoring 110 points and turning a six-point gap into a 43-point championship victory over Starostachev II.

Vidmar's qualifying form also deteriorated at the worst possible moment. His average starting position over the final six races was 6.83, a significant drop from the front-running pace he had shown earlier in the season. Across the full campaign, his 5.42 average qualifying position was also well behind the other leading contenders.

That decline made the final six races even more difficult. While de Saint-Germain's average qualifying position during his late-season charge was 1.67, Vidmar was starting from positions that made it harder to fight for victories and podiums.

In the end, he scored 316 points and was only five points behind his teammate in third and 14 points behind the second place.

This is a good result in isolation.

The disappointment comes from the position Vidmar had put himself in. After winning the title a season earlier by consistently avoiding bad weekends, he once again had a genuine championship opportunity — only for his form to fade when the pressure was at its highest.

For a driver who built his Season 65 championship around consistency, the contrast could hardly be greater. This is why the late-season drop-off has defined his campaign.


Disappointment: John Cannon (5th) - The Fastest Driver to Ever Finish Fifth

If this list were based purely on speed, John Cannon wouldn't be among the season's biggest disappointments.

Cannon had the raw pace to fight at the front throughout the season. Five pole positions showed just how quick he could be over a single lap, while six victories proved that his race pace was more than capable of turning that speed into wins.

His qualifying numbers make the missed opportunity even clearer. Cannon recorded the third-best average qualifying position in the championship, and if you remove his three Q2 eliminations, only his teammate — the eventual world champion — had a better average. In other words, when Cannon put a complete qualifying session together, he was consistently one of the very fastest drivers on the grid.

The problem was that championships are not won on speed alone. They are won by consistently converting that speed into points, and that is where Cannon's season fell apart. A combination of bad luck, poorly timed mistakes and those occasional qualifying failures left far too many points on the table.

Las Vegas was perhaps the clearest example. Cannon was comfortably running second behind his teammate when he crashed on the final lap, throwing away a valuable podium finish. In Hungary, the points slipped away through no fault of his own. Starting from pole and looking like the favourite for victory, Cannon instead suffered a mechanical failure and left with nothing.

His three Q2 eliminations were also particularly costly. The most damaging came in Qatar, where he started from 15th. On a track where overtaking opportunities were limited, recovering into the points was always going to be difficult, and he ultimately finished another race without scoring.

Those three zero-point finishes proved particularly costly. In a championship this close, weekends like these are more than just disappointing results — they are the races that can decide a title.

And that is what makes Cannon's fifth-place finish so frustrating. This wasn't a season where he lacked the speed to fight for the championship. What he lacked was the consistency to turn that performance into a sustained championship challenge.

The speed was there. The wins were there. The consistency wasn't.


Disappointment: Loki Asen (12th) - Pace on Saturday, Nowhere on Sunday

Loki Asen has one of the clearest cases for inclusion on this list because his season wasn't simply about lacking speed.

The McLaren was the fourth-fastest car on the grid, giving Asen a genuine opportunity to fight for points throughout the season. And on Saturdays, he often showed that the pace was there. He won the qualifying battle against his teammate 15-9 and repeatedly put himself in positions where a strong race could have produced a valuable result.

The problem was what happened next.

Again and again, Asen found himself starting from a position that gave him something to fight for, only to lose ground once the race got underway. His race results were almost constantly a step backwards from his qualifying performances, turning promising Saturdays into disappointing Sundays.

That pattern ultimately left him with just 36 points and 12th place in the championship. For comparison, Brendan McGee scored 103 points and finished 10th. But the bigger issue is not the gap to his teammate. It is how little Asen managed to extract from a car that was consistently quick enough to score much more.

A strong qualifying performance can put a driver in the right place, but it is only the beginning. Asen repeatedly demonstrated that he could find the pace needed to put himself in contention. What he couldn't do was consistently convert that position into points.

That is what makes his season so frustrating. There was never a complete absence of speed. Instead, the speed was repeatedly wasted once the racing began.

Whether the problem was racecraft, consistency, strategy, tyre management or simply avoiding the mistakes that cost him positions, the Sunday deficit became too significant to ignore.

The verdict is simple, the pace was there, the opportunity was there, but far too many positions disappeared on race day.


Disappointment: McLaren F1 Team (6th) – A Car That Deserved More

McLaren's season began with genuine promise.

Brendan McGee put the team on the podium in Australia, giving McLaren an early result that suggested they could be one of the teams to watch throughout the year. There was pace in the car, and for a while, the results seemed to be heading in the right direction.

But that promise slowly disappeared.

McLaren ended the season sixth in the Constructors' Championship with 139 points, despite having the fourth-fastest car on the grid. That is what makes their season so disappointing. They had a car capable of fighting near the front of the midfield, but they never managed to get the most out of it consistently.

Senna is the clearest example. Their car's performance was remarkably close to McLaren's, yet Senna finished fourth with 276 points, almost twice McLaren's total.

Then there was Pegaso.

They had a slower car, but still finished ahead of McLaren in fifth. The difference was only 21 points, but that is exactly what makes it so frustrating. McLaren had the machinery to beat them, but they simply didn't do it.

Why?

McGee didn't have a spectacular season, but he was solid enough. Although he lacked the raw pace to regularly put the McLaren near the front in qualifying, he made up for that on Sundays. With 103 points and both of McLaren's podiums, he delivered the kind of dependable season you would expect from a driver in a supporting role.

The problem was that McLaren needed more than that.

With the pace they had, they needed a genuine number-one driver capable of securing big results on Sundays. Instead, they had Asen.

Although his qualifying results were inconsistent, Asen regularly started ahead of McGee. However, he struggled to turn those starting positions into race results. Instead of building on his grid position, he too often went backwards on Sunday, ending the season with just 36 points and without a top-five result.

Perhaps this is the simplest way to describe their season: despite having a car capable of fighting near the front of the midfield, McLaren were the only team among the top six in the championship that failed to win a race.


Disappointment: Lotus (7th) - The Cost of Going All-Rookie

Lotus' season is difficult to judge without looking at the car they had.

They had a quick and efficient car, but it lacked some of the cornering performance and drivability of the cars around it. On paper, that should still have been enough for a respectable midfield campaign.

Instead, Lotus finished seventh with just 42 points.

The Bahrain Grand Prix may have been the perfect snapshot of their season. Pinto took pole position, while Reckziegel qualified fourth, putting both Lotus cars in the perfect position to produce a huge result.

By the end of the race, however, Reckziegel was only eighth while Pinto retired with a mechanical failure. Even without that problem, a top-five finish would probably have been difficult to achieve given his race pace.

That contrast between qualifying and racing was a recurring theme.

Lotus could occasionally put themselves in an excellent position, particularly on circuits that suited their car’s strong straight-line performance, but they struggled to turn those moments into the kind of results that build a championship campaign.

Their only top-five finish of the season came in Montreal, where Pinto finished fifth in a race transformed by heavy rain and chaotic conditions. It was a valuable result, but also telling. Lotus' best finish came when the normal competitive order was disrupted, rather than through consistently having the pace to challenge near the front.

The most revealing comparison is with Pegaso. Their cars were remarkably close in overall performance, yet Pegaso scored 160 points and finished fifth — 118 points ahead of Lotus.

That gap is far too large to explain through machinery alone.

There is also a fairly obvious question hanging over the team: was their driver line-up part of the problem?

Both Pinto and Reckziegel were rookies. That makes their campaign more understandable, but it also raises the possibility that Lotus could have benefited from having an experienced veteran alongside at least one of them.

Raveel's experience allowed Pegaso to turn opportunities into results that a less seasoned driver might have missed. Senna provides another example. Michael Novikov, despite being 40, still won a race in Canada and scored 141 points, showing that experience and racecraft can remain hugely valuable even when outright speed begins to fade.

In the end, Lotus suffered from the same problem that hurt McLaren: they had a car capable of scoring far more points than they actually did.