Are Aston Martin dark horses to sign Verstappen?

After a three-week break, the Formula 1 season resumes this weekend with the Belgian Grand Prix at the much-loved Spa-Francorchamps circuit.

It will be the first race with Laurent Mekies in charge of Red Bull, following Christian Horner's sacking as team principal.

BBC Sport F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your latest questions.

With Adrian Newey at Aston Martin and his history of making cars that Verstappen is strong in, does that make them dark horses to sign Max if he does leave Red Bull? - Dan

Aston Martin already have two drivers committed for 2026.

Fernando Alonso's contract runs out at the end of next season, and Lance Stroll will drive there for as long as he wants.

Stroll is the son of the owner, Lawrence Stroll, and the team effectively exists for him.

That means that if Verstappen were to want to leave Red Bull for Aston Martin, an arrangement would have to be reached with Alonso.

Given that Alonso gets his first chance to drive an Adrian Newey-designed car next year, the chances of him being especially amenable to that are low. Any pay-off in such circumstances would have to be very large indeed, one can imagine.

Having said all of that, and while nothing is impossible in F1, and one can always be surprised, there does not seem to be any movement in this direction at the moment.

If Verstappen is to leave Red Bull, it is most likely to be to Mercedes. Whether he will remains an open question for now.

My sense from little bits of information from here and there is that at this stage Verstappen is more likely to stay at Red Bull than not. But of course that could change.

Laurent Mekies greeting Red Bull staff shortly after his appointment as team principal

How hard is it for a team principal to step into a new team part way through the season? Particularly at Red Bull where the outgoing team principal seemed to have a lot of the control and responsibility. - Steve

The sacking of Christian Horner as Red Bull team principal is a big change. This weekend's Belgian Grand Prix will be the first time in Red Bull's 20-year history that someone else other than Horner is in charge of the team.

His replacement Laurent Mekies is a very capable person who is well respected within F1.

Mekies already has a good understanding of the Red Bull structure. He had been working as team principal at their second team since the start of last year and before that spent a decade there as an engineer before moving to the FIA in 2014. He has also worked at Ferrari, from 2018-23.

Inevitably, as Racing Bulls source a lot of their parts from Red Bull, that means Mekies will already know a fair bit about his new environment.

He will have spent the past two weeks getting to know Red Bull as well as he can at their Milton Keynes base - as well as a test day that he attended in the days immediately following his appointment.

Mekies already knows he is stepping into a team that is immensely capable. He won't want to make massive changes immediately.

For the time being it will primarily be a question of watching, learning and understanding how and why things work as they do, and building a bank of knowledge from which he can then start to make the changes he feels will fix some of the issues that have developed in the past 18 months or so.

In the context of teams focusing on 2026 cars, it is interesting that so many have introduced new floors over the past few races. Are floors more reusable for the new regulations than other parts, or do they simply provide the best value for money performance upgrade? - Sam

The fact that teams are introducing new floors as upgrades this year is not in any way related to next year's new rules.

On the current F1 cars, the floor is the most powerful part of the design in terms of aerodynamics, so it's inevitable that will be where teams focus their attention as they try to make their cars faster through the season.

But any floor that is introduced this year is not relevant to next year because the technical regulations for 2026 are completely different in aerodynamic philosophy.

The so-called venturi floors that generate ground effect on the cars that have been in F1 since 2022 are being abandoned next year.

Instead, F1 is returning to what are known as 'step-plane' floors - similar to the ones used prior to 2022.

These have a central section which is the lowest part of the floor, and then a 'step' either side to a higher section which, from the front of the floor to ahead of the rear tyres, is flat, rather than curved in a wing shape as now.

However, the cars will have to be run differently from that era because the FIA has introduced a series of prescriptions with regard to what teams can do to control airflow in the rear corners of the cars.

According to Mercedes technical director James Allison, these restrictions in the rules "make it harder to hang on to the downforce at high ride heights".

In the era from 2017-21, there was a lot of discussion about the cars' rake.

Red Bull ran a high rake - a steeper angle from front to back - and Mercedes low. In other words, the Red Bull's rear was higher from the ground than the Mercedes'. Red Bull's was the style followed by most teams at the time, even though this was the era of ground-breaking Mercedes success.

These approaches were to do with different philosophies of dealing with a phenomenon known as 'tyre squirt'.

This is messy airflow created where the inner shoulder of the rear tyres meets the ground. It disturbs the clean flow of air teams want through the diffuser, the upswept part of the floor at the back of the car.

Teams want to try to clean up that airflow to increase downforce created by the diffuser, and under the previous rules there were various ways of doing that. But the new rules have aspects that are intended to impede that possibility.

According to Allison, this will likely mean that the cars next year typically run lower at the rear than in the previous generation - but not as low as the ground-effect cars of the current era.

Allison said: "The low ride-height Mercedes (of the previous era) is vastly higher than the cars of the current generation, and I suspect that the new generation cars will be in between where we are now and the lower end of the ranks that we saw in the 2014 to 2021 era."

An image supplied by motorsport governing body the FIA illustrating what F1 cars will look like from 2026

How can teams have a 'feel' for who is ahead in developing the new engines for 2026 when the manufacturers presumably keep everything as secret as possible? - Alex

It's a good question because, on the face of it, no one should know anything about the relative performance of next year's engines, because the manufacturers are all working on them in isolation.

In reality, though, F1 might be big business and have a huge following, but it is a relatively small world, and people talk.

For a start, the manufacturers have to discuss their engines with governing body the FIA for a whole bunch of reasons.

Then there is movement between teams and manufacturers in terms of employment - people leaving one team or engine company to work for another. When they get there, they will obviously take knowledge of where their previous employer was, and be able to share that with their new one.

And then there is just general gossip between people in the paddock.

So, while individual manufacturers do their best to stop performance figures creeping out, inevitably they do, to some extent.

That's how an impression forms.

The last time there was a major change of engine design, there was a lot of talk about Mercedes being ahead of the rest. No one knew for sure whether that was true until the cars first ran in pre-season testing, when it became immediately apparent that it was.

The situation this year feels very similar. Again, no one knows for sure, but the grapevine says that Mercedes are ahead.

There is a lot of complexity in the new rules.

The engine architecture is changing, with the removal of the MGU-H, the part of the hybrid system that recovers energy from the turbo.

The power split of the engine is changing, with the electrical part of the engine now set to produce about 50% of total output, up from about 20% currently.

The need to recover that much energy - in combination with the removal of the MGU-H, which had a powerful impact on recovery - has led to a change in the aerodynamic rules.

F1 is introducing moveable aerodynamics - both the front and rear wing have high- and low-drag modes. The idea is that drag can be reduced on the straights, to increase speeds, to make braking distances longer, to increase the time energy can be recovered during braking.

The deployment and recovery aspects of the engines will also be very different from now.

For example, the engines will likely be run at high revs during cornering simply so energy can be recovered for use on the straights. In that situation, the internal combustion engine is effectively being used as an energy generator for the battery.

Then there is the fully sustainable fuel, which is being manufactured without any use of fossil fuels. These will also have an impact on performance.

Effectively, snippets of information about all these aspects of the new engines creep out one way or another, and a sense of who is in a good place and who is less so starts to coalesce.

But it is, of course, all guesstimation at the moment.