Adrian

There seem to be more significant upgrades from a number of teams this year, McLaren’s being the latest. Will the top four teams be bringing many more in the second half of the season or is there a limit to what they can do? – Richard

All the F1 teams headed into 2026 knowing that the season would be defined by development.

When there is a new rule set, this is always the case. The longer a set of rules exists, the more a) the car designs converge; b) teams get into diminishing returns.

But at the start, progress comes faster and in bigger steps, and that explains the fluctuation in form between the top teams so far this season.

Typically, a team will bring an upgrade, their competitiveness will increase, but then it will shift as other teams bring their own upgrades.

The longer a team leaves it between upgrades, the more they fall back.

That’s why McLaren, for example, made a leap forward with their Miami upgrade, but slowly slipped back as Mercedes and Ferrari brought their own big developments in Canada and Spain.

Then, McLaren leapt forwards – even more than they expected – with their Hungary upgrade. And they have another due in Zandvoort. And more to come after that.

Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull also have developments to come after the summer break.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella said in Hungary: “I still believe that if we want to be in a position to fight for victories consistently in the future, we need to keep our focus on delivering more upgrades. That is the plan, but we are not naive. We know that this will be the plan for all the teams.

“Like it’s always been in this 2026 season, it’s a matter of a race of upgrades. And the good news is that McLaren is now back in this race of upgrades while fighting for the lead.

“But I expect that the car that will be the best car at the end of the season will keep adding tenths of a second in the next 11 races, probably as much as half a second. So definitely a lot of work ahead of everyone, not only McLaren.”

The limiting factor is the cost cap – all teams are restricted to spending no more than $215m on racing and development this season.

This means teams have to be strategic in how they deploy their new parts, “rather than just throwing it in at every grand prix, like in the past”, as Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff put it in Hungary.

He added: “We’re bringing upgrades, we’re closely monitoring how much we can bring. At the moment, cost cap-wise, we’re in a good spot. We’ve tried to have it a little bit more second-half-of-the-season weighted, and we’ll see if that’s enough.”

Why don’t McLaren make their own engines? They often seem to struggle because they rely on others’ (Mercedes) power units, who are also a direct competitor. Surely McLaren have the expertise and they could benefit their road car industry and their F1 car if they became a works team. – Jack

Making a Formula 1 engine is a highly specialised enterprise. It’s also extremely expensive. The manufacturers supplying engines to F1 this year have all spent hundreds of millions of pounds developing their power-units.

Apart from Red Bull, all are car manufacturers who have wider automotive companies to offset the cost, and expertise on which to lean.

There is now an engine budget cap, set at $190m in a company’s inaugural year, and $148.5m after that.

McLaren is a road-car manufacturer. But it does not build engines. It outsources its engines to a UK company called Ricardo.

The plans for the next F1 engine, due in either 2030 or 2031, are still being formalised, and there is considerable debate about them.

However, one aspect all stakeholders are agreed upon is for the costs to come down, perhaps even to the point where becoming a supplier of customer engines becomes a viable business proposition, which is not the case at the moment.

McLaren have proved they can win titles as a customer team, but they have also had frustrations with their Mercedes relationship this year. They have discovered how customer teams are on the back foot when it comes to maximising the operations of such complex engines at the start of a new regulation cycle.

As for the future, McLaren Racing chief executive officer Zak Brown said at the Monaco Grand Prix: “Priority one is to stay with Mercedes. They’ve been a great partner. Any time a new regulation comes out, we’ll take a look and see, is it something technically that’s interesting? Is it something fiscally that makes sense?

“We’ll go through that process when that happens. But sitting here right now, we’re extremely happy with Mercedes and we anticipate continuing with them.”

“Remake” has a tragic tale to tell and director Ross McElwee wastes no time revealing its grieving heart. Near the start of this funereal documentary, the filmmaker addresses his subject directly: “It’s been seven years since you died,” he says to his late son Adrian through voice-over, “and I still miss you every day.”

Across McElwee’s 50-year career, he has worked intimately without a crew to make sense of his own life by diligently recording it. In the process, he turned his friends and loved ones into the unlikely stars of his acclaimed independent documentaries.

With “Remake,” he looks back at that footage, concentrating on the images he shot of Adrian since his birth in 1989. Adrian died on Christmas Eve 2016 of a drug overdose and McElwee clearly remains shattered. For a documentarian who specializes in personal movies, “Remake” feels especially revealing — both in terms of the glimpses we get of this father-son relationship and of unsolved mysteries that linger just outside the frame.

The film’s title ostensibly refers to a surprising phone call McElwee received about 20 years ago, when he was approached by Steve Carr, the director of broad comedies like “Paul Blart: Mall Cop,” who was eager to adapt McElwee’s 1986 documentary “Sherman’s March” into a movie. That landmark picture features McElwee, then in his mid-30s, as he tries to chronicle the exploits of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who laid siege to the South during the Civil War. Except, in the midst of that project, McElwee’s focus shifts, delightfully, to his disastrous love life and the fascinating women he meets in his travels, becoming a deeply humane examination of modern courtship.

Carr doesn’t seem like an obvious choice to oversee a narrative remake, but McElwee decides to sell him the rights anyway. Soon in “Remake,” though, it becomes apparent that this is just one chapter of the story — and hardly the most essential. McElwee’s last film, 2011’s “Photographic Memory,” dealt with his increasingly frayed connection to Adrian, who was already fighting substance-abuse issues. “Remake” retraces Adrian’s childhood while filling in the details of the director’s life after “Photographic Memory,” including brain surgery and the dissolution of his 24-year marriage.

But Adrian is never far from his thoughts or absent from the screen: this smiling, happy boy slowly transforming into an edgy, troubled young man whose sweetness still occasionally shines through.

The passage of time is central to McElwee’s work, but he’s rarely scrutinized the topic as aggressively as he does here. It’s not simply that we watch Adrian age or revisit some of McElwee’s “Sherman’s March” subjects. (“Sherman’s March” is now screening in a new 4K restoration at the Laemmle Royal with “Remake.”) It’s also in the way that McElwee’s formerly wry narration now sounds far more resigned, his voice grown froggy and hushed as he nears 80. McElwee has often pondered the downside of essentially treating himself like a human camera, observing the world rather than fully engaging in it. But in “Remake,” he openly questions his artistic approach and, fittingly, he lets his son be his loudest critic.

As a boy, Adrian is enchanted by McElwee’s filming. In childhood, he paints an abstract picture of God in which the Almighty eerily resembles a movie camera. But although Adrian soon picks up a camera as well, increasingly interested in being a filmmaker himself, he resents how his father intrudes on their time together by constantly shooting their conversations. McElwee’s scenes of them at the Venice Film Festival for the “Photographic Memory” premiere are especially fraught, Adrian’s prickly reaction to a movie about his drug abuse creating tension between the two men at the subsequent press conference.

In “Remake,” McElwee laments that he didn’t do enough to help him navigate addiction and the mental-health issues that exacerbated it. (Adrian was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.) Was McElwee too consumed with his own career to be there for his son? The question haunts “Remake” — he includes an indelible sequence from “Sherman’s March” in which his longtime friend Charleen upbraids him for always having the camera out. “This isn’t art,” she hollers. “This is life!” Did McElwee never come to appreciate the difference?

A eulogy that also serves as an apology, a reckoning and a confession, “Remake” is filled with moments that are crushing because of how understated they are, none more brutal than when McElwee visits Adrian near the end of his life, when he’d moved to Colorado to get a fresh start. “He seemed to be doing OK,” McElwee recalls thinking. “But I always leave knowing I’m probably not seeing the whole picture.”

Even now, poring through his footage, desperately looking for clues, McElwee pines for that larger view — the one that might somehow bring the boy back to his inconsolable father.

June 14 (UPI) — Romanian President Nicusor Dan nominated a new candidate, Adrian Vestea, for prime minister Sunday after the resignation of Eugen Tomac.

Vestea, a former mayor, is a member of the National Liberal Party. A former development minister, he highlighted development as a central focus.

“We are the sixth-largest country in Europe and we need to put a major emphasis on development, which I will do from day one,” Vestea said.

Vestea added that he plans to form a “political government that will undertake real reforms and keep Romania on a pro-Western path.

“Eugen Tomac resigned this morning, and under these circumstances, I am appointing Adrian Vestea as Prime Minister,” Dan posted on social media. “Neither Mr. Tomac nor I have been playing at governing. We moved in this direction following consultations with the political parties. At this point, however, it is clear that a political solution is the right one.”

Romania is facing the highest rate of inflation in the European Union and is operating at a fiscal deficit. Meanwhile it has upped its defense spending in recent years.

The Romanian government collapsed last month after a vote of no-confidence against then-Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan. The Social Democratic Party withdrew from the government coalition in April, joining the call for a motion on a vote of no confidence.