Why F1's fixation on overtaking is flawed

For the better part of its history, overtaking has served as Formula 1’s unofficial performance indicator, the single metric by which a race weekend is most often judged.

A high overtake count usually signals an exciting race. A low one invites complaints about boring circuits or cars that are unable to follow each other, let alone overtake without an artificial aid.

The logic seems self-evident. Until you fully apply it.

Formula 1 itself celebrated having 120 overtakes in the season-opening race in Melbourne. By passing volume alone, Australia should have been one of the great grands prix.

In Japan, it celebrated a 279% increase in overtakes compared to last year – 106 from 28.

The previous race in China, by contrast, saw the smallest increase of the three 2026 races, with 146 from last year’s 72.

In theory, that should mean Australia and Japan were better races than China.

In practice, much of what filled the overtaking tally was cars with charged batteries catching cars that had depleted theirs, surging past on the straight and then being re-passed when the energy dynamic reversed a lap later. Position changes have accumulated, but racing, in any meaningful sense, has been intermittent.

The 2026 cars have now completed three races, and already the framework governing them has divided the audience. The core issue is familiar: that the regulations can produce passing moves that look dramatic on screen but feel engineered rather than earned.

What a pass actually means

The problem with using overtaking as a quality measure of racing is that not all passes are created equal.

There is a huge difference between a driver who spends 20 laps nursing tyres, finding a gap in strategy and making a move stick under braking, and a driver who opens a power-boost mode, applies a temporary electrical advantage and glides past before the next corner.

Both register as one overtake, but only one of them involves actual racing. The former is what many would consider artificial. The latter is what fans consider real racing.

Two-time champion and the most experienced driver in F1 history, Fernando Alonso, spoke with precision about this before the 2026 season began.

He identified what he saw as the central problem with the new overtaking architecture: that the energy cost of making a pass might deter drivers from attempting one in the first place.

“Maybe there is not an incentive to really make the pass, because you will both lose time,” he said.

It was an inversion of the usual complaint, not that overtaking would be too hard, but that the conditions might make it strategically irrational. That’s why, after the first three races, some drivers have complained that they have been overtaking without actually wanting to.

The 2025 Japanese Grand Prix offers a useful point of contrast. By the standards of metric-chasing, it was a dull race: low overtake count, long periods of stasis, no safety car drama.

By the standards of actual competition, it was compelling: Max Verstappen driving perfect flat-out laps to keep the two faster McLarens at bay.

The McLaren drivers were unable to pass but never far enough away for Verstappen to relax. Nothing was decided until the final minutes, and the overtake count told you almost nothing about that.

For the most part, the race is remembered as dull, but in the context of the artificial racing of 2026, some now view it under a different light.

Shanghai and the complicated case

The Chinese Grand Prix produced the kind of sequence that makes the overtaking debate genuinely hard to resolve.

Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc spent a significant portion of the race going wheel-to-wheel, exchanging positions multiple times, including a switchback of passes through Turns 9 and 10, and making brief contact that Hamilton later described as “just a kiss.”

From the outside, it was very entertaining Formula 1 racing.

Hamilton, who came out on top to claim his first podium as a Ferrari driver, said it was “one of the most enjoyable races I’ve had in a long, long time, if ever.”

From the cockpit, the battle with Leclerc was “great wheel-to-wheel racing, very fair – just what we want.”

Leclerc, despite losing the fight, was similarly positive and used the occasion to push back on criticisms of the 2026 rules.

Even on team radio mid-battle, Leclerc could be heard telling his race engineer: “This is actually quite a fun battle.”

So here is the complication. The Hamilton-Leclerc battle produced multiple overtakes and was, by general consensus, one of the highlights of the young 2026 season.

And yet the passes themselves were made possible, in part, by the energy deployment system that has been criticised as over-engineered.

So does the quality of the contest vindicate the mechanism that produced it? Or does it suggest that great racing can emerge from almost any regulatory framework when the competitive circumstances are right — and that the overtakes, in that sense, were not the point?

The specific concern around the 2026 rules revolves around the interplay between the active aerodynamic system and the power unit architecture, which shifts significantly more performance to electrical deployment.

Leclerc made a distinction between the mechanical passes, a car with a full battery catching one that has drained it, producing a speed differential that removes all agency from the defending driver, and the more nuanced battles where both drivers are managing their deployment actively, making decisions lap by lap about where to attack and where to absorb.

The former is artificial. The latter, he argued, is a new form of racecraft.

Again, there are and there’ll always be two sides to that debate, and it’s hard to imagine one side will eventually agree with the other entirely.

Whether Leclerc’s distinction holds across a full season, on circuits less suited to close racing than Shanghai, remains to be seen, though.

The 2026 rules may be three races old, but the tension they have already produced between those who see a system that generates cosmetic passing and those who see a new dimension of tactical racing, is precisely the argument F1 has been having, in various forms, since DRS was introduced in 2011.

Can anything else be measured instead?

If raw overtake numbers are a flawed unit to measure racing quality, the question becomes what a better measure would look like.

Time spent within one second is one candidate as it captures sustained pressure and proximate competition without privileging the final moment of resolution.

As mentioned above, races like the 2025 Japanese Grand Prix would look entirely different through that lens: Verstappen holding off two faster McLarens for lap after lap, the result in genuine doubt until the closing stages.

But no single metric fully replaces the overtake count in the popular imagination, partly because alternatives require more context to explain, and partly because a well-executed, precisely-timed pass remains the most viscerally satisfying moment in a race.

The problem is not with valuing overtaking. It is with treating it as sufficient evidence of excitement and entertainment.

The deeper question

Behind the debate is a question that Formula 1 is struggling to resolve more than ever in 2026, which is what the championship is supposed to be for.

The lines between competition, spectacle and business have never been blurrier, as evidenced by the unprecedented debate and divide over the regulations.