Formula 1 has long been attractive to road car manufacturers but is particularly so in the Netflix era as the sport’s following has exploded. Back in 2018 F1 claimed an already-impressive 500 million fans. Today that number is well over 800 million, the average age has dropped from 44 to 32 and 42% of that fanbase is female. Even better, whereas F1 has traditionally been under-represented in the US, it now hosts three sell-out events in Miami, Austin and Las Vegas. Sponsorship revenues have risen accordingly from around £1.5bn in 2018 to around £2.7bn now, with rate card values 175% higher.

Of the Formula 1 teams not owned by manufacturers, many of them have been transformed in the Liberty era from borderline insolvent to hugely successful franchises. So they are keen to go along with F1’s wishes and those of the manufacturers. There’s way less dissent and wrangling than there used to be. They’ve been tamed by the money. The valuation of the Mercedes F1 team (based upon Toto Wolff selling 5% equity) is now a theoretical £4.6bn. A decade ago, that would have bought you the entire sport twice over…

Formula 1 not only has the manufacturers investing directly in the sport in funding the teams but also benefits from the marketing campaigns of those manufacturers activating their F1 involvement. Because of the respective scales of automotive and F1, F1 is fantastic value to manufacturers but the manufacturers are a source of fantastic income for F1. Because of the latter, when the manufacturers make requests of F1, the sport listens and responds.

Automotive electrification

What automotive requested of F1 over a decade ago was hybrid power. What it requested more recently was a much bigger electrical contribution to that hybrid equation. That and a few other crucial details (notably the removal of ERS-h) to make being competitive simpler and to guard against the embarrassment of a manufacturer being wholly uncompetitive (which no one wants as it would threaten to derail the whole delicate equilibrium).

Increased electrification was the direction road car manufacturers – by force of legislation on both urban pollution and global greenhouse gas emissions – were having to take. Logically, they wished their Formula 1 involvement would reflect that change in technology.

The old rebellious, noisy, tyre-smoking, fuel-burning excitement of F1 therefore needed a tweak. The softer direction of travel was appropriate also to a younger Netflix audience which was generationally not as much ‘into’ cars as previously, and more environmentally aware, but which loved the entertainment of Formula 1: Drive to Survive. So the move to increased electrification met both agendas.

But there’s a complication.

Electrification & downforce

Petrol is remarkably energy-dense. For an equivalent weight it has 50 times the energy of an electric battery.

Battery power can just about be stretched to an acceptable combination of range and performance for a road car – 250 miles from a 370kg battery is fairly typical. Even though an equivalent petrol car might do 500 miles on one-tenth of the fuel weight, it produces emissions from the tailpipe. So the electric car has been legislated in is a feasible replacement.

But getting an open-wheeled aero car, with what by road car standards would be an appallingly high drag coefficient, through the air at super-high speeds (remembering that drag squares with speed) is incredibly energy-thirsty. Downforce and its associated drag absolutely devours energy. Pre-hybridisation, the energy density of petrol allowed an F1 race of 190 miles to require a 150-litre fuel tank. But even though that’s around three times what would be required for a road car to do 2.6 times the distance, the fuel still didn’t take up a lot of space. Because it’s so dense.

“Back in 2018, F1 claimed an already-impressive 500 million fans. Today it’s over 800 million”

To make a battery F1 car feasible would require a drastic slashing of the downforce and much shorter races – which essentially is Formula E. Hence F1’s choice of a hybrid of internal combustion and electric.

A road car battery pack will weigh anything between 350-700kg. That of a Formula E car – which is essentially a battery pack on wheels – is 280kg. The Formula 1 battery pack is around 30kg. Hence its storage capacity is limited and it has to be recharged by energy recovery either from braking or by using the internal combustion engine as a generator.

The battery is designed to enable big bursts of power (the equivalent of almost 500bhp) but due to its limited storage capacity cannot do so for very long. So within those constraints the regulations have defined a baseline state of charge and relatively small harvesting and deployment rates to the ERS-k (termed the capacity-to-swing ratio). So both deployment and harvesting are rationed over the lap.

You can never simply use full deployment all the time you are on full throttle. Nor can you always get enough harvest to fill the battery just from the amount of braking on the lap. So the fastest way around the lap is to deploy heavily at the start of the straights before the drag builds up too much and then to tail it off or even to begin harvesting when still on full throttle (super-clipping).

The more battery charge you have coming onto the straight, the longer you can deploy down the straight. This in turn means that you will often need to cruise through key corners so as not to use up valuable charge which can be put to better lap time use on the next straight. This has given us the ridiculous situation of whole chunks of the ultimate qualifying lap being driven nowhere near the driver’s limits, striking at the very heart of the essence of the sport. Another side effect is the yo-yo style of racing where one car is suddenly 500bhp down on the other – giving meritless overtakes nothing to do with driver skill. That momentary power mismatch also gives potentially dangerous speed differentials.

The energy could be less thinly spread if the ERS-h feature – an electric motor spun by or spinning to the turbo – had not been deleted. Tweaking the deployment, harvesting and storage limits since the Miami GP has improved the situation. But essentially, there is way too much electrical and not enough combustion power to make for an F1 car which requires a driver to be on the limit for the best qualifying lap.

Well, how did we get here?

Short answer: the outside world took it here. It’s just of its time, the way the energy world has evolved. F1 did its best to accommodate, assimilate, to retain those lovely dollars.

F1 was so successful the automotive manufacturers wanted to be part of it and that attraction was mutual; F1 wanted the automotives. But the automotives also wanted an energy source totally unsuited to F1 and F1 complied. It tried to accommodate the conflicting requirements because it can usually find a way. But it’s up against a harder physical limit than any it’s ever faced before.

The energy density of the batteries was even more incompatible with fast, open-wheeled downforce cars once the automotive request of removing ERS-h was granted – i.e. automotive’s second request ensured that its primary request would fail. Should F1 have known that? Well, its engineers did. But the engineers weren’t directing the commercial decisions. And maybe they didn’t automatically grasp how philosophically damaging it was to have the contest of driving on the limit so reduced in importance – after all, they spend their lives chasing lap time and aren’t all that bothered where it comes from. The drivers knew – once they’d tried these cars on the sims. But the drivers do not have a seat at the table.

“F1 wanted the automotives. But the automotives also wanted an energy source unsuited to F1”

So there was a structural weakness in F1’s Liberty era which made it particularly vulnerable to a freak convergence of challenges – driven by the outside world – which were underappreciated by the commercial and engineering factions. Commercial, in holding all the sway, didn’t grasp the scale of the engineering challenge and insisted on ploughing ahead, falsely confident the engineers would make it all work. Engineering didn’t grasp the philosophical damage inherent in meeting the challenge by way of reducing the importance of driving on the limit. And the drivers didn’t have the Lauda or Ayrton Senna figure to galvanise their peers into rebellion against this. Max Verstappen saying he doesn’t really like driving these cars and he may leave isn’t quite the same as a unified driver power front.

But that was just the way it unfolded, how F1 reacted to a sequence of situations. There is much in F1 that is better, fairer and cleaner now than in the Bernie Ecclestone era and we at Motor Sport were among those calling for radical change. But would Bernie have led F1 down this path? No, he was always very specific in his belief that automotive manufacturers should not unduly influence F1. What’s best for them is not necessarily what’s best for the sport and sometimes it’s wise not to let the riches they bring hold you hostage.

That’s how we got here. Where are we going? Towards a refinement that hears the manufacturers but is not beholden to them, probably. The V8 formula the FIA president talks of will almost certainly still have an electrical element, but a less powerful and disruptive one. There may well be further complications arising out of any political struggles between the FIA and Liberty’s representative, Formula One Management, as the Concorde agreement comes up for renegotiation. Things never stay the same and are changing faster than ever. F1, as always, mirrors its environment.

Drivers versus F1

F1’s speedy U-turn after stars spoke out

February

“As a driver, the feeling is not very Formula 1-like. It feels a bit more like Formula E on steroids… The proportion of the car looks good, I think. That’s not the problem. It’s just everything else that is a bit, for me, anti-racing.”

Max Verstappen after day two of Bahrain testing in February

“If you look at Barcelona, for example, we’re doing 600m lift and coast on a qualifying lap. That’s not what racing is about… I sat in a meeting the other day and they’re taking us through it. And yeah, it’s like you need a degree to fully understand it all.”

Lewis Hamilton during Bahrain testing

“I’m totally positive that there will be another incredible year. I don’t feel this anxiety. We need to stay calm because as always when there is something happening as a new regulation there’s always the doubt that everything is wrong… I don’t understand all the panicking going around because there will be incredible racing, there will be a lot of action and that’s the most important thing.”

F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali hits back at driver criticism in Bahrain

March

“We’ve come from the best cars ever made in Formula 1 and the nicest to drive to probably the worst. It sucks, but you have to live with it and just maximise what you get given. It’s certainly different. It’s certainly not like it was last year.”

Reigning world champion Lando Norris after qualifying in Australia

“It’s completely against what Formula 1 is about – flat-out, full attack – and you’re lifting and coasting and stuff. That element is not very good and I don’t think the drivers particularly like it.”

Hamilton weighs in after qualifying ahead of the Australian GP

“I think it’s wrong, in general terms, to talk bad about an incredible world that is allowing all of us to grow. And that’s the only thing that I would say is not right.”

Stung by criticism Domenicali asks the drivers to pipe down ahead of the Aussie GP

“It’s still terrible. I don’t know, if someone likes this, then you really don’t know what racing is about. It’s not fun at all. It’s playing Mario Kart. This is not racing.”

Verstappen ignores Domenicali’s pleas after the China round in March

“We’ve been warning them [F1 and the FIA] about this happening. This kind of closing speeds and these kind of accidents were always going to happen [and] I’m not very happy with what we’ve had up until now. Hopefully we come up with a better solution that doesn’t create these massive closing speeds and a safer way of going racing.”

GP Drivers’ Association director Carlos Sainz reacts after the crash involving Ollie Bearman at the Japanese GP – exacerbated by differing energy deployment strategies

April

“There are meetings next week before Miami, to see what can be done to improve or to adjust the situation. I think my conversation with the drivers is definitely very open, and they know that I do care about their opinions. I want for them to be involved.”

Ahead of the Miami GP, Domenicali appears to change tack and stresses the importance of the drivers’ feedback in the talks

“A number of refinements to the 2026 FIA Formula 1 World Championship regulations were agreed today. The final proposals were the result of a series of consultations over the past few weeks between the FIA, technical representatives and extensive input from F1 drivers.”

F1 on the FIA changes ahead of the Miami GP

“It’s going in the right direction for the stuff that we are asking. That’s the most important [thing]. I don’t think it’s a game-changer.

Alpine’s Pierre Gasly cautiously welcomes the changes

“It’s a tickle. It’s not what we need yet to really make it flat-out, but it’s complicated to get everyone to agree. I just hope for the next year we can make really big, big changes.”

Max Verstappen remains unconvinced…