A week later came China. The Shanghai circuit is nowhere near as energy-demanding as Albert Park, with many more braking zones and a lower percentage of flat-out running around the lap. The racing featured another epic contest between the Mercedes and Ferrari teams, this time for much longer than in Melbourne.
Between Kimi Antonelli, Russell, Lewis Hamilton and Leclerc, there were a riotous 16 place changes. On lap 27 alone, there were four. So it was greeted with much the same polarised response as in Australia: casual or newer fans loving it, many hardcore fans decrying it as inauthentic. But aside from Verstappen – who had a horrible time in a Red Bull with a misbehaving powerplant – this time driver criticism was much more muted.
There was a reason for that. The racing, although superficially similar to watch, was fundamentally different. Of those 16 passing manoeuvres among the top four cars, only two were decided by one car running out of battery a few seconds before the other. The remaining 14 (almost 90%) were traditional out-braking or positioning moves where the driver’s skill and judgement were making the pass, not the battery.
In Shanghai, what the battery-controlled overtake and boost modes were doing was keeping the car behind in play, ready for the driver to attempt a traditional out-braking move into the Turn 14 hairpin or a positioning attack into the Turns 1/2/3 sequence. There were even a few Turns 7/8/9 side-by-sides and a Turn 10 pass – almost unheard of previously, and nothing to do with empty batteries.
Around this track the batteries were emptying about half-way down the long back straight, so dicing cars were arriving into the hairpin with no difference in power. Same into Turn 1. They were racing so closely for three reasons, none of which were empty batteries: 1) It is much easier to follow closely in the ’26 cars as the wake of the car ahead is far more friendly; 2) The aforementioned boost and overtake buttons allowing the overtaken car to be in place to counter-attack, much more effectively than the old DRS system; and 3) The crucial traits of the Mercedes and Ferrari are diametrically opposed, the small-turbo Ferrari lightning fast off the line and vaulting immediately past the bigger turbo Mercedes, which uses its power advantage to grind by at the end of the straights despite entering them slower because of the Ferrari’s superior cornering speed.
Using the freely available boost button will make you faster at the critical moment for position change, but slower over the lap as it’s not allowing the energy to be spread in the optimum way. So even a Mercedes which was around 0.6sec faster than the Ferrari in free air would take many, many laps to get the Ferrari out of its hair and be free to no longer need the compromising boost button. In contrast, use of the old DRS would allow you to lap faster.
That – and not the horrible 470bhp mismatch at the end of the straight we saw in Melbourne – was what was powering the racing action in Shanghai. It’s not only the difference in energy deployment and harvesting allowed between the two circuits, but also the sequencing of the turns. It seems critical that any battery emptying happens before the cars are anywhere near a braking zone – and Shanghai made for a happy place in that regard.
Many seemed to be watching China through the lens of Australia and so believe the problem to be far worse than it is. It’s a long way from perfect – the lift/coast through a couple of critical corners in qualifying in order to get the ultimate lap is deeply flawed, and there probably needs to be a redrawing of the energy split tailored to each track. But it is not as intrinsically artificial as Melbourne made it look.
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