The 2026 Formula 1 rule changes are arguably the biggest in the history of grand prix racing, and certainly the most divisive. They undermine the fundamental tenets of the racing driver’s art in qualifying and reshape the wheel-to-wheel battles in what Fernando Alonso hyperbolically calls the “battery world championship”.

The drivers do not approve, even more vociferously in private than in public, because the unintended consequences of the switch to a 50/50 split of electric and V6 power strikes at the heart of the racer’s raison d’être. There are benefits to the changes, notably the visibly more agile and responsive cars thanks to the reduction in weight and wheelbase. There’s also a nuanced debate to be had about the positive and negative impacts on the style of racing that has dominated fan discourse. To bring into sharp relief the key problem, just listen to Oscar Piastri’s description of his experience in Australian GP qualifying.

“It’s not quite as simple as who’s the bravest and who carries the most speed,” says Piastri, “because I got braver and braver through qualifying and it made me slower and slower down the straights.”

Ayrton Senna or Michael Schumacher could only interpret this statement in terms of being too aggressive on entry and compromising your exit, mapping it to the technique trade-offs implicit in optimising laptime within the stubborn demands of the laws of physics and the limitations of the machinery. This has nothing to do with that. That the art of going faster through the totality of a corner, assembling the optimum compromise of braking, entry, mid-corner and exit speed to carry onto the straight – something that has always differentiated between the great and the merely good – might result in a time-sapping loss of power on a straight later in the lap in a car functioning as designed would be incomprehensible. Yet that’s the reality of F1 now.

“You just can’t drive naturally,” says Max Verstappen. “Basically, you have to be on throttle as little as possible everywhere to save the battery. Certain corners you have to approach differently so that when you exit you can save battery again. That has very little to do with racing.”

“Basically, you have to be on throttle as little as possible”

The argument that drivers have always had to adapt and manage resources sells the effect short. Comparisons with the efficiency challenges of driving that have always existed, or the limitations of rapidly evolving and fragile technology, are misleading. This is hardwired into regulations stipulating a 4MJ battery and that, by necessity, permit far more than that to be harvested on a lap – usually 8.5MJ, but this varies. To produce a remotely fast lap time, you must continually charge and discharge the battery pack, even on a qualifying lap. The MGU-k kicks out 350kW (469bhp), without which you have a power output roughly midway between F2 and F3 level. This is what forces a counterintuitive driving style where you must focus on maximising the harvesting and deployment, even when it’s to the detriment of old-fashioned notions such as corner speed. Even more bizarrely, as Verstappen alluded to, there are occasions where drivers make a small mid-corner mistake, get out of the throttle and actually make a net gain thanks to the extra energy harvested. That this is a factor in qualifying is terrible news for F1.

Piastri’s Australian Grand Prix qualifying exemplifies this. Albert Park is a harvest-poor circuit, meaning there’s limited braking to charge the battery pack. This means a greater reliance on other ways of finding the required energy, meaning off and part-throttle harvesting and ’super clipping’, whereby the driver keeps the throttle pinned but the MGU-k is charging the battery and car speed drops. After exiting the Turn 6 right-hander, the cars blast through the flat-out Turns 7 and 8 kinks then down to the Turns 9/10 left-right sweeper, traditionally a glorious showcase of the astounding direction-change capabilities of F1 cars.

“You use corners to charge the battery, not to make the lap time”

Comparing the pole position laps in Australia from 2025 and ’26, you can already see the difference on that straight. When Lando Norris topped out on his pole lap last year, this year George Russell had already slowed from a similar top speed having automatically switched to harvesting. As a result, he was travelling around 29mph slower at the point Norris braked. Russell didn’t even have to brake, with the speed reduction handled across a significant part of the straight partly by the super clipping slowing effect and partly by being off throttle. This still requires skill and precision, as well as adapting constantly, given the distance-based self-learning algorithms that manage much of the deployment and harvesting changes mean things vary lap to lap, but what comes next really stings.

Be brave, as Piastri put it, and carry the maximum speed in on the limit of adhesion and you will gain a little time initially, but then lose it in spades on the straight that follows. This year it was necessary to drive within the grip limit and delay throttle application in order to harvest. Turn 10 is still testing, because you want to carry the speed you can through it onto the exit, but Turn 9 is neutered. The same applies at Turn 12 in Bahrain, where Fernando Alonso made his infamous comment about the team chef being able to drive the car through the right-hander as drivers sit within the limit.

“If you lift 30% or you lift 35%, you’re going to feel a difference of deployment,” says Red Bull’s Isack Hadjar. “You can’t control this with your leg, you don’t have that sensitivity, so it’s weird.”

There are also more extreme effects. A tiny moment when dancing on the ragged edge can have huge implications thanks to the impact on deployment. Charles Leclerc, F1’s modern Villeneuve given his capacity to produce spectacular on-the-limit qualifying laps even in modern high-downforce cars with vastly reduced tyre slip angles, believes such feats are no longer possible in contrasting his changing approach between sprint and main qualifying in China.

“It’s not a crazy lap, unfortunately. You can’t achieve that any more”

“They are very strange in qualifying,” he reckons. “In the past, one of my strengths was that come Q3, I was taking massive risks to get something out more. Now when you start doing that, you start confusing the engine side of things and you start losing a lot more than you gained, so consistency pays off more. Today, I felt like I found my rhythm from Q1 to Q3, which is a little bit less exciting inside the car for Q3 because you cannot push as much as you would want to. But at the end of the day it paid off, because I’m closer to the guys in front. But it’s not a crazy lap, unfortunately, because you can’t really achieve that any more.”

Leclerc’s problem was a tiny moment exiting Turn 10. This required nothing more than a flash of corrective action and a quick feathering of the throttle to 95%. Traditionally, this might cost a fraction of a second, but its consequences are now measured in tenths. That’s because it changed the automated harvest and deployment strategy and cost significant time on the back straight, which followed another sequence of corners. As Nico Hülkenberg puts it, “Sometimes when you overspin [the wheels] somewhere, the system takes it away from you.” Through such a moment, you can end up deploying energy when you don’t want to and not harvesting when you should be. This also happens in racing situations and can lead to easy overtaking moves if you have a small moment.

Such eccentric behaviour is a result not only of the deployment being out of the hands of the driver, save for the boost button that can override this, but also the rules dictating the behaviour of the power units. These arise for sound reasons, for example, safety and ensuring illegal traction control effects are not produced, but combine to create quirks. Leclerc’s focus on consistency is important because what the self-learning mechanisms benefit from is repeatability. The days when you might take that corner at full throttle on an all-out qualifying lap are gone, because that risks skewing the harvesting and deployment. Turn 5 in Australia is an example, as it teeters on the edge of being flat out, but what teams need is either to be consistently at full throttle or at least off it by a few per cent. This is problematic in dry conditions and threatens chaos in the wet.

It’s common for drivers in qualifying to have what they perceive as deployment glitches without knowing why. Some of these harvesting and deployment regs have existed for a long time, but it’s only now that the electric motor is so powerful that it has the ability to make or break a lap. Deployment has also overpowered chassis characteristics and set-up as a key dictator of lap time variations. This balance will shift rapidly as teams get on top of the quirks of these rules as far as they can, but the fundamental flaws will remain. This is why F1 is grappling with what changes can be made.

“After a couple of races, we will have to look if something should be done and what should be done to make sure we retain the entertainment and as well some of the DNA of driving Formula 1 cars,” says McLaren team principal Andrea Stella. “[This is] trying to exploit the grip rather than having to exploit the harvesting and deployment.”

This is the crux of the era of driving the power unit. In-race management is one thing, but when it comes to qualifying laps F1 has long traded on these being single, all-out laps where the virtuosity of a driver speaks loudest. While they have been, over the years, forced into an ever smaller box by the domination of aerodynamics and the narrow grip peaks of the tyres, drivers have still always been able to express themselves within those confines. Now, even Leclerc can’t, meaning virtuoso pole laps such as his brilliant Singapore 2019 effort will be a thing of the past. A rules set that incentivises a driver to step back from the limit in fast corners and not dance the tightrope of grip in slower ones is flawed.

There are changes under consideration, although eliminating them is likely impossible with this technology, meaning the art of grand prix racing is transformed, in qualifying irrefutably for the worse.