Spa was supposed to be one of the biggest acid tests for the 2026 rules. In the end, it became the latest demonstration of how uncomfortable Formula 1 has become with letting its own fans see what’s actually happening on track.
The problem itself is well known by now: This year’s energy-starved power units, forced to spread a scarce store of battery charge across a lap as efficiently as possible, turned Spa’s famous middle sector into a non-event.
The best corners, drivers agreed, were neutered, making the experience of driving around one of the sport’s most popular circuits a much sadder prospect. The same thing had happened two weeks earlier at Silverstone.
Through what’s traditionally one of the toughest sectors of the season at Spa, the cars were “so easily flat with so little horsepower available through that middle sector with so much downforce,” Mark Hughes said, speaking on this week’s Motor Sport Show podcast.
“It just looked ridiculous. It looked easy. This was the circuit that was always going to expose these cars more than any other, and yeah, there was no hiding from it. It really exposed them.”
That’s a technical failing anyone interested enough can watch and understand pretty easily.
What’s harder to explain away is Formula 1’s apparent decision to stop showing people the evidence of it.
The vanishing graphics
Fans used to get a simple, honest picture of what a car was doing on a lap: throttle, brake, and – this season – a battery deployment trace layered on top, showing exactly when a driver ran out of electrical power and how much speed they lost as a result.
That graphic has quietly disappeared from broadcasts.
Hughes was blunt about what he thinks is going on: “You see it in also how the battery charge and speed graphics have suddenly disappeared from the onboard.”
He linked it directly to a broader pattern of sensitivity around the subject, arguing the sport is “very, very sensitive to criticism of these cars, even though it’s absolutely acknowledged within the sport that the format’s a little bit wrong.”
It isn’t just the graphics, however. Hughes described the world feed cutting away from the post-race “green room” the moment drivers started discussing how bad deployment had been that weekend, pulled off air within about 10 seconds of the topic coming up.
Drivers agreed that Spa had lost a lot of character this year
Grand Prix Photo
Then there was George Russell‘s team radio after his first-lap crash, not present in the world feed and absent from the radio highlights video F1 publishes after every weekend, as noted by thousands of fans leaving comments on the sport’s official video, which includes over 17 minutes of radio messages from Spa.
“What the f**k happened with the SOC (state of battery charge) down the straight? I had no f***ing battery down the straight. Guys, unacceptable. Un-f***ing acceptable, this whole weekend,” was Russell’s angry message,shared by foreign broadcasts, after his contact with Lewis Hamilton put him out of the race.
All the official F1 video includes is Russell saying “I’m out”.
Fans aren’t the problem here
None of this actually hides anything from the people paying closest attention.
As Hughes put it, the fans who follow the sport closely enough to notice a missing graphic or a radio message “understand the problem and understand how we got there”, so cutting away from it doesn’t erase that understanding; it just draws attention to the fact that something’s being managed.
“To be sort of insulting their intelligence is, I don’t think, a smart PR move,” Hughes said.
Asked whether Formula 1 was trying to protect its own brand rather than let people see the real frustrations drivers are feeling, Hughes agreed there’s something to that reading, while making clear the instinct is self-defeating.
Spa’s middle section was the most frustrating for drivers
Grand Prix Photo
“I think it needs to be approached in a much more open way, saying, look, we haven’t got this quite right. We’re working on it. To pretend there isn’t an issue, I think it’s not very smart.”
What makes the caution especially hard to justify is that there’s no secret to protect. At least not from the regular followers.
The deployment issue has been dissected in detail all season – including, on this same podcast, an extended breakdown of exactly why Russell, Kimi Antonelli, and Oscar Piastri lost so much time to it at Spa.
Software failing to reset properly after the start, batteries over-deploying early in a lap and running dry before the flag – these are documented, understood causes, not mysteries.
Hughes’s view is that trying to suppress visibility of a known problem only amplifies it: “Yeah, it makes you look for it.”
Hiding the graphic doesn’t stop viewers noticing a car losing half its straight-line speed out of nowhere; it just adds a second story – why isn’t F1 showing us this? – on top of the first.
Kimi Antonelli delivered his sixth F1 victory of 2026 at the Belgian Grand Prix, writes Mark Hughes. But this year’s cars and their energy limitations made Spa-Francorchamps a shadow of the challenge it usually is
By
Mark Hughes
Formula 1 also appears to be trying to fight a losing battle, with more and more voices joining the critics, even after initially having defended the rules.
Ex-F1 racer and Sky pundit Martin Brundle said after the Belgian GP that he had “a bit of a tear in my eye because we’ve lost all the great corners at Silverstone, and here we are at Spa with the same situation.
“These new regulations hurt us on the high-speed circuits. We’re doing something about it for 2027 and 2028, and we have to get rid of this concept as soon as possible in 2030 or 2031,” added the Briton, who earlier this year had told Verstappen to “either go or stop talking” following the Dutchman’s complaints about the rules.
The better path was always openness
The frustration among drivers is real and entirely rational given how unpredictable the current energy rules make a lap: even small changes in braking or throttle input, or a shift in wind direction, can cause deployment to cut out earlier than it was going to, with no obvious explanation available to the driver in the moment.
Asking fans to pretend that frustration doesn’t exist – by muting it, cutting away from it, or simply not showing the numbers behind it – treats the audience as less informed than it actually is.
Perhaps that’s part of the strategy, however: hiding the numbers to prevent the more casual fans from seeing what the regular viewers can easily spot now.
The more sustainable approach, on Hughes’s account, would be for the sport to own the compromise directly: acknowledge the current rules aren’t quite right, explain what’s being done about it for next year and the year after, and let people see the graphics and hear the radio without editorial nervousness.
The current strategy is just reminding the people watching that every time F1 cuts away, there’s something it doesn’t want those people to see.
