Overtaking rebooted: What F1 racing will be like in 2026

Overtaking has always been the most analysed, argued-over currency in Formula 1, but 2026 will drag it into an entirely different system.

The championship will enter its first post-DRS era, and for the first time in more than a decade, drivers will no longer have a guaranteed, repeatable passing mechanism.

In its place comes something more complex, less predictable and potentially far more human: a race built around energy management, deployment timing, driver-controlled active aerodynamics and a new set of offensive and defensive modes that could redefine what wheel-to-wheel looks like.

While the 2026 rules promise lighter cars, shorter wheelbases, and less turbulent wake – all things that theoretically promote closer racing – overtaking itself becomes harder to map.

One of the biggest changes underpinning this shift is the introduction of active aerodynamics, a system that fundamentally replaces the familiar DRS flap with driver-controlled adjustments to both front and rear wings.

Cars will be able to switch between a high-downforce configuration for corners and a low-drag, low-downforce configuration for straights, giving drivers the ability to reduce drag and increase top speed at predetermined points on the track regardless of their relative position to the car ahead.

Unlike DRS, which could only be activated when a car was within one second of a rival, this active aero system will be available on every lap to every driver, effectively giving all competitors a straight-line speed boost rather than a defined overtaking aid.

The adjustment isn’t purely about passing, however – it’s also about managing energy consumption in a power unit era that’s roughly half electric, where minimising drag on the straights can help preserve battery and overall efficiency.

This change means drivers now have an additional strategic layer to master: not just when to harvest and deploy electrical energy, but also when to switch aero modes to maximise their chances of positioning themselves for a move — or defending against one. The new hybrid framework places far more of the workload back in the cockpit.

Drivers will control how much battery they harvest on approach to a corner, how much they deploy on exit, and how aggressively they defend when the car behind chooses to attack. It turns the act of overtaking from something automated into something expressive.

Early driver feedback hints at the scale of the reset. Several have suggested that the classic long-straight, heavy-braking pass might no longer be the default, predicting that moves could appear in what today look like “obscure” corners – places where a rival runs out of electrical energy or misjudges their harvesting. Little lapses in energy timing could be punished instantly. The loss of DRS could force an entirely new vocabulary of moves into existence.

“I think the way the rules are at the moment, they will be busier in the cockpit,” said Williams team boss James Vowles last year. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think you’ll get those that come out on top as a result of it — those that are completely in control of the car and its behaviours and then thinking outside the box.

“The areas that are different… probably the right way of putting it to you is, you can almost fill the entire battery in one braking zone, but you can deplete it in one straight. That’s for sure. And so that creates a very different dynamic to [last] year.”

Multi-layered energy racing

Where the current era is built around a simple attacker’s advantage – the car behind gets the drag reduction and can launch a move – the 2026 concept is built on mutual optionality.

Both drivers will have offensive and defensive modes they can switch through the lap. The car behind can deploy aggressively to force a gap; the car ahead can answer back with its own defensive squeeze of electrical power. Suddenly, the pass becomes a negotiation rather than a foregone conclusion.

That negotiation is already being felt inside teams. After months of simulator work on early car models, Vowles says drivers went through a rapid evolution in how they understood the new racecraft.

“The overtaking will be different, but it will happen,” Vowles explained. “It’ll just be in a different way to what you’re used to now. The drivers had a go once and thought, ‘this isn’t great.’ Then the second time, went, ‘that’s interesting.’ Then by the third or fourth time – as they’re race drivers – they were really into it. And there’s a very different way of optimising it as a solution, and they can see how the advantage can come in.”

“The overtaking will be different, but it will happen.”

That idea – that overtaking becomes a learned skill rather than a pre-defined exchange – is central to how teams see 2026 unfolding.

As Vowles put it, the learning curve is steep and ongoing.

“The challenge is that everything changes. There’s a lot of learning we’re going through almost week by week, especially on the energy side — how do we use it in the most efficient way possible?”

The result is a racing model where overtaking depends less on geography and more on timing. Opportunities may emerge where no one expects them. Conversely, famous passing points may become easier to defend.

How overtaking zones themselves might change

One of the most intriguing consequences of the 2026 rules is that circuits could develop ‘dynamic’ overtaking zones – places that only become viable when a driver’s energy window is favourable. Instead of DRS straights being baked into the race narrative, each lap might carry its own set of passing hotspots.

Vowles said that manual energy deployment and active aero will shift overtaking opportunities to unexpected areas.

“You’ll probably protect the regions with energy deployment where overtaking is most likely to happen. So taking Monaco, I think it’s unlikely you’ll get a differential through there. But I think you’ll move away from, say, Spa – your typical overtaking point is, for example, up into Turn 5. That’s one of the main areas. Actually, it opens up the door for a few other areas around that lap.”

That line – it opens up the door – is essentially the basis of the new rules.

Traditional passing zones may remain important, but they lose their monopoly. The interplay of harvesting, deployment, and active aero could produce opportunities elsewhere, in smaller corners, in rhythm sections, or in places where the delta is created by battery cycles.

Shorter straights, usually dismissed as transitional pieces of a lap, could become overtaking zones. A rival emerging from a technical sequence with insufficient harvest may find themselves vulnerable on even a 200-metre burst to the next braking point.

Drivers have hinted that these ‘non-corners’ and mini-straights might become the real battlegrounds, especially early in the season when teams are still discovering optimal deployment and aero strategies.

Even mid-corner behaviour may shift. With the hybrid system’s greater reliance on harvesting under braking and coasting, the energy state of a car at turn-in becomes a tactical variable.

A driver who has harvested aggressively into the previous corner might enjoy better traction on exit; one who has been forced to defend earlier in the lap might be caught flat-footed as the electrical system rebuilds. Suddenly, a corner that has never hosted an overtake might open up for a decisive lunge because one driver’s battery window fell at the wrong moment.

Active aero isn’t just a replacement for DRS – it fundamentally changes how cars approach racing.

Drivers will be thinking not just about slipstream and braking points, but about when to toggle aero states and how their energy strategy intersects with those decisions.

Low-drag mode (X-mode) gives a straight-line boost to any car, but it doesn’t automatically guarantee a pass; the balance of energy, tyre wear, and defensive countermeasures will all factor into whether a move succeeds.

Together, active aero and energy deployment modes create a fluid, multi-dimensional racecraft, where overtaking windows open and close dynamically across a lap rather than at a few fixed zones.

While no one will know what the reality is until the cars are on track racing each other, all of these factors point to a broader shift in how races might unfold.

Packs may stretch and compress depending on energy cycles and aero mode usage. Undercuts could become more potent if a driver can emerge with a replenished battery at the exact point a rival is depleted.

Mistakes, even if they are a slightly too-greedy harvest, a poorly judged defensive burst, or incorrect aero mode timing, could have immediate consequences instead of being absorbed by DRS on the next straight.

In the early races, chaos is likely as teams experiment with deployment and aero strategies. Race engineering could become a kind of live maths exercise, with drivers adapting in real time.