Temple of Clipping? Why Monza is F1 2026's hardest test

Formula 1 arrives at Monza with a championship picture that hasn’t changed much at the top, but with plenty of intrigue behind after two consecutive McLaren wins.

Kimi Antonelli leads the way by 59 points after a run of six wins and 10 podiums from 12 races, a very healthy gap that he could struggle to keep intact this weekend as he will serve a grid penalty for a power unit change.

George Russell and Lewis Hamilton are tied on points in second, and both will be looking to benefit from Antonelli’s penalty to score a win the former needs to rebuild his season and the latter to celebrate the dream of a victory in Ferrari‘s home race.

Lando Norris arrives at Monza after two victories in a row, but the high-speed nature of the circuit could play against McLaren‘s strengths.

F1 arrives at Monza with its own set of questions layered on top of the tradition – about power, about pressure, and about which teams are built to survive a track that has never forgiven weakness.

Here’s what to watch for as the Italian Grand Prix weekend gets underway.

What to watch out for: Monza, the temple of… super-clipping?

Back in 2023, when Max Verstappen was first shown the outline of F1’s incoming power unit rules, he picked out one circuit as the format’s obvious weak point.

Asked about the balance between combustion and electrical power, he singled out Monza as “probably one of the worst tracks” for what was coming.

Two and a half years on, his warning is about to be tested in earnest.

By now, everybody knows the story: less combustion, more battery, not enough braking to keep the electrical side fed.

It’s a conversation that has grown tiresome to keep having every other weekend. But arriving at Monza is a reminder of what that story actually costs.

This is still, nominally, F1’s Temple of Speed – the fastest, purest test of a car and engine flat out.

The Italian Grand Prix arrives with Monza doing exactly what the regulations were never built for: minimal braking, maximum full-throttle running, and almost nowhere to recover the energy these cars burn through so aggressively.

With roughly half of total power now coming from the battery rather than the combustion engine, drivers depend on braking zones to recharge – and Monza simply doesn’t offer enough of them.

The FIA’s harvest limits will also be the lowest of the season so far.

The result is that this weekend will feature a lot of super-clipping, the point at which a car, still flat out, has its power abruptly throttled back because the electrical system starts harvesting rather than deploying.

It isn’t just a spectacle question. Cars losing several hundred kilowatts mid-straight, unpredictably, has already raised concerns about closing speeds and contact risk between cars that expect a rival to be accelerating and instead find them clipped.

Earlier this year, Verstappen also warned that drivers may need to brake in the middle of the straight, although it’s unlikely to come to that.

For a season already defined by complaints that energy management dulls the difference between drivers, Monza will present the sharpest version of the argument yet and will serve as a reminder of why the rules are being tweaked after just a year.

If the clipping is as brutal as the run-up suggests, the qualifying laps and the overtaking battles this weekend will be far less about who brakes latest and more about who manages a battery best on a track with barely anywhere to charge it.

Verstappen saw it coming over two years ago. Monza is where we will find how accurate his prediction was.

Who’s under pressure: Ferrari

It goes without saying that Ferrari is always under pressure come Monza. The tifosi make sure of that.

This year, however, the weight feels heavier than the usual home-race expectation, and it’s arriving from three directions at once.

The first is the power unit itself. Ferrari’s ADUO2 upgrade – a new turbocharger, revised combustion chamber and Shell fuel blend worth around 15hp – is landing at precisely the circuit built to expose whatever gap remains to Mercedes and McLaren.

There’s no hiding a straight-line deficit at Monza, and choosing this weekend to debut the upgrade means any shortfall will be as visible as it gets all season.

The second is form. Ferrari hasn’t had a driver on the podium since Charles Leclerc finished second at Spa. Since then, both races have been undone from the pitwall rather than the cockpit.

At the Hungaroring, a late call to pit Lewis Hamilton under a virtual safety car cost him a five-second penalty and, by his own reckoning, a likely podium.

At Zandvoort, Ferrari left both drivers frustrated again — Leclerc queried why he was boxed just laps after George Russell, effectively conceding position, while Hamilton lost time sat behind his team-mate as the team hesitated to swap them.

Two races, two drivers publicly unhappy with the same pitwall. That’s not a coincidence Ferrari can wave away as bad luck twice running.

The third is that Monza offers no cover. It’s a low-downforce, high-speed circuit where strategy calls are compressed and pitstop time loss is unforgiving, meaning there’s little room to paper over a repeat of Hungary or Zandvoort.

Add the emotional stakes of the tifosi and the Michael Schumacher tribute livery both cars will carry, and it’s a weekend with very little room for another muddled call.

Put together, it’s less a question of whether Ferrari can be quick at Monza — the SF-26 has had the pace to trouble the front most of the season — and more whether the team can convert it into the result its power unit push and its home crowd are both demanding.

Historical highlight: When Monza deliberately slowed itself down

For a circuit built on the idea of outright pace, it’s easy to forget that Monza has spent stretches of its history actively working against its own reputation – and never more dramatically than in 1934.

After the horror of the previous year’s “Black Day of Monza,” when three drivers died in separate accidents on the banked oval during the same afternoon, organisers didn’t just tweak the layout — they gutted it.

The 1934 Italian Grand Prix was run on what became known as the “Mini Florio”: a stripped-down 4.3km (2.7 mile) configuration that used both halves of the main straight, joined by a tight hairpin thrown in right before the finish line.

Cars ran up one side, hairpinned back down the other, and crossed the start-finish line twice a lap.

It remains the shortest and slowest grand prix layout Monza has ever used.

There was a second motive behind it, one that quietly rhymes with this weekend’s storylines.

Italian teams were being outpaced on the high-speed sections by the German factory cars — Mercedes and Auto Union‘s silver machines were simply faster in a straight line — and a slower, more technical layout was seen by some as a way of blunting that advantage.

Officially it was a safety measure. Unofficially, more than a few in the paddock believed Monza had redesigned itself to help its home teams. It didn’t entirely work: Mercedes’ Rudolf Caracciola and Luigi Fagioli won anyway, sharing the winning car after a mid-race driver change, a common practice at the time.

The layout lasted a single year before Monza reverted to a faster (if chicane-laden) configuration.

But for one afternoon, the fastest track in the world turned itself into one of the slowest, proof that Monza’s identity as the Temple of Speed has never been quite as fixed, or as sacred, as the nickname suggests.

Pirelli’s form guide: Italian GP