If you are a listener to our regular Thursday podcast, you may recall me a couple of weeks ago mentioning that there were sure to be unintended consequences to the regulation tweaks which were set to take place from this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix and that we should keep an eye out for them.

Well, the first batch of those consequences was apparent even before the cars turned a wheel here, as the FIA published the energy split details for the weekend. They are ridiculously intricate.

That mild range of tweaks announced last week has introduced a bewilderingly complex — and very circuit-specific — range of operational modifications to what was already a hugely complex set of regs.

Don’t get me wrong; the tweaks to the heavily criticised regulations are positive and showing that the sport is responding quickly. Also, you don’t need as a fan to be aware of exactly what the tweaks and their operational implications are.

But the complexity of the circuit-specific changes here only underscores just how flawed the basic tenet of the ’26 regulations is, ie, that you can achieve good, authentic racing when combining electrical power, internal combustion power and downforce. You can’t. That much is now even more obvious than it was, as the recent admissions by senior FIA engineering staff — Nikolas Tombazis and Jan Moncheaux — have made clear.

But anyway, just for the record, and in the forlorn hope that you might be interested, here are the Miami-specific tweaks to the broader tweaks announced last week:

• 8.5 Megajoule battery storage rather than the announced 7 Megajoule. Something was probably lost in last week’s translation, but the idea of reducing the permitted storage of the battery to reduce the advantage of backing off through corners to more than make up the lost lap time down the straights was not deemed necessary for the relatively light energy demands of Miami.However, that limit varies between practice (9.0MJ), qualifying (8.0MJ) and race (8.5, but 9.0 in overtake mode). As a generality, in the upcoming tracks, the battery storage has been reduced from what it was going to be, typically by 1MJ. But that change was not deemed necessary here.
• Now that the battery deployment has been reduced from 350Kw to 250kW outside of defined acceleration zones, so there has had to be a definition of where each of those zones is. Because you can still deploy at 350kW in the acceleration zones, which in Miami are the straight between T8-T11, the straight between T16-T18 and the pit straight.These align with the ‘straightline mode’ sections on which the wings can be flattened. The 250kW deployment zones are between T1-T8 and T11-T16. Because the 250 and 350 sections are now defined, the teams are less able to differentiate between each other in how they use the electrical energy.

• Because of the speed range of large sections of the Miami track, the ramp-down of electrical power once a certain speed has been reached (in order to control end-of-straight speeds) has been changed. Usually, that ramp-down begins at 290km/h, tapering off in steps until 345km/h is reached, at which point there will be no electrical power.But below 210km/h the car can be configured to lose electrical power all at once rather than in steps (to help conserve energy which can be used to better lap time effect on other parts of the track). In Miami that 210km/h is around what the cars will be doing for several of the faster corners and the risk is that the deployment would be very inconsistent and unpredictable for the driver.The reduced harvesting rate has made this more of an issue. So the speed below which it can be switched off has been increased to 240km/h – and the automatic staged ramp-down now begins at 315km/h rather than 290.
• There are further refinements in play this weekend, which will be carried through – the glitch which ruined a Charles Leclerc lap after backing off to 98% throttle in China when correcting an oversteer snap (which allowed the system to deploy fully when it shouldn’t have and left him out of battery early on the long straight) has been deleted. The loophole which allowed drivers to use up battery to enhance their speed across the line at the start of a qualifying lap at the expense of a crawling limp-home mode immediately after the end of the lap (as exploited by Mercedes and Red Bull), has gone.