MELBOURNE, Australia — Formula 1 — the 22 drivers, 11 teams, their paddock personnel, and the fans — all were about to see what racing would be like in this new regulation era of car designs.
In the weeks leading up to the season opener at the Albert Park Circuit at the Australian Grand Prix, questions loomed about how overtaking would work in practice and whether the racing would be good. After all, nearly every part of the cars had changed during the offseason, and Mercedes looked dominant during qualifying.
When the lights went out, the pack rocketed to life. Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc battled with pole-sitter George Russell of Mercedes during those opening laps, with the two exchanging the lead seven times over nine laps.
There appeared to be hope on those lingering questions. From the outside looking in as a spectator, the racing product looked strong given that numerous battles unfolded early on, even if the race later settled into a rhythm.
But once the checkered flag waved and the dust began to settle on Russell’s victory, a dark cloud soon covered the paddock. It had gathered in intensity as drivers filtered into the written media pen.
Many expressed further complaints about the new regulations, with some even raising safety concerns about the style of racing, in which cars cannot pull away quickly after an overtake. This is because wheel-to-wheel racing quickly drains the electrical energy that accounts for much of the engines’ overall power.
World champion Lando Norris called the product “chaos,” while Haas driver Esteban Ocon said overtaking was “painful.” Carlos Sainz expressed his biggest worry “about the racing on Lap 1,” calling it “really sketchy” when the cars ran in a pack and activated their Straight Mode at high speed together.
“It felt really dangerous and very difficult to control the car in the slipstream and (Straight Mode),” the Williams driver added.
Australia was always set to be a tricky race, given the electrical energy drain on racing and the changes. The track is high-speed and offers limited opportunities to recharge the battery via braking, requiring drivers to manage their energy levels more than elsewhere. Monza could be another pain point for similar reasons, but that race isn’t until September.
The F1 organization and the FIA, motorsport’s governing body that oversees the regulations, have a problem to resolve.
The racing product looked strong from the outside, with the race featuring 120 overtakes compared with last year’s 45 — a statistic circulated on F1’s official social media channels.
But when a significant chunk of the sport’s main characters – the drivers – are signaling safety concerns, do changes need to be made?
“It’s not that we are critical just to be critical,” four-time world champion Max Verstappen told reporters post-race. “We are critical for a reason. We want (racing) to be proper Formula 1 — on steroids.”
Lando Norris chases Kimi Antonelli early in Australia (Rudy Carezzevoli / Getty Images)
The drivers’ complaints center on how the engine’s electrical energy systems now dominate how the cars perform. This was one of the biggest changes to the technical regulations for 2026, with a near-50/50 split between the internal combustion engine and the battery providing a car’s power. The electrical energy output is nearly triple that of last year’s engines.
“We’ve come from the best cars ever made, and the nicest to drive, to probably the worst,” Norris said on Saturday.
“It sucks, but you have to live with it and just maximise what you get given. Sometimes you push more, lose the battery, and just go slower.”
Norris said the 50/50 split “just doesn’t work,” because of how “you just decelerate so much before corners.” This refers to a process called “super-clipping”, where the engine harvests energy and slows down, even with a driver fully pressing the throttle.
“(And) you have to lift everywhere to make sure the pack’s at the top,” Norris said. “If the pack’s too high, you’re also screwed. It’s just difficult.” He refers to how the engines may suddenly not super-clip and slow on approach to a corner, as a driver expects if they haven’t realized their battery is full. This can cause them to lock their brakes and go wide.
After qualifying on Saturday, Sainz pointed out the obvious — many drivers are unhappy with the cars. In his eyes, “the only thing we feel is that there seems to be a lot of plasters on top of one another to try and solve the fundamental issue — that this 50-50 hybrid system is giving us a lot of headaches.”
They are still trying to learn and understand the regulations. It’s a different way of driving, and part of the burden falls on drivers and teams to learn these processes. They are much busier in the cockpit compared with previous seasons. A factor in how the Melbourne race settled down seemed to be how the drivers learned to deploy their electrical energy best in real battles for the first time.
But, as Ocon had said Saturday, “There’s too much going on.” Sergio Pérez commented Sunday, after the race, that it can be hard “to understand what’s going on” for the drivers.
“Sometimes with the energy, you do a small lift, and it changes more than you will expect,” the Cadillac driver continued. “Sometimes I was arriving 30kph quicker into Turn 3 because of a different lift or a different throttle pickup, stuff that, to be honest, I don’t understand.
“It’s a very different Formula 1 to what I was used to. It’s a lot less fun, definitely.”
But another big concern that arose around the overtaking is whether it is now artificial, even compared with the 2011-2025 era, where the Drag Reduction System was used as an overtaking aid.
This was F1’s previous form of active aerodynamics — expanded into the Straight Mode and Corner Mode car shape shifting for 2026. These changes are required to shed aero drag and to help as the engines run out of electrical energy on straights.
Norris went as far as to say on Sunday that “it’s very artificial, depending on what the power unit decides to do and randomly does at times. You (can) just get overtaken by five cars and you can just do nothing about it sometimes.”
There are a few different methods at the driver’s disposal to achieve a pass: Straight Mode, Boost, and Overtake Mode. The first one is done without driver input (although they can cancel it themselves), while the drivers deploy the latter two.
Charles Leclerc, left, battles George Russell for the lead in Melbourne (Martin Keep / AFP / Getty Images)
Boost can be used at any time, while Overtake Mode operates similarly to DRS: drivers must be within 1 second of each other and in a designated zone. Both increase the amount of electrical energy a driver can deploy.
It all requires strategy on when and where to try to complete a pass, given that a driver could be overtaken again shortly after, as the extra modes drain their batteries faster than other cars not using them.
“You are just vulnerable again on the next straight,” said Ocon. The Haas driver said this happened to him multiple times during the race.
Norris reckons there’s a big accident waiting to happen. He explained that, depending on how other drivers use their electrical energy, closing speeds of 18-31mph are possible.
A crash at around 200mph with those differences could cause substantial damage to the cars, as well as potentially to the drivers and others. “That’s a pretty horrible thing to think about,” Norris said.
The FIA and F1 will listen to the drivers and teams, and if changes are needed, they are open to making them. But this is just one grand prix — and one that the paddock knew would be tricky given the nature of the Albert Park Circuit.
There are typical F1 paddock political games at play. Drivers who are not winning are more likely to complain about the rules, especially if they could be changed in the future.
As he discussed the complaints about the racing in the aftermath of his win, Russell even said of Norris, the 2025 world champion with McLaren: “If he was winning, I don’t think he’d be saying the same.”
F1 now heads to Shanghai for next week’s Chinese Grand Prix, which will be a very different track to Melbourne. There’s just one long straight — the drivers needed to divide their energy deployment across four long acceleration zones in Australia.
F1 should be patient to see how these regulations unfold. “Everyone’s very quick to criticise things,” Russell said. “You need to give it a shot. We’re drivers. When we’ve had the best cars and the least tire degradation and when we’ve been happiest, everyone (on the outside) moans the racing’s rubbish. Now, drivers aren’t perfectly happy, and everyone said it was an amazing race.
“So, you can’t have it all, and we should just give it a chance and see after a few more races.”
