Compare and Contrast: 2026 F1 and 2000s IRL Pack Racing.
Last night was the Australian Grand Prix, where F1's new active aero, high energy deployment cars raced for the first time. Ground effect is gone, the MGU-H is gone, and the cars have finally gotten smaller - which, one: is something the fans have been asking for for years, and two: is probably the most successful element of this regulation change.
Let's start with the first area of concern: the starts.
We knew from testing that certain cars, particularly the Ferraris, could spool up their turbos and get off the line way faster than others, to the point where it was a dangerous difference in speed. To help alleviate this, F1 added a five second spool up phase before the start, and I was interested to see how this would go.
Initially, it actually looked like it went pretty damn well: the five second spool up phase went by so quickly I hardly noticed it, the cars up front all got moving pretty damn well, and while the Ferraris got the better start - Charles took the lead and Lewis got up to third at this point - it didn't seem ridiculously different. Hadjar also got a really good launch, so it looked like it wouldn't just be Ferrari with the rocketship launches.
However, we already saw one issue: Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who started from second, dropped like a stone. Apparently, he didn't have any battery charge and he'd end up falling to right around sixth. This was perhaps a bit concerning, but nothing went wrong in that particular instance.
What was more concerning, is the bit I only saw this morning after the race.
Liam Lawson bogged down completely off the start, forcing Franco Colapinto behind him to swerve and have to thread the needle between Lawson and the inside wall. That was scary.
Thankfully, we avoided a crash in that particular incident, but who knows if we'll get that lucky next time, particularly on some of the narrower grids on the calendar.
Anyway, Leclerc is in the lead, Russell is in second, and Hamilton is in third.
This is where the meat of this particular blogpost is going to be, because this is where we got a lot of action...or perhaps I should say "action" because, well...there was something rather artificial about it all.
Russell would catch up to Leclerc, go into overtake mode, and make the pass for the lead...only for Russell to be out of battery, vulnerable, and have Leclerc take the lead. Leclerc would, of course, use up his battery in this pass and then be vulnerable on the next straightaway, so the lead went back and forth, ultimately, I think Crofty said it changed eleven times in that battle.
What stopped it was two defensive moves by Charles Leclerc: one where George Russell got on his inside going into the Ascari corner (turn 13) so Leclerc squeezed him towards the grass, forcing Russell to back out of it.
The second came just a few laps later where, having gotten frustrated, George Russell went for a divebomb pass in turn one, locked up badly, and very nearly sailed off track. To his credit, Russell recovered well and stayed in second, not allowing Hamilton to pass him.
So, on paper, this was a lot of passes for the lead, a lot of close fighting, and for most of that sequence the top three were all within a second and a half of each other.
That's good, right?
Well, yes and no, is my answer.
It's a symptom of the regulations, essentially, where the FIA have tried to get them towards a 50/50 power distribution between the internal combustion engine and the MGU-K motor. Now, I think nobody actually achieved that split so they've walked it back, but it's still a considerable percentage of total power coming from the battery.
That means that, when a driver goes for a pass and drains the battery, they're down perhaps 300, 400 horsepower to a car that a full battery charge.
Thus, Russell would dump the battery on one straight to pass Leclerc for the lead, be out of battery, and then Leclerc would use up his battery to retake the lead...
...at which point Leclerc will be out of battery and Russell will have recharged through the superclipping (where the engine bleeds off revs to charge the battery at the end of straightaways) and braking zones, meaning Russell will be able to pass Leclerc on the very next straightaway.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
You know what it reminded me of? The old IRL era pack racing we had in Indycar.
In that situation, it was the cars being so draggy out in the lead, that the car in the draft behind would rocket past the leader, which meant the overtaking car was now the one punching the hole in the air. Thus, the former leader would tuck in behind, get the draft, and slingshot ahead for the lead.
This is actually reasonably common in oval racing, we also saw it in late CART races with the Hanford device, in some Indycar aerokit races like Fontana 2015, and even the 550-package era in NASCAR. Hell, to an extent this is also the basis for the side-by-side draft racing at superspeedways, since everybody is too draggy alone so everyone lines up, the cars behind getting a draft from the leader and the leader in turn getting pushed by the cars behind.
It has that same pattern of passing only to immediately be vulnerable and get passed again.
I think the difference comes in the fact that, on ovals, particularly with Indycars, there's the spectacle of all this happening at or around 200 miles per hour, there's the challenge of keeping those speeds up in the corners, and then the next straightaway comes immediately after the last one.
In F1...it's a bit different.
The middle sector in Australia is actually somewhat similar, since the straightaways before and after the fast chicane are both long enough to allow a pass and then a pass back, but then you get into the slow corners of sector three and don't get an opportunity again until the frontstretch and then the straightaway going into turn three.
And honestly? At least in the Leclerc and Russell battle, all the passes seemed to happen on the top half of the circuit rather than going into turns one or three.
In fact, the only real move into turn one I remember (after the start anyway) is Russell's botched pass that gave him the flatspot.
So what does this mean? Well, it removes the constant spectacle that you get from pack racing in the ovals, and while that spectacle is gone and the cars are going through the corners, that gives your brain time to realize how artificial it all is.
Another difference is that, in pack racing, it can often be multiple cars involved and trading the lead.
In Australia, we always got the hint that this might happen since Hamilton closed up to the top two, but he never could quite get involved, even as, at several points, he'd be 0.7 off of Russell while Russell was 0.8 off of Leclerc, for instance.
Perhaps that has to do with the Mercedes being that much stronger, where a Ferrari could hold it off from the front rather consistently, but not attack from behind.
In any case, Ferrari wouldn't stay in front anyway.
A VSC came out, the Mercedes would pit, and Ferrari would stay out, despite the fact that Sir Lewis Hamilton clearly felt they should have boxed at least one of the cars.
A lot of people were quick to call this a Ferrari strategic blunder, and it probably was, especially when they got a second VSC thanks to Bottas's Cadillac conking out and still didn't take the chance to pit, but I think this time, there actually was some logic to what Ferrari was doing.
Ferrari knew from qualifying that Mercedes was much faster, and they probably felt their best chance of winning was to do something different and go for the one stop.
The problem is that Mercedes pit earlier than Ferrari did and still took their tyres to the end, even as Norris, Verstappen, and all those other cars that pit under the same VSC as the Mercs had to two-stop.
That is the scariest part of the Mercedes to me to be honest, the fact that they can be that fast and are also better on their tyres than anyone else. That's concerning.
Hell, I think Leclerc was even getting to the very end of his tyre life and he pit way later than the Mercs. Lewis Hamilton was taking chunks out of him in those closing laps and I think the gap at the end was something ridiculously smaller like 0.6 seconds or something.
So, do I think Ferrari threw this race away? No, almost certainly not.
I don't think there was any stopping Mercedes yesterday. Maybe if the Ferraris pit and came out ahead of the Mercs we'd have gotten a few more of these battery passes for the highlights video, but ultimately, I think the Mercs would've simply beat the Ferraris on tyre life and won the race anyway.
I mean maybe Leclerc ragebaits Russell into throwing it away again and we could all laugh, but based on how effortlessly he recovered from the turn one flatspot, I'm not sure if even that would've stopped George in the longterm.
So yeah, Mercedes is super strong again, but the engines are so battery boost dependent that a Ferrari could fight them, at least for a time.
Let me know what y'all thought of the race and particularly the passing: was it good for you? Did you see it as artificial? Would you say it's better or worse than DRS was?
Oh and...this is my first blog in quite awhile.
Like I said before, I'm not committing to any schedule with these, I'll blog when I feel I have something to say, and today I had something to say. Maybe I'll have something to say again soon, maybe I'll go quiet again for months, I honestly don't know, but I'm on here regularly even if I'm not blogging so always feel free to comment or ask me questions or whatever.
