#2026 regs

[maisonrubis]

“today if you drive better it penalizes you” yeah say it charles

[bumblewyn]

mom is cancelled. straight mode is in. homophobic sport.

[maxcore]

These new regulations are still confusing to me and I am trying to understand what is going on so sorry if this is a stupid question but Im not sure who to ask. I have seen a lot of people talking about how great Charles is at deploying his battery at the right time. Then I am also seeing people saying that drivers don’t choose when to deploy the battery but that it is all mapped out for them. So are the drivers making a difference with battery deployment or not? This isn’t a go at a particular driver its just I keep seeing people talking about how goated Charles is with the battery management and then the next thing I read is someone telling me the drivers don’t have much input into this so I am so confused about what to think 😭 I think I am just being stupid and missing something

It's not you, it's that these regulations are incredibly convoluted, hard to break down, even harder to visualise and frankly fucking confusing. But it's both, kinda. And Charles has been both a benefactor and victim so is the perfect case study.

Once a driver has charged their batteries during a lap, they can then unleash that power "at will" to increase their top speed and easily overtake cars ahead of them (in theory, but so can the others, we know this). Charles is doing incredibly well with deployment where he can make a difference ie. being creative with his harvesting and deployment where possible in w2w, picking good places to pass plus defending well so he doesn't get re-passed. He is also putting in the work, putting in the hours etc - props to him.

However, there is also the flip side of this which I think is what you mean with "drivers don’t choose when to deploy the battery but that it is all mapped out for them". I think F1 mis-sold this in their pre-season comms as saying that drivers now have much more control over their energy output which is only half the story.

There are pretty significant, and from a driver's pov massively counterintuitive, restrictions (set by teams and the rules) on this so the car is 1) quick and 2) doesn't just die halfway through a lap.

In the F1 explainer, it is stated:

Most of the time, the Recharge will be automated by use of selectable Recharge maps and targets so braking, part throttle and super clip will all be automated functions controlled by the Engine Control Unit. The only Recharge mode the driver will have direct control of will be lift-off regen, whereby if the driver lifts off, then they can Recharge.*

*This had been the case for years but it never impacted drivers to this extent before the regulation change.

These cars are energy-starved thanks to the 50/50 split, so now the fastest way around a lap is deploying the energy where it gives you the biggest advantage, right? That means that sometimes, and counter-intuitively, you have to go slower in one part of the circuit than you perhaps used to, in order to charge your battery to then go quicker in another part. So yes, teams set their engine maps to minimise deployment in less advantageous areas and to save energy so it can be used in places where full deployment delivers more benefit. It's algorithmic.

This leads to some funny situations like the one Lando found himself in on Sunday, saying:

“There’s the racing point of view, and honestly, some of the racing… I didn’t even want to overtake Lewis, it’s just the battery deploys and I don’t want it to deploy, but I can’t control it,” he said. “So, I overtake him, and then I have no battery, so he just flies past. This is not racing. This yo-yoing, even if he says it’s not. “When you are at the mercy of what the power unit delivers… the drivers should be in control of it, at least, and we’re not.

The whole "the engine sometimes decides what it wants to do and is 'AI' controlled" is a talking point because the rules do not allow teams to switch on and off the deployment at their whim either; they are forced to use electrical power at times, and are limited in terms of how quickly it can be shut down. So, to stop cars suddenly running out of juice and causing safety issues (and pileups!), there are ramp down rates where the output can only be reduced by a certain amount. And this differs circuit to circuit. Confusing, I know.

The entire thing is so convoluted and horrible that I recommend you read this piece that explains in excruciating detail what happened to Charles during quali in China because it is a perfect case study of why drivers now feel like the engine "confuses" itself and does what it wants.

TLDR: Sometimes even the tiniest driver input (let's say a minor correction of mid-corner understeer) can trigger the algorithm to see it as a deviation from the planned, mapped-out scenario, and automatically reset the engine mode sequence. As a result, harvesting goes to shit and you're out of power on the straight. Tada, your qualifying is fucked or even worse, someone flies past you on the straight. Just what we watch F1 for!

How much AI is actually involved in this specific aspect is above my understanding and paygrade; I would be horrified but not surprised in the slightest. As a dear friend would say, when failure of something is catastrophic you code it by hand and only by hand.

PS. Can I just say how hard it is to find decent technical explanations in F1 media nowadays? All they do is copy paste driver responses and nobody actually goes into the nitty-gritty or shares their own opinions. I'm starting to think they are just as confused by goings on as we are but what do I know.

I'm emotionally exhausted by this now, so there. Shoot these batteries into space. Ok bye.

[valyrfia]

my long lost wife Ferrari International Assistance has finally returned to my arms

[cuthechicane]

this is crazy btw

[anemptyflask]

You know the sport has lost it all when the most exciting thing that happens is mechanical dnfs. That's it. That's what decides the order. The amount of dnfs is embarrassing and yet it's still the most exciting thing to happen.

[duckys-extra]

An important thing to note.

The Silverstone sprint race is the THE FIRST race in any format in F1 that has not had a single DNF this year so far.

Can we all address how ridiculous that is?

We are in round 9 and there is only one race where there hasn't been a DNF.

These regs make a fucking mockery of motorsports and the legacy within F1.

Now before anyone goes on about F1 30 years ago and how drivers were lucky to make it out a race without reliability hindering them. I want to emphasise how little I care about how the sport was decades ago. I'm talking about today.

And decades ago they actually had spare cars for the drivers to use in case of reliability issues...they don't get that today. If they did, I might change my attitude.

[forcederror]

here from the race reclist post; i liked your breakdown of the current regs shifting positioning into something much more important to getting an overtake to stick. It made me look at the push-pull of the overtakes I've seen differently. Id love to hear more on your thoughts on said regs; I'm far from an expert. And Ive had a very kneejerk negative reaction to them (averse to change lol), but I don't want to stay there without really considering the position. Like if Im gonna be a hater I want it to be real hating.

deeply respect your position on hating i am same. I better know it REAL GOOD. expert hating. Carefully crafted artisanal hating.

And I hear you on change! Change scary. Unfortunately, change is the very core of F1 since the rules change every year and then go through major changes every 4ish, and then each team changes their car race to race. So we're never in a stable world and any sense of that is an ~illusion. That said, sometimes the changes can be more or less preferred.

uhh the feelings are complicated! I'll try to be succinct but brevity is not my forte on stuff that's an interest.

summary: in general I enjoyed the first 3 races due to some specific aspects of the regs, but I think we might be in a situation where they've neutered those going forward so we'll see.

Firstly, it's very early to have an opinion on the regs. My position has been that I'll decide if I like these when they're over, or in about a year in a half, depending. Ground Effect ruleset (the last one) had a huge change after Baku '22, in September. For this ruleset we had a tweak but we haven't had the first ADUO and they're trying to decide whether to adjust regs on sidepods and mini-wings as we speak.

As in, how can we decide how we feel about this reg set when we don't even have this reg set yet?

Things I like about these regs:

drivers get to drive with their own style and personality again! This is huge for me. In GE because the cars required everyone to take the same cornering profile to keep the car from snapping (which it loved to do), basically everyone drove the same. It erased driving style and forced drivers to approach each lap the same. Now when we talk driving style it's often aggressive v cautious or whatever. We used to have 'U' v 'V' braking ;-; We used to talk about twitchy v smooth ;-;

smaller wings make it easier to w2w

changing corner approach allows cars to continue following and overtake in new places

active aero makes the cars noses scrunch and i find that cute

the cars drive in a nimbler way that makes them dance a bit on the track, which allows for driver individuality and also more interesting attack approaches

the first time i saw a driver recover from a snap i almost cried... it's so beautiful. love to see the drivers able to keep themselves in the race after 4 years of cars that loved to see a barrier if a driver didn't turn the wheel with the perfect angle

there's a new thing to manage aside from tires. Like we don't talk about this, but drivers couldn't go full out in the previous regs, they drove to target lap times for tire management reasons

Secondly, idk about you but if I'm going to devote multiple hours of my attention to a race I'd like that to be worth my time. Which is to say, visually interesting. Last reg set most races were processional and won on tire strategy, with potential chaos in turn 1. Turn 1! That's very early into the race.

In contrast, when I think about races in 2010 (probably my fave season to watch), 2008, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, and god help me 2021, there is so much more going on. So I've definitely been craving a reg change that had, you know, more racing.

These regs were designed with improving the racing in mind. So far they've done that, but we might be losing that.

I know I've seen some people say that means the racing is artificial, but I think it's important to remember that every reg set is designed in response to the perceived issues of the last.

Ground Effect was envisioned to allow for closer racing because Turbo Hybrid made it very hard to follow a car due to outwash degrading the tires. Turbo Hybrid cars were designed to be insanely powerful to improve qualifying spectacle and show that hybrid wasn't weak, cars used to make a big noise. Hybrid was designed because car manufacturers were like you cannot expect us to design an engine just for F1, it's literally a financial crisis, let us make F1 engines we can then put in our road cars, also overtaking is so hard let's put DRS on the cars. V8s were supposed to be more reliable than V10s which exploded a lot and now that teams were expected to use the same engine all weekend (an intolerable burden only imposed in 2005), that wasn't practical.

You see? We're here because of perceived weaknesses in each ruleset, and GE's weakness was the racing was pretty samey. So when I'm judging this reg set, I have to ask myself if it's doing what it's designed to do. So far it is.

Also I cannot stress how much everyone hated DRS when it came in until it left. Because: it's artificial. It enables overtakes too much. It makes overtaking feel cheap. So when I'm hearing the exact same arguments about battery deployment im like ok. well. I've been here before.

Thirdly, I found ground effect to be such a health nightmare. I don't like watching all our drivers get their spines smashed into powder every week :((( All of them have back pain now. You ever heard Lewis talk about how he almost missed the met gala because he could barely walk? Or Max talk about how he's in pain every day? Or watched Lando constantly stretching and rolling during interviews? Like that sucks? If I never see a car porpoise ever again it'll be too soon. It's not like the FIA didn't know that was a potential outcome, they had ground effect before in 82 and there was porpoising then. It's part of the reason the drivers went on strike, because it was so unsafe.

But I don't love everything about the regs, and I don't know if it's possible to unpick what I like from what I don't and just keep the good stuff.

Things I don't like:

it is not clear to me as a viewer when a driver says they don't have power if that's because they have a car issue or because they didn't do the right amt of battery management

surprise battery deployment. We've seen this a few times, where if a driver makes an error on their lap, and they use more ice than they should have their battery will be like oh no im supposed to be doing something and dump a bunch of power and then they shoot forward. Not Good. I think this might have been addressed? We'll need to wait for a more difficult circuit to tell

driver's aren't having as much fun in qualifying

The last point is worth discussing. Because that's really at the heart of the driver complaint on quali. I should probably make a separate whole post about this, but the historic envisioning of a driver is someone who can take the car and shake it until it and they almost fall apart. It's about going fearlessly fast. But that hasn't been the case in F1 since the late 90s and nowadays it's more about seeking perfection. Can the driver get the perfect lap, better than the computer, absolutely no wasted movement. That's not about visceral thrill.

I get why drivers want that back. And I want that back for them. It seems like that's mostly been addressed with the power balance changes.

All of everything said, we're definitely in a change error on the scale of the switch to turbo hybrid. I say that one instead of the 2014 hybrid change because turbo hybrid the cars were much bigger in 2017. And that changed the sport extremely. There are tracks that have been removed from the calendar because they didn't work with bigger cars. We adapted the season to the car to make it better.

So looping all the way back, we don't even know about the regs yet. If some tracks are bad tracks for this gen of car, F1 also has the option of switching those out so we don't have energy starved circuits. If the boost button causes more harm than good, it can be removed. If the battery limit is bad - well, it's already changed.

Kind of a bajillion words for a non-answer but I hope mb that gave you some stuff to think about.

If you want to listen to some more perspectives that by and large disagree w me:

Damon Hill (WDC 96) and Johnny Herbert talk about racing, ngl I mostly find them sooo aggravating, but the perspective is interesting because they've been in it so long. Damon had some points about how V10s sucked that I thought were thought provoking.