re: 2026 Formula 1 (F1) Season Thread

Id trust Toto. He never sandbags during testing.

If Red Bull Powertrains shows up with the best engine on their first try then Red Bull needs to rehire Christian Horner. He set that whole plan in motion and built it from the ground up.

Toto seems to be changing his tune

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Let's pump the brakes until we can compare initial performance indications against reliability. They may have it nailed down and dominate, or all four engines may explode on lap 37 of the second race.

Oh, before the season starts I want to call myself out on something.

In the F1 thread over the previous two years I said there's no way Honda and Aramco would heavily invest in Aston Martin and agree to be saddled with Lance Frickin' Stroll in one of the seats. It made no sense that they would invest in a works-team effort and not fill the seats with the best available drivers. Well I was wrong. It looks like Lance is racing, with no indication of having to meet any performance metrics.



This historical reality is, though, that Honda themselves insisted on Japanese drivers in the second seat of teams they supplied engines to, such as Nakajima at Lotus partnering with Senna, and Sato at Jordan when Eddie J wanted the well-regarded Heinz-Harald Frentzen instead. I guess this is the same as the Red Bull model, where you focus on the #1 driver and the #2 driver is more of an afterthought -- in contrast to McLaren, who often employ two #1-quality drivers.

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"The low gears that we have to go down into is just because we can't recover enough battery power. We can't recover enough battery power, so that's why we have to go and rev the engines very, very, very high. So we're going down to second and first in some places just to try to recover that extra bit of power."

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When the new rules were announced a few years ago and they said that 50% of the power over a lap would be coming from the electric motor, my first thought was that this made no sense at all. They would end up using engine power to generate juice. I thought they would be sappng engine power while accelerating down long straights, but it sounds like they are still trying to recover energy during the deceleration phase, but downshifting drastically to get the revs up.

I'm no engineer so I thought maybe I was wrong and it would work out fine. But I was right. Tthe fact that a non-engineer could figure this out immediately means that it was a dumb mandate. They've turned F1 into a game of energy recovery (like FE, as noted above), making the drivers busier than ever with non-driving tasks.

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Oh, before the season starts I want to call myself out on something

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Bro, don’t worry about that. It makes ZERO sense that he’s racing still besides the fact that his Dad owns the team.

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Sir Lewis Hamilton

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Downshifting the car and his dating life at the same time.

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Max adapting well early

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He's legit the best driver in the world.