re: 2026 Formula 1 (F1) Season Thread

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Sudden battery power on a wet track.

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Sudden rear brakes in the rain would be an issue as well.

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trying to figure out what deployment strat worked best.

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he cars were too cumbersome to race against each other?

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Two of Formula 1’s top drivers said the racing in the first race of the new season reminded them of Mario Kart.

The Australian Grand Prix saw an unusual number of changes of position between cars. Many of the passes occured as a result of the series’ new power unit rules. Drivers have more electrical boost which they can deploy at different points around the lap. The new Overtake mode gives an opportunity to use an additional boost to any car less than a second behind another.

Max Verstappen made a series of overtakes as he climbed from 20th on the grid to finish sixth. However he said the new rules have made the racing less authentic.

“If you enjoy that, okay,” he told Viaplay. “But that’s what I do at home and I play Mario Kart.

“For me personally, I didn’t really enjoy that. The way that you were racing is not really proper, let’s say like that.”

Charles Leclerc made a similar comment independent of Verstappen’s remarks during the race. The Ferrari driver was locked in a battle for the lead of the race with George Russell for the first 11 laps.

The pair swapped positions several times, sometimes more than once on a single lap as one used more energy to pass the other, then lacked the power to defend their position, or fell prey to their rival’s Overtake mode.

At one point Leclerc’s race engineer told him, “you have overtake [available] for the entire lap.”

“This is like a mushroom [power boost] in Mario Kart,” replied Leclerc.

Other drivers were unimpressed with how the power units have changed how they attack and defend. Lando Norris described it as “artificial racing.”

However race winner Russell defended the changes to the rules and said drivers should not criticise them too hastily.

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"I love racing, but we can only take so much, right?" the exacerbated Dutchman said on Sunday. "I think they are willing to listen, FIA and F1, I just hope of course that there is some action. I mean, it's not that I'm the only one saying it, I think a lot are saying it, if it's drivers, fans, we just want the best for the sport. It's not like we are critical just to be critical, we are critical for a reason; we want it to be F1, proper F1 on steroids.

"Today, that of course was again not the case."

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There could be little debate about what Formula 1's reigning world champion thought about the video game racing. Asked if the boost modes now at his fingertips were artificial, Norris replied, "Way too much. It's chaos, you're going to have a big accident. We're the ones just waiting for something to happen and go quite horribly wrong, and it's not a nice position to be in, but there's nothing we can really do about that now.

"It's a shame, it's very artificial, depending on what the [power unit] decides to do and randomly does at times, you can get overtaken by five cars or you can just do nothing about it sometimes, so, yeah, there's nothing we can change about it so there's no point saying any more."

Haas' Esteban Ocon shared Norris' doubts and frustrations and gave an interesting different take on back-and-forth position swaps he encountered, albeit ones that were not televised on the broadcast.

"Very painful," he said about racing with the new cars. "It's painful because you can't do much as drivers. Once you use the boost button, and you have not managed to overtake, or even if you overtake, you are just vulnerable again on the next straight. The other guy is going to overtake again, which happened with Pierre [Gasly] three times. It happened with [Gabriel Bortoleto] as well when I was fighting him two times. I just overtook and got overtaken again."

Cynically, you could replace the names Ocon mentioned with Russell and Leclerc and be left with a very different (and less glowing) description of the battle for the lead. Criticisms of the new formula and the new racing it has created appears to be a matter of perspective based on where a driver is relative to another in the competitive order.

While F1 had been quick to release the data concerning the number of overtakes, it had not included how many of these passes had come after a driver had pushed a boost mode. Given the massive emphasis on the battery boost, you would assume most, if not every single one of them.

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