Formula 1’s pre-season has been steadily turned into a made-for-TV event over the last few years. In 2026, the sport is quietly pulling the handbrake.
Broadcast plans for the first public test in Bahrain indicate fans shouldn’t expect wall-to-wall live coverage when the cars hit the track in early February. After a Barcelona shakedown that’s set to run entirely behind closed doors, the scaled-back approach will roll straight into Bahrain’s opening three-day test, with only limited live footage expected.
It’s a notable shift, and not just because it’ll frustrate anyone used to having a live onboard on a second screen from breakfast to dusk. This winter is different by design: new power units, new chassis rules, and an engineering workload that’s already reshaping how teams want to use their precious early mileage.
Barcelona, first, is effectively a private dress rehearsal. The 2026 FIA Sporting Regulations allow a “pre-season private collective test” under Article B11.2.7: five consecutive days between January 5 and 31, organised between the teams, the FIA and the commercial rights holder. This year’s running is scheduled for January 26–30, with each team allowed to participate on any three of those five days.
Because it’s classified as a private collective test, it’s locked down. No journalists in the paddock, no fan access, no live broadcast and no live timing. Any view the public gets will come through the teams’ own social media output, plus curated on-track clips fed into evening highlight packages for broadcasters.
In the UK, Sky Sports F1 has confirmed it will show the available footage at 9pm on its TV channel and YouTube.
Then comes Bahrain, which in recent seasons has essentially been “the show”: three days where teams run their plans but broadcasters fill the hours, pundits build narratives and every lap is treated like evidence in a trial. This year, there are two collective tests in Bahrain during February, and while both are open to media and spectators at the circuit, only the second is expected to get the full broadcast treatment.
For the first Bahrain test, live timing will be available, but live TV coverage is expected to be heavily restricted. The precise run plan for broadcast isn’t finalised yet, but the current expectation is that the final hour of each day will be televised, giving networks a window to wrap up the day as it happens rather than trying to manufacture a full-day programme out of long garage spells.
Full coverage is expected to return for the final pre-season test in Bahrain, running February 18–20.
The stated logic is hard to argue with, even if it’s not what the audience has been trained to want. F1 and its broadcasters have created a modern expectation that testing should be continuously watchable. The reality, especially under brand-new regulations, is that it often isn’t.
In 2026, teams aren’t simply fine-tuning last year’s platform. They’re bedding in completely new hardware and learning how to operate it. That means longer installation phases, deeper garage work, and more stop-start running while engineers chase gremlins, validate systems and cycle through instrumentation. Long stretches with no cars on track aren’t a failure of “entertainment”; they’re a predictable consequence of teams doing what testing is actually for.
There’s also a practical production angle. The Barcelona outing is being used by the commercial rights holder to test its own systems — timing, TV workflows, camera synchronisation — and that process is set to continue into the opening Bahrain test. In other words, the broadcast machine is testing too.
From a sporting standpoint, the staged ramp-up also aligns better with when teams typically start showing anything meaningful. The early days are about reliability, correlation and building a baseline. The “performance” phase — the runs everyone squints at, the fuel-load debates, the mood music about who’s nailed the regs — tends to come later, once teams trust what they’re bolting to the car.
That’s why the final Bahrain test is the one pencilled in for full coverage: it’s the closest thing F1 has to a live prologue for the season. By then, teams are more likely to run representative programmes, and the on-track rhythm usually improves as the build phase gives way to something approaching normality.
There’s an undercurrent here, too: a subtle correction to over-saturation. If you televise every minute of a pre-season dominated by long garage holds and slow, data-heavy laps, you risk making the whole exercise feel flat — and, ironically, encouraging the kind of overreaction culture that testing already suffers from. Limiting the first Bahrain broadcast to a narrow, summarising window is a way of acknowledging that not every hour is worth televising, even in an era where content is currency.
The teams, for their part, are said to be supportive of the stepped approach. It gives them space to work without the constant scrutiny of live pictures, while still offering fans and media enough visibility to track basic progress. And if 2026 delivers what the regulations promise — a proper reset in pecking order and technical direction — there will be plenty of spectacle to come soon enough.
For now, the message is simple: don’t expect pre-season to be packaged like a race weekend. Not this year. Not with this level of change.
