Fernando Alonso has been around long enough to know that every big rules reset comes with a period of mourning for what’s just been lost. But in Bahrain this week, he still managed to land a line that cut through the usual launch-season diplomacy: at Turn 10/12 now, Aston Martin’s chef could have a go.
It was a joke, obviously — delivered with that familiar Alonso deadpan — but the target was serious. The early feel of 2026, he says, is a Formula 1 where the lap time is increasingly dictated by what you *don’t* do, particularly in the corners, because the priority is keeping energy in the battery for the next straight.
“We need to wait a couple of races to see how these regs work when we are all together and how racing becomes,” Alonso said. “I said last week at the car launch that, you know for me, the late ’90s and the early 2000s will be unbeatable in terms of driving adrenaline and pure skills… because you wanted to drive fast in the corners and find the limits of the car.”
Bahrain is where Alonso likes to get specific, because the circuit offers an old-school example of how drivers used to chase performance. He pointed to the fast sequence historically labelled as Turns 10/12 — “a very challenging corner” — and explained how teams once treated it as a blunt instrument for setup direction.
“You used to choose your downforce level to go 10/12 just flat,” he said. “So you remove downforce until you are in 10/12 just flat with new tyres, and then in the race. So it was a driver skill… a decisive factor to go fast in a lap time.”
That’s the bit Alonso clearly misses: the idea that, at a certain type of corner, there’s a tangible reward for bravery and precision — staying in it, taking less wing, living with the consequences elsewhere. Under the new energy-heavy reality of 2026, he argues, the incentive has flipped. The fastest approach isn’t to squeeze the maximum speed through the corner, but to manage the hybrid state so you’re not paying for it 300 metres later.
“Now in 10/12 we are like 50kph lower because we don’t want to waste energy there, and we want to have it all on the straights,” Alonso said. “So you do 10/12, instead of 260, at 200. The chef can drive the car in 10/12 at that speed, but you don’t want to waste energy, because you want to have it on the straight.”
It’s a more nuanced version of the complaint Max Verstappen has been making — that the new regulations risk turning certain parts of a lap into an exercise in restraint rather than expression. Alonso doesn’t disagree with the emotion behind it. He just frames it through the trade-offs the sport has always forced on drivers and engineers.
“I understand Max’s comments, because from a driver you would like to make the difference in the corner, driving those five kilometres faster,” Alonso said. “But now you are dictated by how much energy your engine will have on the next straight.”
Where Alonso diverges from the louder critics is in how quickly he’s willing to pronounce judgement. His view is that we won’t really understand what the rules have done to racing until everyone is running in anger — and, crucially, until teams stop experimenting and start converging on the most efficient solutions.
He also pushed back against the idea that this is the first time a champion car has made others feel like passengers. The limiting factor might have changed, but the principle hasn’t.
“At the same time, this is Formula 1, and it has always been like that,” Alonso said. “Now it is the energy. Last year or two years ago, when he [Verstappen] won all the races, it was the downforce.
“He could go in the corners at 280 and we could go in the corners at 250 because we didn’t have the downforce. So, you know, at the end of the day this is Formula 1. We close the visor, we go and this is the same motor racing.”
There’s a pragmatic acceptance in that — and maybe a little survival instinct from a driver who has made a career out of adapting faster than the sport changes around him. Alonso will hit his 450th grand prix start this year, and you don’t get to that number by spending too long wishing the cars behaved like they did in 2005.
Still, the subtext to his Bahrain explanation is hard to miss: the new formula risks sanding off some of the edges drivers use to make themselves felt. In previous eras, you could point to a corner — a specific, scary, lap-defining corner — and say, *that’s where the time is*. Alonso’s point is that in 2026, that “where” is moving. It’s becoming a systems question as much as a talent one, decided by how you distribute energy rather than how late you dare to breathe.
He’s not pretending that’s automatically a bad thing, either. He even offered a reminder that racing isn’t only fun when it’s technically brutal.
“Sometimes we go with the rental car here in Bahrain… and you have a lot of fun with a rental car,” he said. “We still love motor racing. We still love competing. And for the regs, I understand that it’s less input by the driving skills, but I think after three or four races maybe we will have a better idea.”
That’s the sensible position, even if it’s not the one that gets clipped into a headline. The first handful of races will tell us whether 2026 has simply moved the battleground — from flat-out commitment to energy choreography — or whether it’s genuinely reduced the number of places where a driver can grab a lap by the throat.
Either way, Alonso’s chef line landed because it captured the fear some in the paddock won’t say out loud: that parts of a Formula 1 lap might start feeling like compliance. And for a generation raised on “qualifying laps” and fearless high-speed commitment, that’s a cultural shift as much as a technical one.
