Max Verstappen’s grumble in Bahrain landed with the kind of thud that only a four-time champion can deliver. The headline line was brutal: 2026, he said, is about “management” — and in the cockpit it’s “not a lot of fun”, “not very F1-like”, more “Formula E on steroids” than the flat-out feast he associates with grand prix racing.
It wasn’t just a throwaway complaint after a long day of running. Verstappen went a step further, hinting that if the sport is heading towards a style of racing he doesn’t recognise, he can imagine doing something else with his time. And it’s easy to see why this has struck a nerve: the new regulations have dragged energy usage from being a background consideration to something you feel on every straight and, increasingly, every qualifying lap.
The 2026 cars are a clean-sheet reset — active aerodynamics, and power units built around sustainable fuel with a 50/50 split between electrical and combustion power. Whatever your view of the direction of travel, the immediate consequence is obvious in the data and in the driver comments: you’re no longer simply deciding where to brake and how to attack kerbs. You’re deciding where you can afford to push.
Verstappen’s irritation is rooted in a pure-driver instinct. “As a pure driver, I enjoy driving flat out,” he said, “and at the moment, you cannot drive like that.” That’s the part traditionalists will latch onto, because it echoes the fear fans have voiced since the rules were signed off: if you’re lifting on the straights and thinking about deployment windows as much as apex speed, what exactly are we rewarding?
Lando Norris, the reigning world champion, offered a telling example from the new reality of qualifying. The romantic idea of one perfect lap — every metre committed, every corner a statement — is being chipped away by battery constraints that don’t politely wait until Sunday.
“You can’t go full throttle in the last corner because of your battery,” Norris explained. “As soon as you cross the line, you have to lift again.” In other words: the finish line has become a management point, not a release.
That’s the sort of detail that will make drivers bristle. Qualifying, more than any other session, is meant to be uncomplicated violence: the car at its lightest, the tyres at their sharpest, and the driver at their most fearless. When even that becomes a balancing act, the complaint writes itself.
Martin Brundle’s response — prompted by an irate fan accusing ex-drivers of hypocrisy for defending lift-and-coast — was the kind of pushback you’d expect from someone who’s lived multiple eras and doesn’t buy the idea that “pure” Formula 1 ever really existed.
Brundle’s point wasn’t that this is ideal, or that fans should simply swallow it. It was more basic: management has always been part of the job, whether you liked it or not. He reminded everyone that lift-and-coast was present in the supposedly gladiatorial turbo days of the 1980s, and that endurance racing has normalised it for decades. And beyond fuel saving, he listed the long, unsexy inventory of things champions have always had to protect — engines, tyres, brakes, gearboxes, fuel load, and now battery charge.
“It’s all part of the challenge,” Brundle argued, “the best simply have a greater capacity to manage those challenges whilst carrying winning speed.”
It’s an important distinction, because it gets to the crux of the current argument: is energy management a dilution of F1, or simply a different axis along which the great separate themselves from the good?
Brundle also drew a line between what’s happening now and what happened then. When asked if he lift-and-coasted through qualifying laps in the ’80s, he was blunt: no, not in the way drivers might be forced to now. Instead, the cars effectively managed themselves by falling off a cliff over a lap — the heat-soaked reality of monstrous turbo power, with components “melting” and performance evaporating. His estimate was stark: from 1300bhp at the start of a lap to “probably” 400bhp less by the end.
That’s a different kind of variability, but it’s variability all the same — and Brundle used it to make a broader point about adaptability. He invoked Ayrton Senna as the archetype: a driver who thrived in chaos, who could ride a car with shifting performance and still extract a lap that felt like an act of will.
If Verstappen’s critique is that the new cars prevent that flat-out, edge-of-the-seat sensation, Brundle’s counter is that F1 has always asked its best to do more than simply keep the throttle pinned. The challenge changes shape; the job description doesn’t.
Still, there’s a modern tension here that can’t be waved away with nostalgia. Managing tyres or brakes is one thing — you can often choose how aggressive to be and live with the consequences. Being forced into lift points because the energy equation says “no” risks feeling less like a driver choice and more like a software instruction. And that’s where Verstappen’s “not very F1-like” line finds oxygen in the paddock.
The uncomfortable truth is that both sides can be right. Management has always been part of racing at the top level. But if the regulations create too many moments where the fastest way around is visibly slower than what the car appears capable of, the sport hands its critics easy ammunition.
Bahrain testing is only a snapshot, and teams will get cleverer at hiding the seams — optimising deployment, improving efficiency, finding set-up solutions that reduce the need for obvious lifting. Yet the early mood music is clear: 2026 is going to reward the driver who can think as sharply as he attacks.
Whether that’s a golden era of new-school excellence or a self-inflicted wound depends on how often fans are left watching the best drivers in the world deliberately not going flat.
