George Russell isn’t buying Max Verstappen’s “Formula E on steroids” line about the 2026 cars — but he’s also not pretending the new era is seamless from the cockpit.
Speaking after running at Bahrain testing, the Mercedes driver was pretty clear that the bigger story, at least early on, isn’t some existential crisis about electrification. It’s the slightly awkward reality of how these power units want to be driven when the turbo and energy deployment become as important as the corner itself.
Asked directly whether Verstappen’s description resonated, Russell’s answer was a flat “no”. In fact, he sounded more encouraged than most about what the 2026 package is doing for the chassis side of the sport.
“I do think it’s a step forward,” Russell said. “And I always like to give things a chance. We’re four days into a set of regulations that’s going to be over three years long, and the progress everyone’s going to make in these early months is going to be massive.”
From his perspective, the big immediate win is obvious the moment you turn in. The new cars are lighter and smaller, and Russell says that shows up in agility — the kind of basic, old-school response drivers have been craving as the cars got bigger and heavier through the previous cycles.
“I think the cars are way nicer to drive, the car itself,” he said. “I’ve only ever driven the smaller generation of F1 cars twice, and I couldn’t believe the difference of how much more agile the car feels being lighter, smaller. So that’s very positive.”
Where it gets messy — and where you can hear the first hints of drivers needing to rewire their instincts — is the way the 2026 power units, with their 50/50 split between electrical power and biofuel-based combustion, influence the approach to certain corners. Russell described a scenario that will sound almost comical to anyone who’s driven Bahrain a thousand times on a sim: corners that used to be comfortably third-gear entries are now being taken in first.
Not because the corner demands it, but because the power unit does.
“The one challenge that we’re faced with is using very low gears in the corners,” Russell explained. “So to give an example, here in Bahrain, usually the first corner is a third-gear corner in the previous generation. Now, we’re having to use first gear to keep the engine, the revs very high, to keep the turbo spinning. This is probably the one thing that is quite annoying and isn’t that intuitive.”
That “isn’t intuitive” part is the key. Drivers can adapt to almost anything if the logic is consistent: brake later, carry more speed, change your line, manage a tyre. What’s harder is being told to do something that feels slower and harsher in the moment, because the lap time comes back to you elsewhere — on the straight, through energy state, via turbo response.
Russell reached for an analogy that was more Tesco than Turn 1, but it landed: taking a roundabout in first gear because someone insists it’ll make you faster down the next road.
“Imagine when you drive to the supermarket in your car and you get to the roundabout and you put it in third gear to drive around the roundabout, but suddenly, the person next to you says, ‘Put it in first gear,’ everything like, wham, revving,” he said. “You don’t go in the roundabout to the supermarket in first gear if you’re driving at a sensible speed.
“But this is the same thing. The car and the engine is kind of designed to go around this corner in third gear, but because of the turbo and the boost and all of this, you’ve got to keep the engine revs very high, which means you have to take first gear. So the car, it just isn’t really designed to do that. But you know, we’re working around it.”
There’s a tactical knock-on here too, and Russell laid it out in a way that speaks to the learning curve teams are currently living through in real time. In a “normal” F1 development cycle, you can try a different gear or line and instantly feel whether it’s better. With these cars, the feedback loop is longer. You might sacrifice speed in the corner to preserve the conditions you need for the straight — and you only really know if you got it right once you’ve completed the lap and seen the energy picture.
“Sometimes it feels like a bit of a handbrake when you’re having to go down the gears,” he admitted. “It’s slower in isolation to go around the corner in first gear instead of third gear, but then you would lose a lot of lap time in the straight.
“That’s where we’ve got this big learning curve at the moment… you almost need to wait a full lap to actually learn what I did at Turn 1, has that cost me energy or not.”
Russell’s also cautious about drawing big conclusions from the early test venues. Barcelona and Bahrain, he noted, are relatively kind in terms of energy demands, which makes it dangerous to judge the true complexion of 2026 before the season reaches circuits that stress the system differently.
“These two tracks, Barcelona and Bahrain, are arguably two of the easier circuits for the engine,” he said. “So I don’t want to say anything too early before we get to the likes of Melbourne or Jeddah, but it will be much more challenging for the engines and the energy once we get there.”
What he doesn’t sound like is a driver preparing the public for a disappointment. If anything, Russell is leaning into the idea that the racing might end up more unpredictable — not necessarily cleaner or purer, but perhaps more chaotic as teams and drivers gamble on different solutions.
He even took a wry swing at the fact that drivers are rarely satisfied, whatever generation they’re given.
“Of course, we want the best cars. We want the fastest cars,” Russell said. “But, the fastest cars were the 2020 cars. And we were also saying that we want lighter cars… We as drivers like to complain.”
The last part of his assessment is the one that will matter most as the paddock noise grows louder: the show. Russell said he’s “quite intrigued” to see how it plays to viewers and how the races look on television — a fair question when the mechanics of a lap are changing in ways that won’t always be obvious without a battery graphic or a radio snippet.
And while the drivers argue about feel and philosophy, Russell slipped in a more concrete concern: at this stage, the spread up and down the order appears “far larger than we expected”. In other words, 2026 may be delivering a more interesting driving challenge — but the bigger worry might be competitive separation, not electrical power.
For now, Russell’s position is straightforward. The cars are better to hustle, the power is still enormous when you get the full 350kW, and the awkward bits look like the kind of problems engineers will spend the next months relentlessly sanding down. Verstappen might see an identity crisis. Russell just sees teething pains — albeit ones that force you to take a supermarket roundabout like you’re leaving a pit box.
