Andrea Stella doesn’t sound remotely convinced by the idea that Formula 1 has somehow gone soft in 2026. If anything, McLaren’s team principal reckons the new rules have tilted the workload back towards the cockpit — just not always in the way drivers are used to celebrating.
The early theme of the new power-unit era has been energy: harvesting it, spending it, and doing both at moments that look counterintuitive if you’ve spent the last decade judging a lap by how relentlessly “flat” it appears. Drivers have already been grumbling that the fastest way around now sometimes involves deliberately not driving at the limit in the old-fashioned sense — lift-and-coast, odd downshifts on straights, braking earlier than instinct suggests — all in the name of having usable deployment where it actually buys lap time.
Max Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton have both voiced reservations along those lines, essentially arguing that conservation feels at odds with the sport’s DNA. Stella’s response is less romantic and more pragmatic: the job is still brutally difficult, and perhaps harder because the cars aren’t doing as much of the “making you look good” work as before.
Bahrain testing offered the first proper look at how this all plays out away from simulation. The headline pace wasn’t apocalyptic — tyre-delta adjustments put Charles Leclerc’s best effort a touch over three seconds shy of Carlos Sainz’s benchmark from last year — but the more revealing story was how the lap time is being assembled. Not through one sustained, maximally aggressive push, but through a series of micro-compromises.
“I think what we have seen here in Bahrain definitely confirms that it is the ultimate challenge,” Stella said at the end of the test. Bahrain, he noted, is “harvest-rich” — meaning the circuit layout and braking zones offer plenty of natural opportunity to recoup energy without resorting to too many strange tricks.
Even there, though, Stella said the cars are moving around more than they did in the latter ground-effect seasons. That matters, because it changes what the driver is doing with their hands and feet: less of the planted, precise rotation we’ve come to associate with the current generation, more management of a car that will slide and shift beneath you.
“With these regulations, the cars slide quite a lot more,” he said, “and the role of the driver, if anything, is even more involved in extracting the most out of the car.”
That’s the key point Stella is leaning on: yes, the regulations are asking for behaviour that can look like the antithesis of qualifying bravado, but that doesn’t automatically translate to “easier”. It can just mean the skillset is being reshuffled — and the penalty for getting the shuffle wrong is immediate.
McLaren’s view is also shaped by what it’s seen at different venues already. Stella referenced Barcelona as a more awkward case study, describing it as relatively “harvest-poor”. With fewer obvious chances to regenerate energy, the fastest lap may require what he called “special manoeuvres” — moments where you might not be flat-out through high speed because you’re balancing harvesting against overall lap-time payoff.
In other words, you can still be “on it” and still be leaving performance on the table if you’re “on it” in the wrong places.
“Definitely, there could still be cases in which the driver needs to approach driving in a way that is not the common way of driving a car,” Stella said. “Which is just drive as flat as possible, brake as late as possible, and go as fast as possible on every corner.”
The tension for F1 is obvious. The sport wants drivers to feel like they’re attacking — because it looks like attacking, it sounds like attacking, and fans can read it in the body language — but it also wants the new hybrid era to work without turning qualifying into a rolling efficiency contest.
That’s where the discussion around “super-clipping” comes in, and why it’s already on the F1 Commission’s radar. The concept, as it’s being explored, effectively allows a car to switch back into harvesting while the driver remains at full throttle, by altering the power split between the internal combustion engine and the electrical system. In current form the technique is capped at 250kW, but McLaren trialled an increased limit of 350kW on the final day of the Bahrain test, with the idea now set to be evaluated further once race-weekend data starts coming in.
Stella made it clear he sees deployment rules as the lever that could dial down the strangest-looking driving requirements without neutering the technical intent of the regulations.
“When it comes to improving the balance… there is time to fix this,” he said. “There is a way of changing the way in which we deploy the electrical engine, such that this requirement to do these special manoeuvres is reduced.”
Still, he was cautious about jumping to conclusions off two circuits. That’s a sensible note: the new cars aren’t just one thing. They’re a set of trade-offs that will express themselves differently depending on the rhythm of a lap and how often you can lean on braking zones to refill the battery.
Oscar Piastri, speaking from McLaren’s side of the garage, echoed that point — and offered a useful warning for anyone thinking Bahrain tells the whole story. He’s already pointing to Melbourne as a very different proposition, where insisting on doing “none” of the lift-and-coast or super-clipping could simply leave you empty far too soon.
“From the simulator running I’ve done, [Melbourne] is very different,” Piastri said. “If you didn’t want to do any, you’d be running out of energy very, very quickly.”
He also flagged Jeddah as another track where the layout — long straights stitched together by fast corners — makes it difficult to harvest effectively. Those are the weekends, he suggested, where the “abnormality” of the new driving style is likely to be most obvious.
Perhaps the most telling line from Piastri, though, was that so much of this is effectively pre-scripted before the driver even climbs in. “At the moment, it’s kind of all set before you get in the car,” he said, acknowledging there are changes you can make on the fly, but the management now isn’t just a throttle game.
So the early 2026 picture is this: the cars are close enough in raw pace to keep credibility intact, but different enough in how they generate lap time to unsettle established instincts. Stella is arguing that’s not a betrayal of the sport’s difficulty — it’s simply a new kind of difficulty, one that’s going to look messy at some circuits, more conventional at others, and potentially cleaner if the series decides to tweak the deployment framework.
Melbourne, by the sound of it, won’t let anyone hide behind the familiar.
