Nyck de Vries has ended up in a slightly awkward but useful position in F1’s latest culture clash: he’s one of the few in the paddock who’s lived both sides of the argument.
As McLaren’s reserve driver in 2026 — and with proper mileage in Formula E on his CV — de Vries isn’t dismissing the grumbles coming from the current grid about the new power units. He just doesn’t buy the idea that Formula 1 is somehow sleepwalking into becoming a high-speed imitation of its all-electric cousin.
The complaints, of course, have been loud. Max Verstappen’s “Formula E on steroids” line cut through because it captured what a lot of drivers have been muttering since the season began: too much managing, not enough sending it. The new rules brought a 50/50 split between combustion and battery power, plus the sort of “push” and energy deployment tools that sound great in a technical briefing but have made the cars feel overly regulated when it matters.
In qualifying especially, the picture was messy. Instead of the clean, violent commitment that defines an F1 lap, drivers found themselves harvesting, hitting super clipping, and defaulting into lift-and-coast patterns that robbed the sessions of their purity. It wasn’t just aesthetic; there were safety concerns and genuine questions about the racing product.
That pressure forced action. The FIA met with F1 management, team principals and the power unit manufacturers, and tweaks were agreed — the kind that are designed to ease the symptoms without rewriting the whole prescription mid-season. From round four at Miami, the maximum permitted recharge in qualifying dropped from 8MJ to 7MJ. Peak super clip power went up to 350kW, while maximum Boost power during the race is now capped at +150kW.
Most drivers acknowledged it was a step in the right direction. But nobody sounded like they thought the problem was solved — and the more meaningful rebalance won’t come until next year because it requires hardware changes, with a move to a 40/60 split to shift the electrical/combustion ratio.
That’s the context in which de Vries was asked for his view, and his opening answer was a neat piece of deflection that still landed: “Who am I to have an opinion on that?”
He then gave one anyway — and it was more interesting than the usual tribal stuff.
De Vries says he understands what F1 drivers feel they’re losing. For decades, Formula 1 has sold itself on optimisation in its most ruthless form: “just being able to go flat out, going around the circuit as fast as possible and braking as late as possible.” And that’s the point. When the defining experience of driving the fastest cars in the world becomes an exercise in energy choreography, it’s inevitable that the people inside the cockpit feel short-changed.
“So I get that it might not be what Formula 1 drivers expect from Formula 1,” he said. “They should simply be the fastest cars in the world.”
Yet what makes de Vries’ take different is that he doesn’t treat electrification as the enemy. He’s not romanticising it, either. In fact, he slips in a pretty pointed aside about how the racing can look when the sporting framework is built around energy deployment rather than pure pace: “Personally, I find the overtakes I’ve seen very artificial.”
That’s not a defence of Formula E’s show, exactly — more a reminder that “more electric” doesn’t automatically mean “more entertaining”, and that the sporting and technical levers have to be pulled with care if you want the end product to feel authentic.
Where he breaks ranks with some of the louder voices is on the bigger accusation: that F1 is drifting into Formula E’s lane and erasing its own identity. De Vries just doesn’t see it.
“Oh, that’s not how I see it,” he said. “You shouldn’t compare Formula E with Formula 1. On a technical level there’s something to learn, but in sporting terms they’re not even close. You have to see them separately.”
It’s a grounded argument, and it’s probably closer to how the engineers see it than the drivers do. The truth is F1 isn’t borrowing Formula E’s format, its circuits, its tyre behaviour, or its whole race-craft ecosystem. What it is doing is leaning harder into electrical performance — and that’s where the emotional reaction kicks in, because the sport’s mythology has always been tied to the internal combustion engine and the idea of relentless, simple speed.
De Vries also pointed out the obvious, but it still needs saying in an era where everything gets forced into a binary debate: motorsport isn’t a single ladder where one series has to “win” and another has to “lose”. “If you enjoy following Formula E, that’s great! But it’s a different branch of the sport. Just as WEC is also something very different.”
While the current paddock debate is centred on how to make the 2026 rules work better in practice, the political undertone is hard to ignore. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has already gone public with a plan to bring back V8 power units in 2030 — or at the latest 2031 — with minimal electrification. His description was blunt: “It will be with a very, very minor electrification, but the main one will be the engine… There will be very minimal [electric] power.”
That’s a huge marker for where the sport might be heading — and it inevitably colours how people read the present. If you believe the future is a return to louder, simpler engines, then the current era starts to look like a detour. If you believe hybrid performance is part of what keeps F1 relevant, then the job is to make these regulations feel like Formula 1 again, not apologise for them.
De Vries, characteristically, isn’t waving a flag for either camp. He’s basically saying: stop pretending the series are the same, stop pretending electrification automatically ruins the sport — and get the execution right so the cars can be driven like F1 cars, not managed like a calculation.
That might be the most useful perspective of all, because the argument doesn’t need another slogan. It needs solutions.
