Martin Brundle isn’t usually the guy reaching for the emergency cord mid-season, but that’s where we are with Formula 1’s 2026 rules. Two weekends at two places that normally sell the sport on instinct alone — Silverstone and Spa — have left him sounding less like a broadcaster enjoying the show and more like an ex-driver mourning what’s been edited out of it.
He admitted to having “a bit of a tear in my eye” after recent visits to both venues, arguing that the sport has “lost all the great corners” as a direct consequence of how the new cars harvest and deploy energy. In Brundle’s view, it’s not merely a bedding-in phase or an annoyance drivers will learn to game; it’s a concept that needs binning at the first opportunity.
That’s a loaded word in an era where everyone in the paddock is careful with language. Brundle wasn’t. He used Sky’s airtime to pivot from a discussion about George Russell’s straight-line speed concerns at Mercedes into a wider shot at the regulations, pointing to what he sees as an unwanted trend: at high-speed, historic circuits, the cars aren’t being freed up — they’re being managed.
The complaints have been stacking up through the Belgian Grand Prix weekend. Fernando Alonso raised the alarm about energy management before the running even began at Spa, and in the way these things go, that warning didn’t take long to show itself on track. Max Verstappen’s description was particularly damning in its simplicity: Formula 3 power meeting Formula 1 downforce through Spa’s second sector, driven with no deployment. That’s the sort of line that lands in the garage like a spanner dropped on concrete — loud, avoidable, and hard to ignore.
And then there was Pouhon. The double-left at Spa is supposed to be a commitment test, the kind of corner that makes even modern cars feel briefly alive. This year it became a talking point for the wrong reason: Kimi Antonelli and Lando Norris both said it was flat, with Norris going further and shrugging that it was “not a corner anymore”. When drivers start talking like that, it’s rarely theatre. It’s usually disappointment disguised as bluntness.
Brundle’s read is that the sport has put too much cognitive load on the drivers, and too many constraints on the corners that should define a lap. The new power units, built around a near 50/50 split between electrical and internal combustion power, were always going to change how a lap is constructed — but the fear inside the paddock has been that the most famous circuits would end up feeling like energy spreadsheets with grandstands.
“I think they’re all struggling to really fully understand it, to be honest,” Brundle said of the rules, before getting to the nub of it: “These new regulations hurt us on the high speed circuits.”
That’s the key. Nobody’s denying the cars look quick — Brundle himself said that on Fridays “wow they look fast”, and he’s right. Side-by-side, the shapes and speed still sell. But the argument he’s making isn’t about top speed or visuals; it’s about what the drivers are allowed to do in the places that built F1’s mythology. When a sector becomes something you survive with the deployment light off, rather than attack with your right foot and your nerve, it’s not just a technical compromise — it’s a philosophical one.
The sport has already moved to introduce tweaks amid early concerns, and Brundle referenced changes planned for 2027 and 2028. That’s an acknowledgement from the rule-makers that the first iteration hasn’t landed cleanly, and there’s clearly a willingness to rebalance the picture slightly back towards the internal combustion engine over the next two years. But Brundle is looking beyond band-aids. He’s essentially saying the core idea isn’t worth saving.
That position also happens to align, neatly, with the political wind currently blowing from the FIA. President Mohammed Ben Sulayem has been pushing for a return of V8 engines running on sustainable fuels by 2030 — 2031 at the latest. Brundle is openly in favour. And if you’re trying to read the paddock mood, it matters that a figure like Brundle is saying the quiet bit out loud: the “as soon as possible” part.
It’s easy to file this under nostalgia — a former driver yearning for the cars he grew up with — but Brundle’s criticism is more specific than that. He’s not asking for louder engines for the sake of it. He’s arguing that the rules are actively reshaping iconic corners into non-events. That’s not romance; that’s product.
There is, of course, a counterpoint: drivers and teams will always chase the optimal solution, and in a young regulation cycle, “optimal” can look a lot like caution until everyone knows where the lap time lives. Brundle even conceded that the grid has to “get on top of the complexities” because, for now, that’s the reality. But the tone of his message suggested he doesn’t believe mastery will fix what’s been removed from the circuits themselves.
Spa and Silverstone are more than stops on a calendar. They’re stress tests for any rule set. And if your new era arrives and the first thing the sport’s most recognisable ex-driver-turned-broadcaster wants to do is eulogise the corners, you’ve got a perception problem at best — and a sporting one at worst.
The more interesting question is whether F1 treats these as early-season growing pains, or whether the grumbling from Alonso, Verstappen, Norris, Antonelli and Brundle becomes the start of a proper momentum shift. Because once the paddock starts framing a regulation set as something to “get rid of”, rather than something to refine, it stops being a technical debate and turns into a countdown.
