Fernando Alonso doesn’t need reminding that Formula 1 has reinvented itself more than once. He’s lived every version of it — from screaming V10s, to the first V8 season, to a decade-plus of hybrids — and that history is exactly why his first proper taste of the 2026 car has left him both intrigued and slightly weary.
After running Aston Martin’s AMR26 for the first time in Barcelona, Alonso’s verdict wasn’t the usual pre-season mix of optimism and secrecy. He went straight to the point: the new era’s obsession with energy harvesting and deployment is going to change what it feels like to drive an F1 car, and not necessarily in a way drivers will love.
“It’s a little bit annoying — from a driver point of view, you want to drive 100 percent,” Alonso said at Aston Martin’s launch event in Saudi Arabia. “Now you need to think a little bit more than that.”
The key shift is already showing up in the way these cars are being driven even on low-fuel laps. Lifting and coasting, long associated with race management, is expected to creep into qualifying. Drivers have also been downshifting on long straights — not for a corner, but to keep the power delivery in its sweet spot. It’s the sort of thing that looked strange in theory and looks even stranger in reality, even if not everyone sees it as a problem.
George Russell, for one, has shrugged off the “unnatural” label, likening it to driving uphill — a scenario where a downshift to keep the engine working makes sense. Oliver Bearman was blunter, calling it “a bit sad”, and Haas team boss Ayao Komatsu has already warned that the new rules can actively punish drivers who don’t nail the energy-saving windows: get the deployment wrong and you’re not just untidy, you’re slower.
Alonso’s take lands somewhere in the middle. He’s not pretending it’s undriveable, nor is he doing the romantic “back in my day” routine just for effect. If anything, he sounds like someone who understands exactly what’s coming — and is disappointed that F1 is choosing to make the driver’s job more computational at the very moment it’s trying to sell the sport as raw and spectacular.
“All the regulations have their own special things,” he said. “But this one is a little bit more dramatic on that regard.”
What he described is a style of driving where the car’s behaviour is shaped corner-by-corner by how you approach throttle and gearing — because partial throttle recharges, full throttle drains, and the trade-offs ripple forward to the next straight. In other words: the lap is no longer just about braking points and minimum speeds; it’s also about not painting yourself into an energy deficit you can’t escape.
“There are a couple of things that are interesting,” Alonso admitted. “But I prefer to drive with not too many systems interacting with your driving style… it seems that you need to overthink a little bit while driving, and that’s always a risk of having less joy behind the wheel.”
That line — “overthink” — is the tell. Alonso has always been one of the grid’s most cerebral operators, the kind of driver who can win races on awareness and detail as much as outright pace. On paper, a more complex rule set should suit him. Yet when asked whether the new regulations might play to his strengths, Alonso didn’t bite. He’d rather the sport didn’t demand this kind of mental accounting in the first place.
And his broader point is difficult to ignore: F1’s technical direction is pulling it further away from what he considers the sport’s purest identity. The 2026 power unit regulations push electrification towards a near 50/50 split with the internal combustion engine, and with that comes an unavoidable reality — these are, in Alonso’s words, “energy-starved machines”. The more they rely on energy budgeting, the more the driver is asked to manage scarcity rather than chase the limit.
“We will get used to,” he said. “But… we will never go back to the late 1990s or early 2000s where the cars were light and fast, with the noise of the engine. Everything was probably at the peak of the Formula 1 DNA. Now we are moving more into a different Formula 1.”
Alonso wasn’t interested in declaring the new era better or worse — just different — but the subtext was clear. The things that used to separate drivers in a very visible way are being replaced by a style of performance that’s harder to see, harder to celebrate, and easier to reduce to “who managed the systems best”.
That’s where his most pointed concern sits: that the most naturally fast drivers might actually be constrained by the requirement to conserve, because the biggest rewards will go to those who play the efficiency game most completely.
“It was more interesting before,” Alonso said, before adding the key caveat: “We need to sell that for a new generation.”
His comparison was telling. He pointed to other sports where structure and systems have increasingly replaced spontaneous brilliance — not because talent has disappeared, but because the environment around it has changed. The implication for F1 is uncomfortable: if the cars demand a more “robot style of driving”, as he put it, then the flashes of inspiration that used to define grand prix racing risk becoming rarer, or at least less obvious.
That tension has been bubbling for months. In late 2025, discussions with power unit manufacturers about an early switch to a simpler sustainable-fuel formula failed to gain enough support, leaving the 2026 engines locked in for the full five-year cycle as planned. So whatever anyone thinks of the direction, this is what F1 will be living with.
For Aston Martin — and for Alonso personally — the timing is fascinating. He’s starting yet another regulatory reset, again having to rewire instincts built over decades. He’ll adapt, because he always does. But it says plenty that even someone as technically literate and strategically minded as Alonso is openly questioning how much “joy” might be getting engineered out of the cockpit.
In 2026, the sport’s challenge won’t just be building fast cars under a new rulebook. It’ll be making sure the spectacle still looks and feels like Formula 1 — even when the fastest lap involves lifting earlier than anyone wants to admit.
