Sergio Perez didn’t need long in the 2026 machinery to land on the same conclusion Max Verstappen has been pushing for weeks: this new era of Formula 1 is going to be won and lost as much on the dashboard as it is in the braking zones.
Speaking in Bahrain during pre-season running, Perez described the overhaul as the most jarring regulations shift of his career — and not in a way that immediately flatters the spectacle. With the new cars leaning heavily on energy deployment and recovery, Perez’s concern isn’t just that it feels different; it’s that it risks feeling like something else entirely.
“It is very different,” he said. “Definitely this Formula 1 does feel extremely different to what I was used to. I’ll say it’s the biggest change I’ve had in my career in terms of regulations.”
That line matters coming from Perez, a driver who’s lived through multiple technical cycles and made a career out of reading races. But what’s really jumped out at him is how central the power unit has become in everyday driving — not simply peak performance, but the constant mental arithmetic of what’s available, when you can spend it, and what the bill looks like later in the lap.
“Very difficult to figure it out – what’s going on with the energy, with deployments, all of that is tremendously difficult,” Perez said. “So yeah, a lot of this power unit comes into play much more than in the past, which is not ideal.”
That “not ideal” is doing a lot of work. For drivers, the fear isn’t complexity in itself — F1 people are paid to master complexity. It’s the possibility that the optimal way to race simply won’t resemble what they instinctively consider racing. Verstappen has already complained he can’t drive “flat-out” and that the right word for 2026 is “management”, likening the sensation to “Formula E on steroids”. Perez didn’t repeat the phrase, but he didn’t exactly run from it either.
“I want to see how the racing, because for me the main fun is the racing,” he said. “At the moment, I just don’t know how we racing. It seems like overtaking may be a little bit trickier, managing your energies and etc.
“It might become, I don’t want to jump into conclusions, but they can be like Formula E racing. So let’s wait and see.”
The subtext is obvious: if everyone’s guarding energy like it’s the last lap of a battery endurance test, the overtaking model changes. You stop thinking purely about tyre life and DRS timing and start thinking about whether the car in front is vulnerable because it’s genuinely slow — or because it’s temporarily broke on deploy and about to defend like a demon once it’s recharged. Even the meaning of “push” becomes slippery. Are you pushing for lap time, or pushing yourself into a hole you’ll be climbing out of for the next ten corners?
Perez’s other warning is the one race engineers will quietly nod along to: the early-season learning curve may not be linear. It could be messy.
“I think it can be chaotic,” he said. “I think especially the first races, getting everyone to get to know their power units, their management when you can use the overtake button, the amount of energy you drain while you’re using it… all of that.
“It’s very, very tricky.”
That’s not a dramatic prediction so much as a realistic one. Testing can teach you a lot, but it can’t recreate the exact compromises of racing traffic, defence, undercut pressure and safety-car restarts — all the moments where a driver’s instinct says “go now” and the power unit says “not if you want to finish the lap like this”. The first few grands prix are going to be a live-fire exercise in recalibrating those instincts.
There’s an extra layer in Perez’s case, too. He isn’t saying all this from the comfort of continuity. He’s back on the grid with Cadillac after a season out, joining an 11th team still bolting its operation together while everyone else is refining. In that context, “management” doesn’t just mean energy; it means expectation.
Perez was careful not to turn the regulation debate into a personal complaint, and he framed Cadillac’s Bahrain progress as exactly what you’d expect from a brand-new project: imperfect, but moving.
“I think overall it’s going well, it’s going in the right direction,” he said. “The team has done a good job, obviously, getting all the puzzle together. It’s quite not an easy one… but we’re making progress, which is the main thing for us as a new team.”
He also offered a refreshingly blunt view of what Melbourne should mean for a start-up outfit: not a referendum on competitiveness, but a baseline.
“I think it’s a little bit irrelevant where we start in Melbourne,” Perez said. “It’s how much progress we are able to make in the coming weekends.”
That’s the other reality of 2026. While the front of the grid argues about whether the cars are “F1-like” enough, the teams further back will be grinding through fundamentals: understanding the engine side, mapping deployment, and learning how to turn theoretical performance into repeatable lap time. Perez admitted that’s where Cadillac’s biggest strides have been so far — not glamour upgrades, just getting on top of a power-unit philosophy that’s changed the sport’s rhythms.
The irony is that the very thing making drivers uneasy could be what defines the first phase of the season. If everyone is still learning when to spend and when to save, races may open up in unexpected places — not because the cars are easier to pass with, but because someone, somewhere, will misjudge the equation at the worst possible time.
Whether that’s “chaos” or simply a new type of unpredictability depends on your taste. Perez, for one, sounds like he’d prefer to win and lose on the limit — not on the ledger.
