There’s a slightly surreal quality to the early weeks of F1’s 2026 era: the cars look like the future, the power units are sold as the future, and yet the racing has often felt as though it’s being dictated by a spreadsheet rather than a driver’s right foot.
That tension is now heading for a very real political moment. After what’s been described as an “extremely positive” meeting between the FIA and the drivers, the sport arrives at Monday’s key gathering with FOM, team principals and power unit manufacturers — where proposals to tweak energy management and deployment rules will be formally tabled and voted on.
The mood matters because this isn’t just a technical debate. It’s about who gets to steer the direction of the new regulations now that their real-world consequences have landed in full view. The drivers might finally feel aligned with the FIA, but the next room contains the people with the votes — and the competitive “vested interests” that come with them.
The flashpoint has been obvious since round one. With the new power units leaning into an almost 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrical output, the cars have been described in the paddock as “energy-starved”. Drivers aren’t simply choosing where to push; they’re compelled to manufacture the energy to push at all. The knock-on effect has been a style of racing defined by long lift-and-coast phases, odd downshifts on straights, and a general reluctance to properly attack corners because over-committing can leave you exposed where it hurts most: on the next straight.
Add in the superclipping technique — the ICE effectively bleeding away as energy is harvested into the battery at a specified rate — and you’ve got weekends where the quickest lap is as much about keeping the system in its happy place as it is about bravery.
Drivers have been blunt about what that does to the job. Corners are increasingly “energy-limited” rather than grip-limited, a philosophical break from what most of them grew up mastering. And while there’s been a spectrum of public frustration, the underlying message has been consistent: the cars are asking for passivity, not commitment.
Suzuka then turned the abstract into the frighteningly concrete. The safety concern drivers had been warning about — large closing-speed deltas created by different energy states and algorithm-driven deployment — was brought into sharp relief when Oliver Bearman suffered a heavy accident in the Japanese Grand Prix.
Bearman, in the Haas, arrived at Spoon vastly quicker than Franco Colapinto’s Alpine, not because one was “racing” and the other wasn’t, but because they were effectively on different pages of the same energy-management book. Colapinto, having used his boost earlier, was low on battery; Bearman, with his boost engaged, had a significant power advantage in an abnormal part of the lap. Bearman swerved to avoid contact and lost control, hitting the barriers with a 50G impact. He walked away, but the sport won’t miss the message: this can’t be allowed to become normal.
Conveniently — and perhaps fortunately — the calendar handed F1 a reset. With the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix cancelled, the break created space for the FIA and technical groups to examine what could be changed without tearing up the rulebook they’ve only just started living with.
Nobody in the paddock is expecting a wholesale rewrite. The direction of travel, instead, is the sort of “massage” that makes the cars behave more like racing cars again and less like rolling energy budgets.
Two ideas have been leading the conversation. One is reducing the maximum harvestable energy around a lap from 8.5mJ, which would likely slow lap times but could ease the odd driving techniques currently required to keep the battery topped up. The other is increasing the superclipping harvesting rate from 250kW to 350kW, shortening the period in which top speed bleeds away and, crucially, reducing the amount of lift-and-coast that’s crept into both qualifying and races.
Underpinning all of this is a governance reality drivers know all too well. The GPDA doesn’t have a formal vote in the committees that actually decide the regulations. Lewis Hamilton voiced that frustration at Suzuka, suggesting drivers don’t really have a seat at the table when it matters.
The more nuanced reading — and the one doing the rounds in the paddock — is that the drivers’ anger isn’t primarily aimed at the FIA, but at the teams. A team or engine manufacturer that has found an early advantage under the current interpretation has every incentive to keep the rules exactly as they are. Drivers, meanwhile, are advocating for the quality of the spectacle, the safety of the pack, and the ability to extract performance through skill rather than compliance.
That’s why Friday’s FIA-drivers meeting carried weight. It’s understood the conversation was unusually collaborative, with genuine common ground found on what needs to change and why. George Russell, wearing his GPDA director hat, has been one of the central voices in those discussions — and he wasn’t shy about what the drivers are prioritising.
The first is simple, and telling: flat-out qualifying, without the current lift-and-coast compromise. The second is reducing abnormal closing speeds — particularly in sections that aren’t designated straight-line modes, where a straight exists because it’s the exit of a corner rather than a drag strip.
Russell also pointed directly to the two-sided nature of the Suzuka crash dynamic: Bearman had boost available and deployed it for an extra 350kW, while Colapinto had spent his earlier and was left with a deficit half a lap later. That mismatch — energy abundance versus energy scarcity — is what creates the startling speed differences that drivers say can’t be policed by etiquette alone.
What happens next is where this gets interesting. Monday’s meeting with team bosses and manufacturers is the bottleneck: changes need F1 Commission approval before they can go to the World Motor Sport Council for ratification. And that’s where the sport’s internal push-and-pull comes into play.
There’s an expectation in the paddock that “common sense” will win, because the costs of doing nothing are obvious: awkward racing, awkward qualifying, and another Suzuka-shaped warning waiting to happen. But the competitive stakes are also obvious. Any tweak to harvesting limits or superclipping rates can shuffle the competitive order — and in F1, altruism has never been a reliable strategy.
The FIA does, however, hold the ultimate card. If it believes safety demands intervention, it has the power to mandate changes regardless of whether the room full of competitors can agree.
For now, the drivers sound more optimistic than they have in months. Russell described the current feedback loop with the FIA as the closest relationship they’ve had with the governing body in years, and suggested there’s “low-hanging fruit” that could materially improve the driving experience quickly — with the 350kW superclipping figure framed as close to a no-brainer.
All of which leaves Monday as more than just a technical vote. It’s a test of whether F1’s stakeholders can accept that the first version of these rules has produced consequences nobody wants to defend in public — and whether the teams are willing to trade a potential edge for a healthier, safer product.
Miami is looming. The question now is whether the sport arrives there having quietly corrected course — or whether it decides to keep learning the hard way.
