The FIA has moved to clear up a small but significant fog hanging over Miami: how much energy the 2026 cars are actually allowed to put back into the battery per lap, and when.
On paper, a regulation note circulated during April’s break looked pretty unambiguous. It spoke of a “reduction in maximum permitted recharge from 8MJ to 7MJ”, framed as a way to stop qualifying laps becoming a lift-and-coast exercise disguised as flat-out commitment. The same communication also pointed to “super clip” power rising from 250kW to 350kW, with the intention of shortening the time drivers spend leaning on peak electrical punch.
Then teams arrived in Florida, opened the FIA’s latest Power Unit Information document, and found numbers that didn’t match the headline everyone had latched onto. Rather than a universal 7MJ cap, the paperwork for Miami retained the higher limits: up to 9MJ in practice and the race, and 8MJ in qualifying.
That contradiction matters because these numbers dictate more than just how a lap feels for the driver. They determine how aggressively engineers can build a lap model, how much the car can be asked to harvest without cooking rear tyres on entry, and how a driver sequences their deployment through the lap to protect the biggest time-gain zones.
The FIA’s clarification is that the “7MJ” language wasn’t intended as a blanket rewrite of the recharge limit across the calendar. Instead, it’s a tool: officials now have the ability to lower the permitted maximum to 7MJ at certain events if the expected “super clipping” — the periods where the car hits the ceiling of electrical deployment and the system has to manage that peak — would become too intrusive.
Miami, in the FIA’s view, doesn’t qualify as one of those problem tracks. With only around two seconds of super clipping anticipated per lap, the governing body has opted to leave the maximum recharge unchanged here. In other words, the sport hasn’t suddenly decided to take energy away everywhere; it’s decided to give itself a lever it can pull when a circuit’s layout would otherwise encourage too much harvesting and too many compromised “qualifying” laps.
So what are teams dealing with this weekend?
The Miami event runs with a familiar-looking ceiling, but with more prescriptive rules around where drivers can access the headline 350kW deployment and where they’re capped at 250kW. In the sprint and race, the document states 9MJ is available when Overtake is active; without it, the accessible figure is 8.5MJ per lap. Qualifying is set at 8MJ, and practice at 9MJ.
The bigger operational change in Miami is the zoning. From Turn 1 through to Turn 8 — the busy, sinuous opening sector — drivers are limited to 250kW. On the run to Turn 11, they’ll be allowed 350kW. The system then drops back to 250kW through the tighter complex that feeds onto the back straight, where 350kW becomes available again.
For the drivers, this is less about “more” or “less” energy and more about the loss of freedom. Previously, the smartest lap often belonged to the driver who could make the best judgement calls on where to spend electrical power and where to accept a small compromise to protect the next straight. With zones defined and peak power gated, there’s a sense the FIA is corralling everyone into broadly similar patterns — which may well be the point if the goal is to discourage exaggerated harvesting and keep qualifying looking like qualifying.
It also nudges the competitive emphasis toward traction and efficiency in the parts of the lap where the extra shove is now restricted. If you’re capped at 250kW through the technical opening, you can’t simply “electric” your way out of a scruffy sequence; you’ve got to carry speed properly, get the car rotated, and let the internal combustion side and chassis balance do more of the heavy lifting.
The flipside is that where 350kW is permitted, the lap will become more binary: either you’ve arrived at the zone with the right state of charge and you get the full benefit, or you haven’t and you’re a sitting duck to anyone who has. That has obvious implications in race trim, too — especially with Overtake availability tied to the higher 9MJ figure.
Miami, then, isn’t the weekend where the sport quietly slashes recharge and changes the character of the cars overnight. It’s the weekend where a new piece of regulatory discretion becomes real: the FIA can now tailor maximum recharge to the circuit if it believes the spectacle — and the safety case — demands it.
And that’s worth watching as the calendar moves on. The numbers in Florida may look reassuringly familiar, but the precedent isn’t the 9MJ staying put. It’s that the rules now come with an adjustable dial, and teams will have to be ready for it to be turned.
