If the pre-season running has done anything for the paddock mood, it’s reminded everyone how quickly Formula 1 can get messy when the rulebook tears up the script.
The 2026 season finally begins in Melbourne this Friday, and Martin Brundle reckons the opening rounds could be “slightly wild” as drivers and teams try to stitch together the new power unit demands with brand-new cars — in his words, one of the biggest changes the sport’s ever pushed through.
On paper, the headline is the 50/50 split between electrical and combustion power. In reality, the early story may be the stuff that never shows up neatly on a spec sheet: how aggressively you harvest, when you deploy, and whether you’ve left yourself enough in the battery to do anything useful when it matters.
Practice starts in testing have already looked untidy at times, but Alex Albon has suggested the “chaos” people have been watching might not carry over to Melbourne. That’s fair enough — teams rarely show their full hand in a test environment, and drivers don’t always treat practice starts like a Saturday night in parc fermé. But the broader point stands: in race trim, once engines are turned up and the systems are being pushed in anger, there’s going to be a proper learning curve.
Brundle’s expectation is that the variability won’t just come from who’s nailed the basics; it’ll come from who can get the battery cycle to work without it dictating the entire lap.
“It’s a dramatic change, the biggest ever in Formula 1, and we’re right at the very beginning of it,” he said on Sky F1, pointing to the immediate challenge teams face in replenishing energy without turning the lap into one long compromise. His hunch is that, once the clever people in the factories converge on broadly similar answers, things will normalise. But the opening phase? He’s not expecting calm.
There’s another ingredient Brundle keeps coming back to, and it’s the one teams hate talking about publicly: unreliability. The previous generation of hybrid engines, after years of refinement, became almost bulletproof. The new world is different. New cars, new packaging, new operating windows, and new ways to get caught out — and that means the early part of 2026 could bring back an old feeling: you don’t bank anything until the chequered flag is in sight.
“I think you’ll not think you have won a grand prix until you literally see the chequered flag,” Brundle said.
That line will resonate up and down the pitlane because it captures the uneasy truth of major regulation resets. Even when you’re quick, your weekend can still be ambushed by an energy management miscalculation, a systems glitch, or the kind of small reliability gremlin that disappears for months and then reappears at the worst possible time.
Melbourne, too, is not a gentle environment in which to find your feet. Albert Park is power-hungry, and it’s the sort of circuit where any misjudgement in deployment or harvesting can bleed lap time in a way that’s obvious both on the stopwatch and in a wheel-to-wheel situation. Drivers will have to optimise boost mode and harvesting for qualifying, then juggle boost and overtake modes in the grand prix — all while working the movable front and rear wings for extra speed into corners and down the straights. It’s a lot of levers to pull, and not all of them will make sense immediately when the adrenaline is up and the tyres are on the edge.
Brundle does at least sound convinced that this time the field won’t split into the kind of extreme have-and-have-not scenario F1 lived through when hybrids arrived in 2014. Back then, Mercedes nailed it while others scrambled. Now, he believes it’s “much closer”.
That doesn’t mean the pecking order is settled — far from it. The conversations in the paddock still tend to circle back to a familiar leading group: Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and McLaren are widely seen as the front-runners heading into the opener, while Aston Martin and newcomer Cadillac are being talked about towards the back. But in a season like this, “consensus” is just another word for “guess”.
What Brundle is really forecasting is movement — not the incremental, predictable development curve you get in a stable set of rules, but big swings as teams unlock chunks of performance.
“It’s going to be an incredibly changeable year,” he said. “I see teams leapfrogging each other.”
That’s the tantalising part of 2026: the gains aren’t just hiding in a new winglet or a minor floor tweak. They’re embedded in the architecture of these cars and power units, and when someone finds a solution that ties together aero performance, energy strategy and drivability, it won’t be worth a tenth — it could be worth a season.
So yes, the start might be “slightly wild”. But it’s not wild for the sake of it. It’s wild because the sport has handed everyone a more complicated set of tools, and Melbourne will be the first time we see who can actually build something coherent with them under pressure.
