If you’re looking for an early-season metric that might tell you who has truly understood Formula 1’s 2026 reset, forget the headline times from a closed Barcelona shakedown. Watch Q1 in Melbourne — specifically, the spread from first to 22nd.
That’s the measure former drivers Johnny Herbert and Damon Hill have zeroed in on, and they’re not expecting subtlety. Herbert has put a number on it: around 1.2 to 1.3 seconds, front-to-back, in the first qualifying session of the year. Hill went one better — or worse, depending on where you’ll be sitting on that timing screen — suggesting it could stretch as far as 1.8s.
Herbert offered his estimate on The Race’s *Stay on Track* podcast, framing it as the natural consequence of a regulation set that’s genuinely new rather than iterative. “1.3… quite a big difference front to back. 1.2, 1.3,” he said. Hill didn’t hesitate when it was his turn.
“I’m going to say 1.8,” the 1996 world champion replied, prompting a laugh of disbelief from Herbert — not because the concept is ridiculous, but because 1.8 seconds in modern F1 qualifying is a canyon, not a gap.
The context matters. Last year in Melbourne — the final season of the ground-effect car era that began in 2022 — the field was tight: excluding the two slowest drivers, Liam Lawson and Esteban Ocon, the Q1 spread was under seven-tenths. That’s the baseline most of the paddock has grown used to: a world where missing a braking point by half a metre can cost you three places, and a “bad” Saturday can still be salvaged with a tidy lap.
2026 threatens to break that rhythm, at least initially, because the new cars demand a different kind of discipline. They’re shorter than the 2025 machines by 20 centimetres, and 30kg lighter, but it’s the systems layered on top of that package that are likely to sort the field. Active aerodynamics is now part of the performance equation, and the sport has also switched to a new power unit formula running on sustainable fuel with a 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrification.
That might sound like tidy, modern marketing copy — until you translate it into what a driver has to do mid-lap, and what an engineer has to decide pre-lap.
Hill’s point, put bluntly, is that everyone is still learning where the lap time actually lives. “They’ve got a lot to learn,” he said, looking ahead to Bahrain testing, “so it will be about playing with the options.”
Herbert followed with an analogy that will resonate with anyone who’s heard a team radio in pre-season. “Learn about the toolbox,” he said. “This is a new toolbox and they’ve got to work out what they need to use.”
In other words: the early competitive order may not be decided by who has the most ultimate downforce, but by who makes the fewest mistakes while juggling new “movable wings and engine deployment” demands — and who has already built the cleanest operating model around them.
Hill suggested that’s where the real divergence could come from. “Someone is going to work it out earlier than the other people as to what the tricks are, what the options are, with this active wings, active downforce,” he said. That’s the nub of it: active aero introduces performance potential, yes, but also decision-making, compromise, and the possibility of teams simply choosing the wrong approach for a given circuit or condition.
Layer in the revised hybrid philosophy and you’ve got another variable that can bite. With greater electrification comes more emphasis on harvesting, charging and deploying — and a new set of habits around when to spend energy and when to protect it. Hill boiled it down to the essentials: “Charging it up and deploying it.”
It’s not hard to see why that might produce a messier Q1 than we’ve been conditioned to expect. In the past few years, teams could often arrive at a rough weekend baseline quickly; the cars were familiar, the development language mature, and the simulations had years of correlation. Now the paddock is staring at a regulation set that demands new compromises — and, crucially, new mistakes.
The Barcelona shakedown hinted at the volatility. It was behind closed doors, limited in running — teams could use three of the five days — and it wasn’t a time-setting exercise. But even within those constraints, the field reportedly ended up split by around five seconds. Nobody credible is pretending that gap is representative of true performance. The point is what it reveals: the pecking order isn’t just unsettled, it’s elastic. If you can be “wrong” by that much in the early mileage phase, then 1.3 seconds in Melbourne Q1 suddenly feels conservative.
That’s why Hill’s 1.8-second swing isn’t just pundit theatre. It’s a reminder that in a new formula, the quickest team isn’t necessarily the one with the cleverest idea — it’s often the one that finds a complete, repeatable way to use the idea without tripping over it.
The next clues come quickly. The drivers will be back on track in Bahrain on 11 February for the first of two three-day tests, again in Bahrain, before the circus rolls to Australia. First practice in Melbourne is scheduled for 6 March.
When qualifying arrives, don’t just look at who’s on pole. Look at the cut line. If the spread really is 1.3s — or Hill’s eyebrow-raising 1.8 — it won’t simply mean the cars are harder. It’ll mean the new era is already doing what big regulation changes often do: rewarding the teams that can make complexity look boring, and punishing everyone still rummaging around in that “new toolbox” for the right spanner.
