“Yes, selling 1,600 stocks of Nortel please.”
Wow. What a wacky weekend that was. Welcome back to Dre’s Race Review, and for the first time this year, it’s time to talk Formula 1. A highly anticipated race with a fan favourite opener in Albert Park, Melbourne, and the first race of a new regulation set that promised cars that were smaller, more nimble, more explosive on power deployment, and better for racing. Did we get that? Yes, and no. This is going to take some explaining, so sit down and grab a brew, this is going to take a while.
A Stock Market Of Vibes
This was one of those weekends where I think to myself… man, I am fucking lucky I don’t invest in stocks. Because if there was a graph of how the vibes felt from Friday through Sunday, it would have looked like a safe from Rollercoaster Tycoon.
Practice was mostly spent poking fun at the unmitigated disaster that was Aston Martin (More on them later), but establishing that Mercedes, who were still allegedly figuring out their deployment, was comfortably top of the timing sheets, besides the Oscar Piastri cameo appearance in FP2.
There was a glimmer of cynical hope when Kimi Antonelli had a huge accident at the end of FP3, spinning into the Turn 2 wall after having a power spike over a bumpy part of the track. Mercedes had just under three hours to rebuild the entire rear of the car and try and get a fix before the end of Q1. And due to Max Verstappen’s rear axle completely locking up going into Turn 1 on his final hot lap, it bought them just enough time to get Kimi out there and safely through. What I don’t think anyone was prepared for, was the sheer margin of brutality that Mercedes dished out. It was like watching prime Michael Schumacher put down one of his signature pole laps that wrecked the field. George Russell on pole wasn’t a surprise. The fact he was on pole by eight tenths of a second over any other car was frightening.
But that wasn’t even the freakiest part. Remember Kimi Antonelli? Mercedes rebuilt a wrecked car, had no time to apply an ideal setup, and within three and a half hours, Kimi was half a second quicker than any other car but his own in P2. WHAT?!
When you combine that to the growing evidence of onboards, it was not a good feeling coming of Albert Park. It had leaked to the press that a Driver’s Meeting had ripped the new regulations to shreds, with Verstappen in particular pissed off over the aftermath of it. Lando Norris, once troller of said criticism in Bahrain, said these were the worst cars he’s ever driven.
The internet had gone ballistic over onboards of the car “superclipping”, the cars harvesting energy while at full throttle (250kw from the motors) to slightly charge the battery rather than deploying it all to the rear wheels at speed. For those who don’t know, because the energy deployment of the 2026 power-units are now 50:50 as opposed to the 20:80 internal combustion ratio it used to be, teams are now allowed to regen nearly 100% more energy compared to the previous regulation set, and it’s even more under “Overtake Mode” the new mode deployed within a second of another car, where you get even kore power at the top end of the power band to aid passing. At its most efficient, the run towards Turn 10, the Superclipping was scrubbing as much as 30 miles per hour off the top end of the car entering the left/right complex.
Now personally, I don’t mind this. I’m a tech nerd who thinks F1 should be the platform to trial and experiment with the best in new technology. But if you’re a vibes-based F1 fan (And I know many of us love the aesthetic element of the sport), seeing drivers lift and coast and harvest energy on a qualifying lap to be as efficient as possible with their batteries is like a Christian backhanding the Pope in the Vatican. It’s not a good look and it’s not going to make people feel good about what they’re watching.
I promise you, that placebo effect means something in this space. Those who truly know the sport know, it’s always been a game of management. From tyres, brakes, to traction and launch control, to refuelling and DRS, it’s always been a matter of juggling the resources you have, and being as efficient as possible in order to win. Sometimes I wish I could shake these people and say: “Your roaring V10’s aren’t as good as you remember”, but here we are. So I was getting to bed on Saturday mornings thinking: “Fuck, this is going to be a walkover.”
I was wrong. Ferrari goes and punches George Russell in the mouth. Charles Leclerc nails his start and gets the holeshot, Ferrari’s smaller turbos in development meaning less energy needed to spool the turbo and get into ideal rev range. And for the first 15 laps, it was a barfight. Passes into Turn 1, into Turn 3, down the back of the track at Turn 11, and it was back and forth, Russell manually deploying his battery to get ahead, only for Leclerc, in similar vein to 2022, counter-attacking.
It brought Lewis Hamilton and the poor-starting Kimi Antonelli into play, and just like that we had a four car fight for the win. Annoyingly, Ferrari had a small “honsing” by extending their stint during the first Virtual Safety Car as Isack Hadjar’s car died, but the first third of this race was the most fun F1’s had in a dry race in quite some time. Tactical passing and more of the track coming into play. Good stuff.
Sadly, a bit more of a conventional race broke out in the back half. Ferrari had a better tyre delta but were unable to make major gains on the two Mercedes up the front, with Antonelli having just too much ground to make up to give Russell something to think about, but it was nice to see a genuinely competitive Hamilton again. I don’t think the win was ever quite on for Ferrari even if they came in right alongside Mercedes, but you’ve got to make them work for it, make them second guess themselves. Once upon a time, Mercedes struggled to control both their elite drivers. They can be fallable.
Max Verstappen had the quietest +12 positions gained day to go from 18th to 6th, but didn’t quite have the legs to get past Lando Norris due to graining in Red Bull’s final set of hard tyres. There’s some fun midfield stories there too which I’ll get to in The Lightning Round, but I think overall… we’re about even on how I feel about these new cars.
The sample size is low, it’s only been one race on a big outlier track. Australia is now a 70%+ full throttle lap now the chicane’s been removed, where deployment was always going to be more challenging, given only Monza and Saudi Arabia are more aggressively ratio’d that way. We need to see China and Japan, more traditional circuits to see how these new cars hold up before I truly pass judgement. But there was a lot of good, a lot of bad, and a lot of in-between where the jury’s still out in my opinion.
Jesus Christ, Aston Martin
At the other end of the grid, Aston Martin became the main characters of the plot for all the wrong reasons. On Thursday, they called a media briefing between team principal Adrian Newey, and Koji Watanabe, the head of Honda Racing Corporation. During that presser they revealed that Alonso and Stroll were going to be limited to 25 and 15 laps respectively because the vibrations of the car were so extreme, there was a risk of permanent nerve damage if they tried to go the distance.
WHAT?!
The greatest car designer of the modern age basically just admitted his car was unsafe for purpose. I’m stunned the press wasn’t more ballistic in their approach after that admittance. Now I made a video about this on our YouTube page because I felt like Newey was throwing Honda under the bus, especially when he insisted that they had a Top 5 level chassis and only 0.75-1 second off the leaders. This was a lie given future running. But it also conveniently ignored testing, where we saw Aston’s in-house gearbox fail multiple times, concerns over the lack of cooling on the car, and the classic Newey trait of overdoing it in terms of packaging. Didn’t look like a Top 5 in Bahrain, that’s for damn sure.
Then the bombshell story dropped on Friday, that Newey that Aston Martin didn’t know that Honda’s staffing was depleted in terms of their relationship as recently as November 2025. Despite the fact that they had a deal agreed back in 2023. Now in my opinion, there’s three sides to every story, Person A, Person B and the Truth.
Do I think Aston were completely in the dark about this until late last year? Nah. Andy Cowell was CEO at the time and was moved into a role of liaising with Honda on development, if he didn’t know, I’d be shocked. Jon Noble at The Race reported earlier in the year that this wasn’t the same Honda that was backing up Red Bull in 2021, and that was kinda obvious given their greater expanses into IndyCar’s hybrid development, as well as trying to recover their crown jewel – Their poor MotoGP squad’s decline and loss of Marc Marquez.
All of this though strikes me as Adrian Newey, a first-time team principal not being able to keep his worst development impulses in check (He had enough talented people in Red Bull to do so, like Skinner, Marshall, Fallows, Prodromou, etc.), while also struggling to handle the media backlash from a job he inherited late due to his own Red Bull departure in the first place. It’s ugly.
And that’s before we talk about the car. Lance Stroll only managed 16 laps through Saturday, with multiple ICE issues severely hampering his running, and only being allowed to race due to Alonso comfortably lapping within 107% during FP3 and Qualifying. The team parked both their cars and treated the race like a test session, which is obviously the right thing to do, but it’s more than obvious they are now sitting as the worst car in the field with severe questions over reliability and outright pace.
Aston Martin hired the best technical mind in F1 history and has gotten significantly worse. Remember, it’s not what you have, it’s how you use it.
The Lightning Round
If you’re more cynical about these new regulations, look at it this way – Everything Christian Horner said about these cars being Frankenstein’d and not realistically functional, turned out to potentially be true. By all means, you don’t have to hand it to him, he’s Christian Horner, but I did find that kinda funny.
Arvid Lindblad looks like the real friggin deal already. He was born the same week Fernando Alonso deliberately held up Lewis Hamilton in Hungary 2007 and yet, he stuffed Liam Lawson into a locker over the weekend. Top 10 pace pretty much the entire weekend and P8 on debut. Super impressive.
Whisper it quietly, because it’s just one race and there’s a lack of running alongside Max, but… Isack Hadjar might be the one Red Bull was looking for.
Audi also got a Top 10 finish on their official debut via a really nice race from Gabriel Bortoleto. A shame Nico Hulkenberg never took the start due to a technical problem, but Gabby finishing P9 and gunning down Lindblad at the end was good to see from Audi’s first full race distance.
If Mercedes were impressive in victory, McLaren as a customer team being 50 seconds off the win was… oof. And that’s before mentioning Oscar Piastri spinning into the wall on his sighting lap and not even taking the start. The Australian podium curse continues for another year. (Seemingly an extra battery deployment he wasn’t expecting coming out of Turn 4, but Zak Brown refused to go into greater detail, at least publicly). In fact, all the Mercedes customers were kinda cheeks here. Gasly just about sparing a point for Alpine again, mind.
Cadillac got a car over the line. That’ll do donkey, that’ll do.
The Verdict: 6.5/10 (Decent) – For a fully dry Australia with a general lack of major shenanigans, this was pretty good. An outstanding start with a lot of fun that definitely mellowed out as the race went on, but it showed that this format does have some potential, even with the potential drawbacks also being displayed. Overall, cautiously optimistic about the future of the series. For now. See you in China.