Formula 1’s new 2026 cars, mainly the engines, have certainly divided opinion across their early running and some elements to them are more unusual than others.
The huge changes to the car and engine rules were guaranteed to have some unintended consequences or work differently in reality to what was expected.
There have been some wild horror stories and worst-case scenarios predicted over the last couple of years in the build-up to these regulations and while most haven’t come to pass, there are some aspects that are certainly very strange.
After watching and hearing these cars for the first time, and hearing some very telling feedback from all the drivers, here are the oddest consequences of the rules so far.
‘Super clipping’
A bit of F1 jargon already creeping in this year is ‘super clipping’ – one of the more unusual ways of charging the battery.
Clipping was a known phenomenon in the hybrid engine era already. Previously it was when the battery ran out of energy to keep deploying the MGU-K down the straights so total engine power would drop.
The new engines demand a more controlled, deliberate version of that. Super clipping refers to a phase on long straights where the MGU-K is used to run against the engine while the driver is still flat-out.
There is simply not enough energy to deploy the MGU-K at full power the whole way down every straight, but instead of clipping to zero deployment, the MGU-K can be reversed into generator mode: the driver is still on full throttle, the V6 engine is still flat-out, but the electrical system is charging rather than deploying by working against the crankshaft.
This is what leads to cars slowing down while still on full throttle, as observed in testing, but the rules place a specific constraint on how aggressive that can be.
For straightline charging, the MGU-K is capped at 250kW in reverse instead of 350kW. This prevents sudden deceleration effects at very high speed and stops teams from turning the end of every straight into a massive recharging event, as so much of the engine’s power is diverted from driving the rear wheels, to fighting the force of the MGU-K.
However, now the cars have run in reality, more of this is might be exactly what’s needed.
If the super clipping cap was lifted then cars could harvest more aggressively while flat-out at the very end of the straights, replenishing the battery faster and reducing the need for lift-and-coast phases elsewhere in the lap.
McLaren is particularly keen to use more super clipping to eliminate the need to lift-and-coast, as it argues this is the safer compromise: it would be more uniform and predictable because everybody will do the bulk of their recharging there, as it is most effective.
And something that creates a bigger speed differential with lift-and-coast is that doing that switches active aero back into cornering mode, slowing the car down more.
‘The chef can drive the car’
Divisive cars and engines are ripe to be taken advantage of by Fernando Alonso’s penchant for headline-grabbing phrases.
He suggested journalists, or even the team chef, would be able to drive the car as under the limit as he had to in the Turn 12 right-hander.
This is due to the need to avoid wasting energy in parts of the lap where there isn’t much time to be gained, as well as maximising harvesting.
Corner speeds are down this year for several reasons, notably the reduction in downforce. But the effect is far bigger in the faster corners and that is partly down to not wanting to waste energy in them.
A comparison of the minimum corner speeds of Alonso on his fastest lap in Bahrain testing last year versus this year shows he is 34km/h slower in Turn 12.
It’s a crude comparison, with multiple factors contributing including the fact the 2026 Aston Martin is a troubled car, but this data illustrates his point.
As McLaren team principal Andrea Stella says, you have to do “some counterintuitive things from a driving point of view to maximise the exploitation of the power unit and therefore achieve the fastest laptime”.
But this topic isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Bahrain’s got long straights and some fast corners that might be ripe for showing off lift-and-coast or super clipping but at least it has some good recharging opportunities too.
“When we go to Melbourne, there’s much, much reduced energy recovery there, and I think it will be a much bigger topic there, honestly,” said Racing Bulls team principal Alan Permane.
“From sim running already, we know it’s going to be tough. I don’t think that topic will go away.”
Unusual, inconsistent starts
Starts now require a prolonged, aggressive pre-start phase that looks and sounds counterintuitive. And Pierre Gasly says: “I advise you to be sitting with your TV on in Australia, because it could be one that everybody remembers!”
Watching practice starts at testing, we observed drivers sitting stationary in first gear for anything between six and 16 seconds with the throttle open before launching.
The key change is the removal of the MGU-H. Without it, there is no electrical assistance to pre-spin the turbo. Drivers must now hold high revs for several seconds to build exhaust energy, spin the turbine and reduce turbo lag before launch – but then may need to switch the throttle position required to manage the actual getaway and avoid wheelspin.
Read more: What weird 2026 starts look like
Ollie Bearman described the result as “everyone sitting on the grid for 20 seconds, with their rpm all over the place”.
How many revs are needed to spin the turbo enough, but not compromise the race start, seems imprecise. And judging whether you have achieved that is impossible. The timing window to get it right also seems razor-thin: a little too much, or too little, and the launch is very different, so it is more inconsistent.
Then the transition to deploying 350kW of MGU-K power adds another variable as it can’t be used until the car’s doing 50km/h. The launch phase is done between managing the V6 engine, the turbo, and the clutch/throttle demands around that – then there’s a big dump of electric power on top of that to complicate the torque demands even further.
Another factor beyond the sheer inconsistency of the starts is that not all drivers will have enough time needed to pre-spin the turbo based on the current procedure.
For the cars at the back of the grid, they will not have enough time between pulling into position and the race beginning. Hence a late push from some teams for this to change, to give everyone more time on the grid.
Even then you’ll have the sight and sound of 22 cars revving excessively for a prolonged period of time before a start that could be wildly different in execution.
First gear is essential for most
Under the old regulations, first gear was barely used outside of starts, pulling out of the garage, and at the Monaco hairpin.
This year, it will be used far more often thanks to the use of downshifts to optimise energy harvesting and the need to keep the turbo speed up. Gasly says he never used first gear as much across the rest of his F1 career combined as he has so far in testing.
Even on his fastest lap of the first Bahrain test, Max Verstappen dropped into first gear three times – at Turn 1, Turn 8 and Turn 10 – whereas on the equivalent last year he never went lower than second.
Dropping into first has a dynamic impact and some teams are struggling with that more than others. Williams driver Alex Albon says going down to first at high revs does “weird things to the car”.
This will also be a point of difference from car to car – particularly with different power units. Ferrari is widely believed to have a smaller turbo than the rest. That makes it more responsive and may be the reason why the Ferrari-powered cars were generally not dropping into first in Bahrain – it doesn’t need to spin the turbo as much, to prevent lag on corner exit, by having higher revs through the corner.
There’s also the question of what power units can tolerate the more savage treatment on downshifts.
Overtaking aid might be too costly
There are concerns that the straights are becoming slightly pointless, zero-gain parts of the race track. And that bodes poorly for the prospect of overtaking, which McLaren’s drivers have reported as “extremely difficult” when following other cars in testing.
We all knew that the elimination of the drag reduction system as an overtaking aid, replaced by active aero used by all drivers at all times purely to add efficiency in a straight line, meant losing a way for cars to get closer on the straights.
And the natural slipstream is weakened because the cars will be in that low-drag state, too.
The DRS has been replaced by the ‘overtake’ mode that allows for slightly higher recharging capacity and extended MGU-K deployment so you get maximum electrical power for longer than in normal mode.
The problem is testing’s shown there’s going to be a lot of cases where drivers simply don’t have enough energy in reserve to take advantage of that deployment.
George Russell said if you spend your energy making an overtake unwisely, you’ll just get overtaken again. It’ll be track dependent, obviously, and the more places a circuit has to charge and deploy, the more varied and interesting it could be.
But it won’t change the fact that if you use energy to overtake, it could lose you more time somewhere else – whereas with the DRS, that was just free laptime.
Isack Hadjar reckoned you could use overtake to nail the car head, but the cost of getting extra power for maybe only 200 metres on the straight would be spending “five laps recovering energy”.
A proposal from McLaren to allow more recharging on the straights will, Stella claims, give enough flexibility on energy recovery that racing is possible – and then drivers can tap into some of the better characteristics of the cars themselves.
The cars are better in certain conditions: smaller, slightly more nimble, able to follow closely. So Stella reckons you could see overtaking in a “traditional enough” way, but only if the rules change.
Qualifying will get even messier
The problems of queuing and impeding in qualifying as drivers attempt to start their push laps with the Pirelli tyres in the optimum temperature window are well-known.
In 2026, there’s the added complication of the battery demands. You must start your qualifying lap with the battery at maximum state of charge, or you throw away laptime.
On top of that, even on the quick lap you must optimise harvesting during the lap to charge the battery, hence the use of lift and coast. So both prep and push laps are affected.
Particularly during the Barcelona test, the challenge of getting everything prepared was obvious in the low temperatures. That means you have to push harder to get the tyres in the right window.
However, you also want to start the lap with a full 4MJ in the battery, so you don’t want to deploy that energy to help the tyre-warming process.
Now imagine a track full of 22 cars in the dying minutes of Q1 trying to solve these complex equations and the chaos that could lead to.
Oh, and remember there’s still the maximum laptime that prevents drivers going too slowly on outlaps and prep laps in qualifying.
Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur pointed out that tyres alone last year could make a difference of six or seven tenths, meaning that you cannot just solely focus on energy management now.
All of this means an increased chance of extra prep laps, and of cars running out of phase and tripping over each other.
If you thought qualifying was chaotic at times before, just wait…