While Formula One’s new regulations were meant to make the sport greener, cleverer and more futuristic, Hanzala Fayaz argues they have made overtaking more about battery management than bravery.
There is a moment in every Formula One race where you want to believe the overtake means something.
A driver lines up the car ahead. They edge closer through the corner. The rear twitches. The front tyres bite. Then they commit, properly commit, and for half a second it feels like the entire race has narrowed into one act of nerve.
That is racing.
Or at least that is what I thought racing was.
The problem with Formula One’s 2026 regulations is that too much of it now seems to come with a battery percentage attached. The sport entered a new era with a roughly 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrical power, 100 per cent sustainable fuel, no MGU-H, active aerodynamics and a new way of overtaking. On paper, it sounds clever. Greener and smaller cars. More manufactures. More overtakes. Every beardy engineer telling us the future has arrived.
But watching it, I can’t help feeling that the future has arrived slightly overcharged.
I understand why F1 wants to become more aware of its environmental impact. It would be ridiculous if the sport just stuck its fingers in its ears and pretended that the world had not changed. Sustainable fuel is a good thing. Attracting manufactures like Audi and Cadillac matters too. F1 cannot just live forever on noise, nostalgia and YouTube clips of V10s screaming through Monza.
But a 50/50 split between engine and electricity feels too far. It starts to look less like Formula One and more like Formula E wearing a designer suit and pretending nobody has noticed.
The biggest issue is the battery management. Drivers are no longer racing each other; they are now racing a spreadsheet too. If you have enough energy, you attack. If you don’t, you wait. If the driver ahead has run out, you fly past. Then a lap later, when they have recharged, they come back at you. It can create action, yes, but action is not automatically drama. A slot machine creates action. That does not make it sport.
This is where I agree with Max Verstappen. He has been warning about these regulations since the simulator days in 2023, long before everyone else started acting shocked. He called it “Formula E on steroids” and, honestly, I see his point. When overtaking becomes a case of who stored enough to boost at the right time, it starts to feel artificial. Not completely fake, but definitely manufactured. It’s as if someone in F1 headquarters looked at the Netflix audience figures and decided every straight needs a plot twist.
That said, not everything about the new rules is awful. I actually like the active aero. There is something strangely fascinating about watching both the front and rear wings open up. We have seen rear wings move for years with DRS, but the front wing changing too gives the cars a proper futuristic feel. For once, different is not the problem.
The problem is that F1 seems to have confused complexity with spectacle.
Fans do not need every race to be simple. We can cope with strategy. We can cope with tyres, fuel-saving, safety car sand the occasional Ferrari pit wall mystery. But the main battle becomes invisible energy deployment, the sport risks losing the rawness that makes people care. Nobody grew up dreaming of watching their hero lift and coast beautifully.
And yes, some people will say the racing is closer now. Fine. More overtakes look good on a graphic. But if the pass feels like it was arranged by a battery algorithm rather than a driver’s bravery, then something has been lost.
The FIA and F1 had time to listen. Verstappen was loud about it. Other drivers were uneasy too. Now changes are already being discussed for 2027, which tells you plenty.
Formula One should move forward. It should be cleaner, smarter and braver.
But it should still feel like Formula One.
Not Mario Kart with a cost cap.