Amid a rising tide of pre-emptive discontent about the new rules, Formula 1 implored drivers and other critics to withhold judgement until at least the first grand prix of the 2026 season.
The judging began as soon as the chequered flag fell in Australia, but it’s tough to say the verdict is in.
Unsurprisingly for a group of 22 largely self-interested athletes, reviews were mixed, sometimes contradictory and occasionally revisionist. While it’s fair to say the majority skewed negative, the new rules also found backers among the stars of the show.
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Critics will have left Melbourne feeling vindicated by what they saw, but others were optimistic that what is tipped to be among the weakest tracks for the new engines delivered a decent weekend of action. Formula 1 will have breathed a sigh of relief that Australia delivered a swag of highlight-worthy moments as a rebuttal against those talking down the sport.
All of them have a point. Where their combined arguments lead, however, is unclear at the dawn of a new season.
SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Let’s quickly refresh ourselves on what’s changed.
Formula 1 has introduced new rules for both the chassis and the engine this year, the biggest single-season change in the sport’s history.
The chassis — narrow and lighter and with less downforce — has been generally praised by the drivers for being nimbler and livelier than its predecessor.
The power unit, however, is a real revolution.
Though it develops an impressive 750 kilowatts, almost half of that is electrical energy.
At a track like Albert Park, where there are very few big braking zones and where the driver spends a lot of time at full throttle, the hybrid motor cannot charge the battery enough for the drivers to always have access to full power.
At energy-poor circuits like these — and Melbourne is among the worst — electrical power must be rationed and actively topped up by redirecting combustion power to the battery or by lifting off the throttle and downshifting to lower gears through corners.
The spectacle was particularly affected in qualifying, where top speed would peak around halfway down the back straight, after which the battery would run flat and speed would decrease despite the driver keeping their right foot to the floor.
Russell’s pole lap, for example, showed an almost 50-kilometre-per-hour decrease in speed without hitting the brakes.
Performance appeared less neutered in the race, when drivers are always a little behind the limit given the need to manage tyres and fuel, as is always the case in motor racing.
But the need to think about the battery and the choice of deployment strategies meant racing was conducted in a totally different way to usual.
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‘LIKE THE MUSHROOM IN MARIO KART’
Sometimes a single pithy quote can cut through a mountain of meticulously constructed analysis.
“This is like the mushroom in Mario Kart,” Charles Leclerc radioed during his battle for the lead with George Russell.
Leclerc was describing the effect of hitting the new ‘boost’ button, which gives drivers instant access to all 750 kilowatts from their power unit, at least until the battery runs flat and they have to recharge.
That fundamental process — deploying full power, running out of charge and needing to regenerate energy — explains almost every move in their battle, which delivered seven changes of lead in the opening nine laps.
“It will definitely change the way we go about racing and overtaking,” Leclerc explained.
“Before, it was more about who is the bravest at braking the latest. Maybe now there’s a bit more of a strategic mind behind every move you make.
“Every boost button activation, you know you’re going to pay the price big time after that, and so you always try and think multiple steps ahead to try and end up eventually first.
“It’s a different way to go about racing for sure.”
Leclerc was on the fence about the rules — after, it’s worth nothing they appeared to come quite naturally to him — but others were more decisive, and most were not complimentary.
Verstappen, the four-time champion, has been criticising the rules all year. Having long ago described these cars as being contrary to what he felt was the DNA of the sport, his comments were more defeated by Sunday night despite rising from effectively 18th on the grid to finish sixth.
“I do care about it, I do love racing, and I want it to be better than this,” he said, criticising what he described as the randomness of pace difference between cars during the race. “We can only take so much.”
Esteban Ocon said the new racing style was “frustrating” because using the boost button to execute an overtake immediately left you vulnerable to being repassed with a depleted battery. “It’s painful, because you can’t really do much as drivers,” he said.
Liam Lawson said “it’s not super fun to drive in the race” because “you’re just constantly managing energy, running out of energy and slowing down at the end of every straight”.
Sergio Pérez, who was disconnected from the sport last year before joining Cadillac, said it was “a very different Formula 1” top what he’d become used to.
“It’s a lot less fun, definitely,” he said. “It’s not as fun as it used to be, the racing side, and with this amount of management that we have to do, it’s not great, to be honest.
“I think we are all with the artificial racing, it’s too artificial. Unfortunately, Formula 1 has changed a lot.”
Pierre Gasly said it “wasn’t natural” and that the rules were “taking quite a bit away from pure driving”.
The reigning world champion, Lando Norris, described the race as chaotic for all the wrong reasons.
“It’s very artificial depending on what the power unit decides to do and randomly does at times.
“You just get overtaken by five cars or you can just do nothing about it sometimes. It’s not for me.”
Norris had said after qualifying that F1 has gone from the “best cars ever made” to “probably the worst”, and he underlined that point after the race.
“Even worse,” he said. “It’s just not as fun as last year.
Merc Dominate as Ferrari call backfires | 02:25
SORE LOSERS?
Norris’s claim that the cars are worse to drive than last year certainly attracted scrutiny.
Though last year’s ground-effect machines were extremely impressive at high speed, they were widely disliked by drivers for needing to be too stiffly set up, for being unpredictable when they snapped out of control, and for being heavy and lazy at medium and low speed.
At all but a few high-speed tracks, they were not the stuff of driver dreams.
“I didn’t hear any one of the drivers speaking particularly good of the last cars, saying they were the best car,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said incredulously. “We tend to be very nostalgic looking at past events.”
Russell, his winning driver, suggested there was more than just politics at play in some of the criticism.
“If he [Norris] was winning, I don’t think he’d be saying the same,” he argued.
“Everyone had a bad back [from last year’s cars] and drivers were complaining about that, but McLaren drivers said there was no porpoising even though we watched their car and they were porpoising.
“Everyone’s always looking to themselves, and we’re all selfish in this regard.
“The truth is last year we had the same engine as them and McLaren did a better job than us and they beat us. Now McLaren have got the same engine as us, the same as Williams and the same as Alpine, and so far we’ve done a better job than them.
“That’s just how the game goes.”
The same argument of course applies in reverse for Russell — that he’s only happy because he’s winning — but it underlines that perspectives in F1 are certainly prone to change depending on competitive position.
“I personally loved it,” Lewis Hamilton, looking rejuvenated this season, said. “I thought the race was really fun.
“I thought the car was really, really fun to drive. I watched the cars ahead; there was good battling back and forth. So far, so good.
“It may seem different, but in my position, I thought it was great.”
‘That will hurt him for a while’ | 01:03
IS IT ANY MORE ARTIFICIAL THAN DRS?
It’s worth making the comparison to the way the sport worked previously, at least when it comes to overtaking.
Overtaking is always difficult when aerodynamics is the dominant performance differentiator. Getting close to another car means the following car is affected by the aerodynamic wake and will lose performance. It means more stress is put on the tyres to make up for the difference with mechanical grip, the following driver simply has to fall back, putting a pass out of reach.
The DRS was introduced in 2011 to counter that effect by allowing the following driver to shed drag by opening the rear wing, which boosts acceleration and top speed down the straight. DRS zones became the principal overtaking spots.
But the drag reduction system often led to breeze-past overtakes that required no particular skill and often no deftness in the braking zone. The car being overtaken had no way to fight back, at least until the following lap. Often finely balanced battles came down to who could best position themselves to use the DRS — or to evade it.
What we saw in Melbourne was almost like a heightened version of that, with drivers deploying and charging their batteries to attack or defend several times a lap — but, crucially, both drivers could do so simultaneously, and both drivers could consider their tactical options in doing so.
It fundamentally changed the way drivers raced — even all the way down to how they tackled each corner — but control was totally in the hands of both drivers.
Perhaps more intriguing is the idea that a slightly slower car can defend against a slightly faster car more easily — as Leclerc did ahead of Russell. The games with batteries made it hard for Russell to sprint away from the Ferrari until Leclerc was taken out of the mix by a poor strategy call.
If we’d been in the DRS era, Russell may well have cruised past Leclerc with his rear wing open, and Leclerc would have been unlikely to have fought back.
It’s also unclear how representative Australia was of the season overall.
As one of the four worst circuits for energy recovery, we saw often massive differences in battery state between drivers, who had to spend a lot of time considering their electrical energy store.
At a circuit where recharging is easier and deployment is less aggressive, we’re likely to see less of a difference in speed, which may neutralise accusations of artificiality.
Lewis calls out Ferrari over strategy | 00:43
SAFETY IN THE SPOTLIGHT
The need for a bigger sample is why no changes will be rushed through before this weekend’s Chinese Grand Prix. It’s not only that the tracks are different; every team and driver now know a lot more about how racing will unfold. If the Australian Grand Prix were run again tomorrow, you can bet they’d all do things differently based on what they learned.
There is, however, one burning question that remains more important than the artificiality or otherwise of the racing spectacle.
The sport was lucky to get away without a massive crash on the grid when Liam Lawson’s car unexpectedly bogged down — something McLaren boss Andrea Stella had warned of during testing.
Dangerous closing speeds — also something Stella forecast — became a feature of pack battles in all parts of the field.
“You’re going to have a big accident, Norris said. “That’s not a nice position to be in.
“Depending on what people do, you can have 30, 40, 50 kilometre per hour speed [differences].
“When someone hits someone at that speed, you’re going to fly and you’re going to go over the fence and you’re going to do a lot of damage to yourself and maybe others, and that’s a pretty horrible thing to think about.”
Even Russell said battling in a group in low-downforce straight mode was “sketchy”.
“I think from a safety aspect [changing] that would make the racing safer, better,” he said.
Stella said it was important F1 addressed the safety impact of the new rules immediately.
“We can hope for the best or we can just do something further to make sure that we reduce this speed differential,” he said.
“This is a very technical matter. I don’t think we should go too far into ‘we should do this or we should do that’.
“My appeal, my call, is to say we should do more. Keep attention on the start, because at some stage that will become a problem.”
After months of speculation, the Australian Grand Prix gave us our first look at the true state of Formula 1 in 2026, but it will take many more races before we can be confident of the verdict.
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