2026 F1 Thread

Still counts. 👍🏽🇯🇵🏎️
And great strap.

Lando Norris:

“Honestly, some of the racing… like, I didn’t even want to overtake Lewis,”

“It’s just about the battery deploys, and I don’t want it to deploy, but I can’t control it. So I overtake him, and then I have no battery, so he just flies past. This is not racing, this is yo-yoing."

“When you’re just at the mercy of whatever the power unit delivers, the driver should be in control of it, at least, and we’re not."

I stand by the previous negative comments I've made about this regulation set, it's absolutely terrible. More drivers have spoken out against it since, too, it's no longer just Max. I feel the sport can't continue like this, they even hid 130R in Antonelli's pole lap video to hide the super clipping. The FIA's claim is they couldn't show that section due to a data issue, but apparently the footage of that corner was already available during the session in the onboard live stream.

The incident with Bearman and Colapinto demonstrates the safety issue with it as well, which I think is what the FIA will use as justification to backtrack somewhat. Their official statement from a couple of days ago indicates this is at the very least being looked at.



On the positive side, the cars are slightly smaller and look better, and they do seem to be able to follow more closely so I think the aero side of things is a real improvement. There have been signs of good racing this year. All they need to do is address the disastrous energy recovery problems. Drivers should not be having to coast through corners to go faster on straights and having their cars automatically decelerate without their input.

Idk how Mercedes keeps doing all these cheats/innovative interpretations and the FIA keeps on agreeing with it. First it was compression ratio. Then it was the front wing slow closing. Now it's the sudden shutoff of the MGU at the end of qualifying. Used to be a Red Bull thing to do all of these cheats/innovative interpretations of the rules.

What's the old addage... If you're not cheating, you're not trying!

It's literally the job of these teams to extract the maximum possible performance out of the car within the regulations, and to do that they have to look for things other teams may not have found. Every team does this, it's part of what makes the sport great.

This year, the other teams have complained to the FIA about the Merc and so far the FIA has found no wrongdoing. To the other teams, I would just quote Christian Horner when he was responding to Toto complaining about the other teams being better in a previous year: "You've got a problem, change your fυcking car."

I'm not a Mercedes fan, but they're no different from anyone else, they've just executed better by finding a solution the other teams missed to get a faster car. If it's legal, they deserve their advantage. McLaren had some sort of funky tyre advantage last year, Red Bull had the blown diffuser, Ferrari tried the same thing in 2019 by bypassing a fuel flow sensor but pushed the limits a bit too far and the FIA came down on them for it.