MELBOURNE, Australia — Formula 1’s controversial new cars didn’t just fail to pass their first audition, they fell flat on their face at the first yell of “action.”
The opening qualifying session of a brand-new regulation era in Melbourne should have been a showcase for the sport’s future. Instead, it produced a largely uninspiring hour of running and a wave of savage criticism from the sport’s own drivers immediately afterwards. Saturday fell flatter than even the most pessimistic critics had feared.
“We’ve come from the best cars ever made in Formula 1 and the nicest to drive to probably the worst,” said despondent new world champion, Lando Norris, after the session. “It sucks, but you have to live with it and just maximise what you get given. It’s certainly different. It’s certainly not like it was last year.”
Four-time world champion Max Verstappen, the man who has frequently teased the prospect he will quit the sport should he ever stop enjoying himself, said he was “not having fun at all driving them,” later telling Dutch media he’s felt “no emotion” inside the cockpit so far this week.
Lando Norris didn’t hide his true feelings in Melbourne when discussing F1’s new cars. Alastair Staley/LAT Images
While this new era features aerodynamic designs which look a lot nicer than F1 cars have looked in a while, the problem lies with what is now underneath the carbon fibre. New rules have introduced hybrid engines with a 50-50 split between combustion and electrical power, resulting in an added focus on managing battery levels, which is sometimes at the expense of driving through corners well below the usual limit. Startling footage went viral during Friday’s practice of cars losing power while at full throttle at the end of straights as hybrid systems switched over to the now-essential energy recovery settings.
The added electrical elements were huge in convincing Audi to join as a new manufacturer, but are largely loathed by the drivers. Speaking in February after just a week of driving the new car, Verstappen memorably said the new cars were like all-electrical series Formula E “on steroids,” a label which Formula 1 might struggle to shake from its new generation of cars.
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Grid grits its teeth, but Russell’s all smiles
What was remarkable about the media pen on Saturday afternoon was how drivers were clearly itching to vent. During his session, ESPN asked Norris if there is anything at all about the new cars he enjoys. The Brit looked down to the floor ponderously for seven seconds, then looked up and said simply: “No, not really.”
Of course, Norris was the last champion of the previous generation of ground-effect cars, the era which ran from 2022 to 2025. Drivers are rarely glowing about cars that replace title-winning machinery — unless they quickly become machines capable of defending a title — and those ground-effect cars were hardly universally loved either. When Norris’ quote that F1 had gone from the best to worst car with one regulation change was put to Lewis Hamilton, who shares his countryman’s frustrations about the new generation, the seven-time world champion laughed and said: “Well, he did!”
Drivers who appear to have the best shot at winning a championship quickly become the best cheerleaders for the existing rules package. In F1, that is a tale as old as time. Norris himself acknowledged this, saying: “I’m sure George [Russell] is smiling, so it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day.”
Mercedes’ George Russell has been dominant in Melbourne and will start Sunday’s race from pole position. Quinn Rooney/Getty Images
The sport has long been trying to manage the reaction to the new cars — CEO Stefano Domenicali has said drivers should not say anything critical at all about the new cars, while he also urged fans and the media not to “panic” a few weeks ago when the first driver criticisms were making headlines. Panic might start setting in over the next couple of days.
Saturday afternoon felt like a bit like a dam breaking. It was always going to be a critical moment in the introduction of the new generation and F1’s response to it will be fascinating. Drivers can stomach just about any kind of car if they know it might take them to a championship, but combine frustrations at the feeling inside the cockpit with a sudden, flattening sense of how far ahead another team might be, and you are lighting a fuse. Qualifying featured the gut-punch of Mercedes’ dominant front row lock out — poleman George Russell finishing nearly a second clear of third-placed Isack Hadjar, who impressed on his Red Bull debut.
Unsurprisingly, all these things considered, Russell was, in fact, smiling broadly about the new generation of car as he sat in the news conference for the top three finishers — something he is going to get used to fast in 2026.
“The car, to be fair, especially in these conditions when they’re lighter, is super fun to drive,” Russell said. “It’s much more agile, the car is much better through the low speed, the ride is much better.
“Obviously, you’re lacking a little bit of high-speed downforce, but that’s going to come. I mean, we’re only at the first race of the new regulations. Then of course on the PU side, there’s a lot to learn. It’s very tricky on a track like this, but it’s part of the game.”
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Russell’s utterly dominant performance had only intensified the swirling cloud of negativity. Mercedes had been careful to downplay their advantage in the weeks leading into Australia and there was a moment during Friday’s first practice session when many wondered if the German manufacturer’s supposed advantage had in fact been overblown.
Over the years, many F1 teams have been accused of “sandbagging” — the paddock lexicon for the art of hiding one’s true pace over testing — and Mercedes’ 2026 might well forever go down as the best example of it given their performance on Saturday. “If they have a few months of that, then the season’s done,” Hamilton said at one point about his former team.
But this was not a simple case of one team being brutally ahead and the rest being sore losers. These frustrations have been building for a while. Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc echoed Norris’ sentiment, saying: “I’ve known more fun.”
Norris’ McLaren teammate Oscar Piastri smirked and nodded when quotes from other drivers were put to him. Footage from Piastri’s car had circulated social media on Friday, showing the alarming reduction of speed he took through the Turn 10 corner, due to a phenomenon known as “super clipping”, when the energy harvesting kicks in and slows the car down despite the driver being full throttle.
Max Verstappen lost control of his car and crashed out of qualifying on Saturday. Getty Images/Getty Images
When one journalist said the onboard had looked quite “depressing” from the outside, Piastri again smiled and nodded his head, without repeating the headline-grabbing word. But what he did say was just as concerning. “I think everyone can see the state of things, but I think it will probably improve a bit,” the Australian said. “But there’s clearly some fundamental things that won’t be very easy to fix and I don’t really know what we do about that.”
Piastri’s hometown circuit was always going to be a brutal starting point for the new cars, given the fact it lacks multiple heavy braking zones. Nico Hülkenberg, who gave one of the more level-headed summaries of the week of racing so far, put a positive spin on things.
“To be honest, it was to be expected,” the Audi driver said of the extreme energy management. “It was part of these regulations. Melbourne is a very energy hungry circuit, and actually I think fourth worst. To get the first race at such a difficult energy track immediately, all things considered, the cars are out running, it’s working, you know? We’ll see tomorrow.”
F1 will be crossing its fingers Melbourne was an extreme example for the reasons Hulkenberg mentioned: it was always going to be an outlier due to its layout. Piastri suggested he anticipates different issues as the circus zig-zags across the calendar. “We’ll have different challenges at other tracks because the tracks are kind of in two categories at the moment, being energy starved and energy rich,” Piastri said. “And there’s a problem with either of those things, but I think when you’re energy starved like this, it’s a lot more obvious.
“I don’t know what the Mercedes lap looks like, but we were lifting and coasting three times a lap. We had two super clips through the lap and in some corners we’ve got, effectively 450 horsepower less, so it’s a massive challenge to get your head around. It’s tough overall.”
Max Verstappen has expressed frustration with the new cars and he will start Sunday’s race 20th in the grid after his crash in qualifying. WILLIAM WEST / AFP via Getty Images
Are there any obvious fixes?
Worryingly, we are already seeing knee-jerk reactions. During preseason testing, Andrea Stella suggested a number of changes that might fix different quirks caused by the new engines. F1 will have a new, longer start procedure for Sunday’s race to counteract the longer time it now takes for the turbo engines to spin up enough to get a car rolling.
Some silliness took place this weekend which highlighted how much F1 and the FIA are struggling to get on top of these options. At the drivers’ briefing on Friday, sources have told ESPN a lengthy discussion took place, with plenty of the drivers voicing their concerns about the new race cars.
On Saturday morning, FIA official Nikolas Tombazis called a news conference to say the governing body was removing one of the sections for “straight mode”, the new name given for the moveable front and rear wing devices otherwise known as active aerodynamics. During the Friday meeting, several drivers had talked about the lack of downforce they had when activating “straight mode” on the curved run between Turn 8 and Turn 9 and suggested it wasn’t wholly safe.
The FIA acted accordingly, but teams were outraged — these cars require set-ups on an absolute knife-edge and a change made on the eve of the final practice session risked teams having to start again from scratch in terms of how they were running their cars. After 30 minutes of confusion, the FIA put out a statement saying they had reversed their own decision.
Melbourne has been the setting for an unharmonious start to the new F1 season with new car regulations frustrating much of the grid. Quinn Rooney/Getty Images
Bizarrely, the FIA suggested drivers such as Gabriel Bortoleto had pushed for the change, but the Brazilian clarified he had simply made the point that he had not felt too much grip when using the system. Bortoleto was annoyed his name had been leaked out into the public as the person who first raised it. ESPN understands drivers have been in agreement that their behind-closed-doors driver briefings should remain just that, secret, and Verstappen was annoyed the information got out, calling it “not very professional.” It should be said, the media got wind of the driver feedback from the press conference Tombazis himself had called on Saturday morning.
While it was a tiny and ultimately irrelevant exchange in an otherwise busy day, the FIA decision, the team outrage that followed, and the U-turn which followed suggests an overall struggle to comprehend how to make changes that will actually make this new formula better. Williams driver Carlos Sainz made the point that F1 will, ultimately, have to wrestle with over the coming weeks as it works out how to get drivers back on board: quick fixes might not solve anything when it’s the half-and-half nature of the new engine rules themselves which seems to be the root cause of all the negativity right now.
“It’s clear that so far no one is happy,” Sainz said. “The only thing we feel is there seems to be a lot of plasters on top of another to try and solve the fundamental issue… that I think this 50-50 hybrid system is giving us a lot of headaches.”
Sadly, it does not seem like a remedy to those headaches will be coming any time soon.
