F1 moves a step closer to fixing its 2026 hybrid problem

While lifting and coasting, the car’s brain tells the V6 to keep revving, and it siphons off 350 kW to the battery. But there’s another way the engine can recharge the battery that happens when the driver’s foot is still flat on the throttle. F1 calls this “super clipping,” and while it’s happening, the car’s power output at the rear wheels is significantly curtailed—any power going to the battery can’t go to the rear wheels, and the V6 only has 400 kW to offer. So super clipping has been capped at 200 kW, leaving the other 200 kW (268 hp) to push the car. So sometimes an F1 car has 750 kW (1,005 hp), sometimes it has 400 kW, and sometimes it might just have 200 kW. As will the other 21 cars on track, but not in any coordinated way. The software that governs the hybrid systems is capricious, and it decides when to initiate super clipping, and when to ramp up or ramp down power from the MGU based on how much it has already expended on the lap and how much it thinks it will need. The new engine regs were created to get automakers more enthused about the sport, back before so many of them started pulling back on electric vehicles. It worked: Audi, Cadillac, and Honda signed on to join Ferrari and Mercedes. But as I’ve described above, the new formula means that the cars are energy-starved during a lap, particularly during qualifying when the aim is to drive the car right at its very limit. As we saw in Japan, this has effectively neutered all of F1’s fast corners, because you can reach a shorter overall lap time by using that energy elsewhere. There’s no real problem with lift and coast during a race—as noted before, it’s already common practice in IndyCar and endurance racing. But in qualifying, that’s another matter, and watching the cars lifting and coasting through the 130R corner at Suzuka in Japan was something that demoralized virtually every race fan this author knows. Driving it seems to be worse: McLaren’s Lando Norris described it as “soul destroying.” During the races, the bigger issue is the new formula’s recipe for dangerous speed differentials. If one car has a battery charge and somewhere between 500–750 kW, they’re going to be going a lot faster than another driver that has depleted their battery (and so has just 400 kW), creating speed differentials of up to 70 km/h (43 mph). We saw this when Franco Colapinto’s slowing Alpine caused Oliver Bearman to heavily crash his Haas in Japan. But it can also create accidental overtakes, when the car gives the driver more power than they were expecting or wanted; Norris called out this behavior to his engineer while in the midst of the race at Suzuka. A core tenet of F1, enshrined in the rules for many years, is that the driver alone should control the car. That’s why there’s no traction control, no stability control, and no anti-lock brakes. So you can see why many have an issue with the car’s software now being the thing that decides how much throttle translates to how much power. While a larger-capacity battery would indeed solve the problem, there’s simply no room in those tightly packed chassis to squeeze in any more lithium-ion, at least without significant redesign work. One possible fix is to limit the amount of power that the MGU can deploy in qualifying to 200 kW. This would allow for more time on full throttle to actually get maximum power, although it also means an F1 car would have the same 600 kW (804 hp) power output during qualifying as next season’s Gen4 Formula E car when it’s in its qualifying. For some of the time, anyway… (F1 fans can rest easy. Even if the Gen4 car has all-wheel drive, it’s also more than 30 percent heavier, has less aerodynamic downforce, and still has to race on treaded tires, so F1 cars should remain faster across a single lap of the same circuit. Which is unlikely to happen; the FIA even tweaks the Monaco layout between F1 and Formula E to prevent a direct lap time comparison.) During the races, the FIA might increase the amount of energy that the MGU can harvest from the engine while superclipping. Increasing this from 200 kW to 350 kW would give the car even less power for propulsion while it was occurring, but it would also be able to charge the battery much more rapidly, so you wouldn’t have to super clip for as long, or start so early. Other changes that have been mooted in the past few weeks include allowing drivers to use the more streamlined “straight mode” aero configuration anywhere on track rather than in a handful of defined zones, and even giving the drivers some greater degree of control over the power units from inside the cockpit. F1 gets back to racing May 1–3 in Miami.