F1 chiefs rethink rules on fuel-electric split after bumpy start to season
Drivers say 2026 changes demanded counterintuitive driving and pose safety risk
Some spectacular driver battles in the early 2026 races, more overtaking and higher television viewing figures cannot disguise the troubled birth of Formula 1’s new rules era.
Senior figures have gone out of their way to focus on the positives of the new regulations brought in for this season, but one of their fundamental pillars is already being abandoned.
With just five races run ahead of this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix, a path has been mapped out to move away from the approximately 50:50 split between combustion engines and batteries that was at the core of the new rules. The FIA, the governing body, hopes to accomplish this as soon as the 2027 season.
Longer term, F1 is also looking to get rid of the current V6 turbo hybrids entirely. Old-school screaming V8s are coming back by 2031 at the latest, with F1 chiefs believing that using sustainable fuels will allow grand prix racing to return to simpler and cheaper engines.
The much-championed 50:50 power split came about as a means of attracting new manufacturers because of increased electrification, which is in line with wider motor industry trends. It did its job in bringing Audi and Cadillac on board and helped convince Honda to abandon an exit from the sport.
But the compromises needed to make the bigger electrical element work proved too much — and were not enough to prevent the cars being starved of energy or drivers left frustrated. Batteries too quickly running out of power resulted in dramatic drop-offs in speed on the straights, an outcome that world champion Lando Norris says “hurts your soul” as a driver.
Counterintuitive driving was also necessary in order to be quick overall. Drivers had to go into corners more slowly to harvest more energy from lifting off the throttle or braking to charge their batteries so they would have extra power available to go faster down the straights.
One of the most outspoken critics was four-time world champion Max Verstappen, who hinted that he had toyed with walking away from F1, such is his dislike of the new cars. “It’s not nice the way you have to race,” he said early in the season. “It’s really anti-driving.”
Despite the criticisms, early grands prix left opinion divided because the action was not all terrible. The races have been entertaining, as the varying speed differences between cars with and without battery power triggered a new style of overtaking, with drivers passing and repassing each other several times per lap. This has been nicknamed “yo-yo” racing, although many purists see it as artificial.
TV viewership from the early races showed that fans were tuning in too, with increases in numbers according to analysis of F1’s main territories.
Yet sections of the F1 audience did not like the changes, while drivers remained unhappy about some aspects and lobbied for change. Some of the concerns were related to safety issues, and these were addressed quickly.
Start procedures were changed before the beginning of the 2026 campaign to help avoid problems of drivers fumbling their getaways because it was too hard to get the new cars off the line.
There were also tweaks to reduce the extra boost available to cars in the race. The aim was to help avoid the kind of huge closing speeds that triggered a bad crash in March suffered by Ollie Bearman in Japan after he was caught out when trying to pass Franco Colapinto.
But minor tweaks were not going to cure one of the biggest bugbears for drivers and the more hardcore fans: that qualifying had lost its spectacle and challenge because of excessive energy management requirements.
F1 teams and bosses ultimately accepted that the 50:50 element must be abandoned by reducing the role of the battery. Following May’s Miami Grand Prix, an agreement in principle was made to move away from the near-equal split between combustion and electrical power and towards 60:40 from as early as the start of the 2027 season.
To achieve the shift, F1 is looking to increase the power of the combustion engine by 50kW from a nominal 350kW to 400kW and to reduce the battery element from 350kW to 300kW. This will be achieved by increasing the amount of fuel that can be fed into the engine. Additionally, the idea is also to allow greater and faster energy harvesting into corners and potentially making batteries bigger, to store more energy.
Together, these changes should allow the cars to run flat-out more, result in less dramatic speed drop-offs at the end of straights and, critically, be more intuitive for drivers.
Some complications remain to be resolved before the changes can come in for 2027. They include proposals to get round the problem of larger fuel tanks being needed by teams that want to race with the current chassis next year.
The hope is that the shift from 50:50 will put to bed the negatives of the new rules, before the focus then moves to whether the V8s return in 2030 or 2031.
The key battleground for that next era of rules will be how big a role the batteries should have. F1 has learned the hard way in 2026 about the downsides of being overambitious with electrical energy.