F1: Preseason tests show how different 2026 will be

It’s just two weeks until F1 gets underway in Australia, and teams are currently in Bahrain, midway through their third and final preseason test. The 2026 season promises to be wildly different from those of the past few years, with all-new cars, engines, hybrid systems, and sustainable fuels entering the mix and shaking up the established order.

You shouldn’t read too much into times from preseason testing. The cars don’t have to conform to the in-season rules as teams test new components or fit-test rigs; for example, glowing brake discs could once again be seen on some cars that weren’t running wheel covers at an earlier test, something we’re unlikely to see during actual races.

You also don’t know how much fuel—and therefore extra weight—anyone is carrying. In the past, some teams have even made headlines by running too light to set more competitive lap times in an effort to impress potential sponsors. And as the name explains, it’s a test, so drivers will be following run plans devised with their engineers to learn specific things about their new cars. Or as one Internet wag once put it, the times mean as much as “a bacon briefcase.”

All change

That said, the tests are far from meaningless, particularly this year. After 12 years of using the same hybrid power units, the sport has moved to an all-new design. The internal combustion engine is still a turbocharged 1.6 L V6, but that turbocharger no longer features the MGU-H hybrid system that both captured waste energy from the spinning turbine and also eliminated turbo lag. The remaining hybrid system—the MGU-K that harvests and deploys energy from and to the rear wheels—is much more powerful than before and is paired with a 4 Mj (1.1 kWh) battery pack. And like many hybrid road cars, that kinetic energy can come from braking or the engine.

Now, the V6 provides 400 kW (536 hp) and the MGU-K an additional 350 kW, as long as the battery has charge. Cars are allowed to deploy up to 8.5 mJ (2.4 kWh) of electrical energy per lap, so energy management—knowing when and how to harvest and when to deploy—will become as important to F1 drivers as it was during the LMP1h days at Le Mans, or currently in Formula E.

As a result, we’ve seen some drivers try out new techniques, downshifting to a lower gear than might otherwise be used in order to keep the engine revs up (and therefore charging the battery). There’s also a phenomenon called “superclipping” (previously known as derating), where cars slow toward the ends of a straight even as their engine revs rise—here, the cars are sending some of that engine power to the battery instead of the rear wheels to fill the battery so the MGU-K can help shove the car out of the next corner. And that isn’t always consistent lap to lap, as battery state of charge or track conditions change and the cars’ onboard computers juggle how much energy to deploy.

We may have to revisit that topic, as the teams have been asked to test a reduced power output of the MGU-K as a backup plan in case the fears of critics of the 2026 rules come to pass.

Interestingly, the MGU-K won’t be used at race starts—it only begins to contribute above 50 km/h (31 mph). That’s to prevent the danger of some drivers depleting their batteries and therefore slowing much faster than others in the approach to the first or second corner at the start as they superclip, and it has also exposed a potential performance differentiator this year. Ferrari, which also provides power units to Haas and Cadillac, opted for smaller turbochargers that spin up more quickly; the other OEMs all went for larger turbos that generate higher peak power. Ferrari has gambled that the smaller, faster turbos will give it an advantage at race starts and when its drivers have to rely solely on their V6s.

Sleek

I’ll say this for the 2026 crop of cars: They sure look good. They’re a little shorter and narrower than last year’s cars, with slightly narrower tires and much greater diversity among the teams than in the tightly proscribed ground-effect era. Those rules, which ran from 2022 to 2025, gave such little leeway to the teams in design decisions that performance converged to within fractions of a percent across the entire grid. Now everyone looks quite different from one another.

The big thing to look out for this year is who can shed the most drag in straight-line mode. Each car’s front and rear wings are now active, with a raised position called corner mode that generates lots of downforce, and straight mode, which drops both wings to minimize drag (and therefore the energy the car needs to go fast). Ferrari tested an interesting approach to this in Bahrain at one point, with rear wing elements that flipped a full 180 degrees. I wonder if we’ll see that in-season.

The arguments about engine compression ratios are still ongoing. Briefly, Mercedes is believed to have used clever materials science to create an engine in which the compression ratio increases rather than decreases as the engine gets hot. For this year, engines are capped at a compression ratio of 16:1 but measured at ambient temperature. Next week, the teams and the sport’s organizers (the FIA) meet to discuss adding a hot test for compression ratios, which is unlikely to go Mercedes’ way. (For its part, Mercedes says there’s nothing illegal about its engines.)

The Mercedes-powered teams (Mercedes, McLaren, Williams, and Alpine), as well as Honda-powered Aston Martin, have another potential problem. Each power unit has its own sustainable fuel; Mercedes’ is provided by Petronas and Honda’s by Aramco. To ensure it is indeed fully sustainable, there’s a homologation process with an independent third party to verify compliance throughout the supply chain. Unfortunately for these five teams, neither Petronas nor Aramco have finished this homologation process, with a deadline of March 1 fast approaching. Should that not happen in time, we’ll still see those five teams race, but they’ll use a substitute fuel that won’t be optimized for the engines that will burn it.

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