Two races at once

// on the pit wall

A spaceship with four tyres

The 2026 power unit

The 1.6-litre V6 turbo hybrid stays, but the petrol engine's share drops and the electric motor gets about three times stronger, for a roughly even split. The complicated MGU-H, which recovered energy from the turbo, is gone. Cars now run on fully sustainable fuel, and the battery can harvest twice as much energy per lap from braking.

Wings that move

The 2026 cars have active aerodynamics. In corners, the front and rear wing flaps sit in a high-grip position that pushes the car into the road. On designated straights they flatten out into a low-drag mode for top speed. It replaces DRS, and every driver can use it every lap.

Downforce, the invisible hand

An F1 car is shaped like an upside-down aeroplane wing: instead of lift, it makes downforce. At high speed it presses the car into the track so hard that, in theory, it could drive upside down on a ceiling. The 2026 cars are lighter, narrower and make less downforce than before, which should make them twitchier and closer to fight.

Racing as energy management

With so much power coming from the battery, a lap becomes a puzzle: where to harvest energy, where to spend it, and when to save it for an Overtake Mode burst when you're within a second of the car ahead. The fastest driver isn't just brave on the brakes; they're also good at maths.

// in the boardroom

The fastest car per dollar

The budget cap

Before 2021, the richest teams simply outspent everyone. Now there's a cost cap on what teams can spend on making the car fast: design, R&D, parts, upgrades. The jump to $215M in 2026 is mostly bookkeeping. Things that used to sit outside the cap, like factory equipment, now count inside it.

Some things are left out entirely: driver salaries, the three highest-paid staff, marketing, and travel. So a team boss's real job is deciding where each dollar buys the most lap time. Is it a new floor, a better simulator, or one more engineer?

Where the money comes from

• Prize money from the sport's commercial revenue, paid out by where you finish in the Constructors' Championship. Every position is worth millions.
• Sponsors who pay to put their name on a car that hundreds of millions of people watch.
• Team value. F1 teams used to lose money. Under the cap, with spending controlled, they're now some of the most valuable sports franchises in the world.

Engineering meets economics

With spending capped, F1 has become an optimisation problem with a budget constraint. The winners are the teams that spend smartest, not the ones that spend most. That's the part I find most interesting: it's research, engineering and strategy all fighting over the same finite pile of money.