Who’s really fastest in 2026? F1’s new rules are confusing the pecking order – and the drivers

Formula 1’s new era was always going to bring questions, but its first week of serious running has raised more than most. Preseason testing in Bahrain has offered flashes of performance and plenty of data, yet little in the way of firm answers about how the sport’s new landscape is really shaping up.

On track, the stopwatch has told a shifting story, with different teams looking quick at different moments and no clear benchmark emerging amid a game of smoke and mirrors.

– F1 testing: Who’s posted the fastest times and most laps

Off the track, the uncertainty has been matched by unimpressed drivers and tension behind the scenes. Technical interpretations, competitive suspicion and safety concerns have all surfaced as the paddock tries to define the boundaries of the new rules. With one more test still to come, ESPN makes sense of a fascinating three days in Sakhir.

Who’s fastest?

Headline lap times in preseason testing are often misleading, but this year’s competitive picture has been made even murkier by new power unit regulations and, increasingly, a degree of politics at play.

Ask Mercedes who’s got the fastest package and they say Red Bull. Ask Red Bull and they say they’re fourth behind Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren.

Ferrari point to Red Bull and Mercedes as the teams ahead of them, while world champions McLaren are convinced all three of their aforementioned rivals have the edge.

On paper, F1’s latest generation of power units are remarkable things, capable of producing three times as much electrical power as their predecessors and harvesting twice as much energy around a lap. But in reality that equation means they spend most of a lap starved of energy, meaning simply pushing to the limit is no longer a guaranteed route to the fastest lap time as the battery will soon be depleted.

“It’s ridiculously complex,” seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton said. “I sat in a meeting the other day and they’re talking us through it — it’s like you need a degree to fully understand it.”

One person in the paddock who undoubtedly has the qualifications to get his head around the challenges at play is Williams team principal James Vowles, and like all the best engineers he was able to summarise it in a satisfyingly concise manner.

“Think about it this way,” he said, “in one braking zone, you can nearly fill the battery up, but in half a straight, you can deplete the entire battery.”

It’s no surprise, therefore, that “energy management” became the main talking point in Bahrain this week. Put simply, the more effectively you can harvest energy around the lap under braking and in corners, the more you have to spend on the straights and the faster your eventual lap time will be.

That can mean drivers are no longer pushing to the limit in corners in the knowledge that sacrificing a bit of lap time there will come with the benefit of gaining more time back on the straights. Figuring out how best to balance that equation, especially for a single flying lap, has been a steep learning curve for teams this week, and one that has resulted in a quick-shifting picture of who is actually fastest.

Mercedes insists Red Bull, which is using its own power unit for the first time, has found a way of deploying more energy on certain straights than any other team, with both team boss Toto Wolff and George Russell saying the advantage their rivals have found is worth as much as a second per lap.

“They’re not just a small step ahead,” Russell said. “You’re talking in the order of half a second to a second in deployment over the course of a lap, so it’s pretty scary to see that difference.”

McLaren’s Lando Norris, whose car is also powered by a Mercedes engine, added: “When someone just has a deployment advantage, that’s just a beautiful bit of lap time to have in your pocket. Without trying, you can just go quicker.”

But ask Red Bull’s technical director Pierre Wache if he feels his team is the benchmark and he points back at his rivals.

“We are not the benchmark, for sure,” he said. “We see clearly the top three teams as Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren. They are in front of us from our analysis, and we are behind.

“That is where we think we are at the moment. It is difficult to say about the other because the level of fuel they run, the level of power they run is difficult to say, but it’s currently our analysis and it could be wrong.”

Away from the top four teams, and underlining the view that the competitive picture is constantly evolving, Alpine managing director Steve Nielsen said his data has shown different power unit manufacturers looking strongest on an almost daily basis.

“Honestly, if you’d asked me that in Barcelona [at the first test] I would’ve probably said Mercedes is head and shoulders above the rest. If you’d asked me that on Wednesday [in Bahrain], I would probably have said Red Bull are the benchmark. If you’d asked me yesterday [Thursday], I would’ve said ‘wow, you want to see Ferrari’s long run.'”

Nielsen also stressed that all teams will have learned from each other over the week by analysing different approaches to deploying energy around the lap and will likely converge towards the best solutions as a result.

“I mean, we’re shameless plagiarists, all of us,” he said. “We’ll look at anything anybody else can do on the track, off the track, and if we like it, we’ll steal it. And looking at their speeds, cornering speeds, how they deploy, all of that stuff. We’re all doing it to each other.”

Combine those different approaches to energy deployment with all the other usual testing caveats, such as fuel loads and differing track conditions, and trying to read anything meaningful into the lap times is something of a fool’s errand. Some long run data from Friday suggested the Mercedes and Ferrari had the edge over McLaren, but it is only a small snapshot of a much wider picture that will likely change again when testing resumes in Bahrain next week.

Is it still F1?

If the new regulations are proving confusing for onlookers, the feelings from inside the cockpits are more clearcut. Four-time champion Max Verstappen has never been one to mince his words and didn’t hold back when speaking to the media on Thursday.

“As a pure driver, I enjoy driving flat out,” he said. “And at the moment, you cannot drive like that. There’s a lot going on.

“A lot of what you do as a driver, in terms of inputs, has a massive effect on the energy side of things. For me, that’s just not Formula 1.

“Maybe it’s better to drive Formula E, right? Because that’s all about energy efficiency and management. That’s what they stand for.

“Driving-wise, it’s not so fun.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum was Norris, who, possibly because Verstappen’s negative quotes were put to him and he felt the need to counter, played up the challenge presented by the new regulations.

“It’s a challenge but it’s a good fun challenge for the engineers, for the drivers,” Norris said. “It’s different, you have to drive it in a different way and understand things differently and manage things differently.

“But you still get to drive cars and travel the world and have a lot of fun. So, no nothing to complain about.”

Although not all drivers sided with one of the extremes being forwarded by Norris and Verstappen, all of them seemed to agree the 2026 regulations were certainly “different.” Just from standing trackside there are two fairly big changes to driving style that are both visible and audible. Some drivers (although notably not those with Ferrari engines) are reaching for first gear in Bahrain’s three slowest corners — Turn 1, 8 and 10.

By engaging first gear, the engine revs much higher than it would in second or third, helping to charge the battery while also keeping the turbo spinning at a higher speed to give optimum boost pressure on the exit of the corner and avoid a phenomenon known as turbo-lag.

“I think the one challenge that we’re facing with is using very low gears in the corners, so, to give an example, here in Bahrain, usually the first corner is a third gear corner,” Russell said. “In the previous generation, now we’re having to use first gear to keep the engine, the revs very high to keep the turbo spinning, this is probably the one thing that is quite annoying and isn’t that intuitive.

“Imagine when you drive to the supermarket in your car and you get to the roundabout and you put it in third gear to drive around the roundabout, but suddenly the person next to you says put it in first gear — everything is like wham, revving. For that reason you don’t go in the roundabout to the supermarket in first gear if you’re driving at a sensible speed, but this is the same thing, the car and the engine is designed to go around this corner in third gear, but because of the turbo and the boost and all of this you’ve got to keep the engine revs very high, which means you have to take first gear. The car isn’t really designed to do that, but we’re working around it.”

Another obvious change is slower speeds through fast corners. In some cases there is little to gain by deploying battery power in the high-speed corners, and so it makes more sense to lift a little.

Fernando Alonso, who has been racing in Bahrain since it first joined the calendar in 2004, said it has changed the approach to the high-speed Turn 12 from the cockpit of his Aston Martin.

“Here in Bahrain it has been historically Turn 12 that is a very challenging corner,” he said. “So you used to choose your downforce level to go through Turn 12 just flat, and so you would remove downforce until you are in Turn 12 just flat with new tyres.

“So it was then driver skill that was the decisive factor to go fast in a lap time.

“Now in Turn 12 we are like 50 kph slower because we don’t want to waste energy there and we want to have it all on the straights. So to do Turn 12 instead of going at 260 kph, we are at 200 kph — even our chef [in Aston Martin’s hospitality] can drive the car in Turn 12 at that speed. But you don’t want to waste energy because you want to have it on the straights.

“So I understand Max’s comments because from a driver you would like to make the difference in the corner, driving those 5 kph faster than the others, but now you are dictated by how much energy your engine will have on the next straight.”

It should be said that telemetry data showed Alonso was taking more speed into Turn 12 than his rivals and then needing to lift the throttle while the others stayed flat, but the point of taking slower speeds through the fastest corners still stands.

Power politics

With the added complication of the new rules has come a significant amount of paranoia among teams around what their rivals are doing. Heading into this week’s test, Mercedes’ interpretation of the rules regarding the engine’s compression ratio was a key topic and by the end of the three days it was no closer to being resolved.

The controversy centres around the reduction of the compression ratio from 18:1 in 2025 to 16:1 this year to make it easier for new power unit manufacturers to compete in the sport.

The regulations state that the compression ratio will be measured at ambient temperatures, and it seems Mercedes has found a way to comply with the test when the engine is cold but achieve a higher compression ratio — and therefore more power output — when the engine is running hot.

The FIA has declared its intention to “solve” the issue ahead of the first race of the season and avoid the situation being referred to the stewards or decided in court. One possibility is to change the rules so that the compression ratio limit of 16:1 explicitly applies when the engine is hot, but to push the change through it would require the support of the FIA, FOM and all of Mercedes’ power unit rivals.

There is a feeling among the rivals that Mercedes has been hiding its true performance in testing to prevent the FIA and FOM from siding against the German manufacturer.

“Mercedes are showing some very impressive things, sometimes, but I would say they are hiding a lot more,” Charles Leclerc said on Friday. “I would expect them especially to be a bit ahead of us.”

Verstappen took a more direct aim at Wolff’s assertion that Red Bull has the benchmark power unit.

“For me personally, it’s more like diversion tactics,” Verstappen said. “But that’s okay. I mean, I focus on what we’re doing here with the team. Because honestly, for us, there’s still so much to learn. This new ruleset is so complex that we just want to do our laps and just go from there, to be honest.”

Wolff claims any advantage is only worth “a couple” of horsepower and maintains the FIA was kept in the loop throughout the development of the engine. A change to the rules will need to be made ahead of the looming engine homologation deadline of March 1, and it is not yet clear what it would mean for Mercedes and its three engine customers, McLaren, Alpine and Williams.

Another issue up for debate ahead of the season opener in Australia centres around race starts. Following multiple practice starts by drivers this week in Bahrain, it became clear just how difficult it will be to make a clean getaway using the new power units.

Until the car is over 50km/h the regulations state the power unit cannot deploy any of its electrical boost, meaning the initial getaway is reliant entirely on the V6 turbo engine. Under the previous set of regulations an element of the power unit’s hybrid system, known as the MGU-H, was used to spool the turbo to provide the optimum boost pressure for the start, but the MGU-H was removed as part of the changes to the power unit this year.

As a result, the V6 engine now needs to be revved in advance to build up boost pressure and minimise a common phenomenon in turbocharged engines known as turbo-lag. During practice starts in Bahrain, cars could be observed revving hard for over ten seconds to build turbo boost before finally making their getaway.

There is a belief that the current start procedure — which sees five red lights illuminated at one second intervals before all five are extinguished and the race gets underway — will not provide enough time for drivers arriving at the back of the grid to prepare their turbo in time for a clean start.

The concern is that a significant variation in start qualities up and down the grid could result in collisions.

“We need to make sure that the race start procedure allows all cars to have the power unit ready to go because the grid is not the place in which you want to have cars slow in taking off the grid,” McLaren boss Andrea Stella said.

“This is of bigger interest than any competitive interest. I think all teams and the FIA should play the game of responsibility when it comes to what is needed in terms of race start procedure. I’m thinking about the timings, for instance, the timing of the lights, the timing before the lights.

“They need to be in the right place to make sure that, first of all, it’s a safe phase of the way we go racing.”

The issue is further complicated as Ferrari is believed to have opted for a smaller turbocharger to combat turbo-lag.

A report by The Race claims the Italian team initially raised the issue but was not listened to by its rivals and has since blocked a more recent attempt to change the start procedure.

Stella also raised concerns about overtaking and the possibility of collisions caused by drivers lifting and coasting along straights to harvest energy. He claims changes to the regulations to prevent such issues are “simple”, although those changes would likely be centered on the rules around harvesting and deploying energy, which some teams are clearly doing a better job at than others. All three of the concerns raised by Stella are expected to be discussed at next week’s meeting of the F1 Commission on Wednesday.

In short, far more will be at stake at the final preseason test than the relatively simple matter of who has the fastest car.