New Formula 1 Regulations Equate To Making The Soccer Goal Bigger

Football (aka soccer) is the biggest sport on the planet. Formula 1 and basketball are both up there, but they don’t come close to soccer by any measure of global popularity. Which, incidentally, will be on full display in this year’s World Cup tournament. Indeed, the last World Cup final in 2022 featuring Argentina’s Lionel Messi was the single greatest sporting event I’ve ever watched live. And I don’t even count myself as soccer fan.

The United States is the big exception to soccer’s global dominance, where football, baseball and basketball are all more popular. The American audience just doesn’t grok soccer’s appeal. The biggest criticism is that it’s low scoring and, therefore, not as exciting. Also, we can’t seem to accept tie scores and penalty shootouts as viable outcomes. To be fair, no fan of soccer actually likes these aspects of the sport. And while most are critical, it doesn’t diminish their passion in the slightest. Because what you get with soccer is constant tension. This builds every time a team goes on the offensive. Most of the time the effort fails. But when they score, it’s a massive victory, and fans celebrate accordingly. The scoring infrequency is a feature of soccer…not a bug. Because fans appreciate the tremendous skill and teamwork required to score a single goal at the top level of the sport.

If you poll Americans, though, they’ll say they want games to be higher scoring. How might that be accomplished? Perhaps the size of the goal could be increased? That would certainly work. But at what cost? All of sudden, much lesser players would be scoring at will. That tension would evaporate. We’d see 20 or 50 goals per game. And the seemingly superhuman skills of Messi and his ilk would be neutralized. You might gain some American fans, but you’d lose the rest of the world. Because the scoring would be artificial.

This is precisely what Formula 1 and the FIA have done with the 2026 regulations. After making my 2026 predictions, I wanted to give it a few races before commenting on the impacts. I might have waited until after Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, but unfortunately those races were cancelled due to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. It’s unfortunate for fans and those race organizers, but it might actually prove to be a net positive for the sport, as it gives the teams, F1 and the FIA five weeks to pivot back to something resembling the previous 75 years of Formula 1 by the time we get to Miami. However unlikely, we can only hope.

To sum up the problems with the new regulations, the hybrid power units force drivers to recharge their batteries in the braking zones and corners. They do this by lifting early, braking early and downshifting early. So braking zones are now recharging zones, and most corners cannot be taken at the limit. Drivers can also choose (or not) when and where to recharge their batteries, which leads to dramatically different speeds at various points around the track. At the most recent Japanese Grand Prix, this caused Oliver Bearman to take evasive action while closing on Franco Colapinto at a 45 kph speed differential into Spoon curve. Bearman was deploying extra power via the boost button while Colapinto was downshifting due to a depleted battery. Bearman hit the barriers with 50 Gs of force and fortunately walked away with only bumps and bruises. Aside from the increased risk that this type of racing creates, illustrated by the Bearman crash, these new regulations are simply antithetical to the spirit and key pillars of not just F1 but motor racing more broadly.

In my debut F1 story, I described the four steps to becoming a fan of Formula 1. This was prior to the groundbreaking Netflix series Drive To Survive (DTS) debut, which almost singlehandedly doubled the US audience for F1. And since then, I’ve just told aspiring fans to watch DTS. It’s a shortcut. But with these new regulations, I need to call out one of those four key steps: Experience Driving on a Track. Fans of sports like football, soccer, basketball and baseball have all had access to the sport from a player’s POV. We can relate to the skill required and what it means to be truly great. If you’ve never driven a car on a race track, then you have no clue about F1. You’ve just bought into the glitz, drama and trendiness. Because if you had driven on track, you’d understand why these new regulations are so tragically flawed. And you’d sympathize with drivers like Max Verstappen who continue to be so critical (criticisms that started back in 2023). It’s not because his car is uncompetitive this year. It’s because these regulations effectively neutralize the two fundamental principles, skills and challenges of piloting a race car: braking and driving on the absolute limit.

Driving a race car boils down to three things: accelerating, braking and turning. Of the three, braking is by far the most challenging. Skill under braking is what separates the good drivers from the great drivers and the great drivers from the generational talents. Nailing a braking zone is like hitting a three-pointer in basketball. It’s the toughest shot to make. How do we know it’s the toughest shot? Because you get an extra point for it. With braking, it’s about applying the minimum amount required to slow the car and make the apex while carrying maximum speed out of the turn. This is where tenths of a second can be gained or lost. There is zero room for error. Drivers do this in qualifying, where the braking zones are uncontested, and they do it during a race, where the best moments in F1 history occurred when two or more drivers fought one another into a braking zone and out of a corner—the equivalent of hitting a three-pointer with a hand in your face.

When it comes to driving on the absolute limit, this is the combination of those three things—accelerating, braking and turning—wherein a driver is pushing the car to the edge of its physical limitations in terms of grip, traction, apex speed, G-forces, deceleration, reliability, etc. It’s flat-out driving from lights out to the checkered flag (with some strategy and tire management in between). This is what we want to see, and the application of this skill is also what separates the good, great and generational.

The 2026 regulations neutralize both of these fundamental skills because braking zones no longer matter, and the cars can no longer be driven at the limit for more than a few corners before needing to harvest energy. It’s akin to eliminating the three-point line in basketball. Imaging that. You can still shoot from downtown, but you only get two points. This would kill the advantage upon which players like Steph Curry have built GOAT-worthy careers. All of a sudden, he’s just like every other player on the court. Fernando Alonso alludes to this when claiming that the team chef could drive these cars just as well. Under the 2026 regulations, there is no decipherable difference between good, great and generational. This is precisely why Isack Hadjar and the rookie Arvid Lindblad (good drivers) appear competitive with Max Verstappen (generational talent) in similar equipment is because Max is trying to apply his objectively superior driving skills to a regulation set that doesn’t reward them, while Hadjar and Lindblad are more quickly adapting to this neutered playing field. It’s also why Kimi Antonelli is competitive with George Russell. Russell is clearly the more skilled and experienced driver under traditional F1 principles (braking and driving on the limit), but those skills no longer offer him the advantage. And they damn well should.

What we’re seeing play out across the F1 universe is three different constituencies offering their input about the new regulations. First, you have the fans, journalists (yours truly), pundits and drivers who appreciate the sport for what it is (and has always been) and feel compelled by our love of the sport to voice our actual opinions. Next, you have those with a vested interest (directly or indirectly) in the new regulations—F1, the FIA, Mercedes, Audi, anyone currying favor with F1 or the FIA, Ferrari to a certain degree, drivers who can’t say what they want—who are being outright disingenuous in their praise of the new regulations and the racing we’ve seen thus far. And finally you have the fans and pundits who just don’t know any better and believe what we’ve seen over the first three races is actually great racing.

Those who support the new regulations point to the wheel-to-wheel action and frequent overtakes of the first three races as proof they are good for the sport. Lewis Hamilton happens to be one of them, but his support needs to be parsed and put into context. First of all, Ferrari has a fast car, and it allowed him to score his first podium for the Scuderia in China. Hamilton’s legacy was in serious jeopardy last season, so this is some welcomed relief. It has also closed an obvious skill gap with his teammate Charles Leclerc. Hamilton’s main point, however, is that the cars are more racy and easier to follow. This is a function of the aerodynamic design, which has less downforce and creates less dirty air. But this is independent from the power unit and power deployment. One would assume we could have one without the other, so these need to be addressed separately.

As for overtakes, this is where the soccer analogy applies. Do we want to see more overtakes? Yes. Just as we’d like to see more goals scored. But not at the expense of the sport itself. And if we have to accept F1 the way it is and has been for 75 years, so be it. We can complain about the lack of overtaking and still love the sport. As Fernando Alonso describes it, “Overtaking these days is accidental. Suddenly you find yourself with a higher battery than the car in front, and you either crash into them or overtake them. It’s an evasive maneuver, not an overtake.” If this is the case (it is), it’s hard to imagine a more damning indictment of the new regs. Of course, this is exactly what happened to Bearman in Japan. He had so much extra power and pace that he had to evade a crash with Colapinto but then proceeded to overtake the Argentine driver going sideways. This is not Formula 1.

What’s encouraging is that Formula 1 is clearly aware of the problem. So much so that it is being accused of doctoring onboard footage so we don’t see the dramatic deceleration on the straights as drivers harvest energy in the braking zones. It’s also been accused of censoring driver criticisms in official press conference videos that it posts online. If the powers that be at F1 were proudly standing behind the new regulations, they’d have no problem with these things. Fortunately, they have some time to fix it before the next race. Unfortunately, it might not be enough. We’re hearing the power split between the internal combustion engine (ICE) and electric could be adjusted from 50/50 to 60/40, respectively, but probably not in time for Miami. Regardless, it sounds more like a Band-Aid than a cure. The only solution is to return to the core F1 principles of braking and driving on the limit. Anything short of that is not F1. As anyone who’s driven a car on track would know.