Concerns have emerged in recent weeks about the risks of a wrong step with the new cars in 2026 ruining the spectacle.
World champion Max Verstappen said that a simulation run he had with the 2026 car, where he was forced to change down gears on the straight to recharge the battery, left him far from happy.
“To me, it looks pretty terrible,” said Verstappen. “If you go flat out on the straight at Monza, and I don't know what it is, like four or five hundred [metres] before the end of the straight, you have to downshift flat out because that's faster. I think that's not the way forward.”
But while Verstappen’s Red Bull team is pushing for changes to be made to help improve matters, F1’s own senior technical figures are far more sanguine about the situation.
In fact, F1’s chief technical officer Pat Symonds thinks team alarm bells about the 2026 situation are far too premature – as he suggests their fears have been triggered by out-of-date data and regulations that are in the process of being refined.
Symonds and his team at F1 and the FIA, making the most of the massive computer power available to it through a partnership with AWS, have been accelerating computer simulations on the 2026 project over recent months.
And it has emerged that the latest car model F1 has is a huge step from what teams have been basing their findings on so far, and is performing in a completely different way.
Source: Autosport