Why F1 2026 cars are accidentally overtaking each other

Accidental overtakes, potential pole position laps ruined if you lift off the throttle to correct a slide, computer glitches that cost you podiums, welcome to the weirdness of F1 2026. A rules revamp for this year with a near 50-50 split between the internal combustion engine and battery power was always going to make F1 a different beast from what we knew before. But three races down, drivers and teams are still discovering quirks to the new cars, some of which are truly strange. Here we look at 10 bizarre aspects that have caught our attention so far this year, ranging from amusing glitches to dangerous flaws that need urgent action. Love it or hate it, a lot has been said about F1's new yo-yo style of racing. But one of the most bizarre aspects of this fresh way of battling is that sometimes drivers have made passes by accident. The most recent example was Lando Norris in the Japanese Grand Prix, where he found himself accidentally passing Lewis Hamilton. Norris had fallen foul of a rule where in backing off to avoid running into the back of the Ferrari, he had automatically triggered a different engine mode. So when he got back on the throttle, his power unit deployed a lot more energy than he wanted. That was enough to carry him past Hamilton, but left him with an empty battery for the following straight, so he was quickly overtaken again. It's why Norris pointed to the racing, while exciting on TV, not being as authentic as it appears. With complicated rules and brand new technology, it was inevitable that there were going to be some computer glitches. But teams still appear to be discovering more, and some software bugs are proving extremely costly when they put drivers into the wrong engine modes, or even stop the cars totally. For example, in the Japanese Grand Prix, George Russell lost a position to Charles Leclerc when his car suddenly switched into super clipping mode, which is when a car is at reduced speed because it's harvesting power at full throttle. The cause of this was revealed later to have been an anomaly. Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained that there had been a bug There have been times when teams have been so baffled by what is happening to their cars, that the only course of action has been to do what we do to our computers at home, which is switch it off, and switch it back on again. One of the strangest behaves of the new cars this year has been how power units are automatically getting switched into different engine modes, just because of a brief lift of the throttle. There are rules that dictate a minimum amount of power must be deployed if a driver gets above 98% of throttle, so if a driver lifts off for a moment to correct a slide, or because he has hit a bump and his foot has moved as happened to Kimi Antonelli in Australia, then when they get back on the accelerator, they are powerless to stop extra battery power being burned through. This is what derailed that Australia effort from Antonelli, wrecked a sprint qualifying lap from Charles Leclerc in China, and triggered Norris's accidental overtake of Lewis Hamilton in Japan. In being forced to burn through extra energy, it means an immediate speed boost, but then a lack of deployment several corners later. Speaking after what happened to him in China, Leclerc said, It's a little bit silly to lose half a second, just because of a very small lift at some point. Energy management algorithms are proving to be king with the F126 cars, as computer code cleverly dictates how best to spend the sparse battery power over a lap. There's also a bit of self-learning here too, because the systems adjust the deployment patterns lap to lap, based on what a driver's doing, so adjusting where and how power is deployed for maximum performance. But while this is all well and good if drivers follow exactly what the computer plans for, it leaves little room for freedom. If a driver lifts off in the wrong place, or takes a corner slightly faster, and therefore does not recover as much energy, then the whole lap may be ruined because of it. That is because the computer will already have burned up energy that it thought would not be needed later on, but now it is. Drivers can no longer properly think on their feet, because computers are deciding more than before. F1's race starts a very different build-up this year, with high-revving cars sat stationary for much longer than has been normal in the past. It's all a result of the new power units that got rid of the MGU-H, which was an energy recovery system that made use of hot exhaust gases. The MGU-H was previously called upon at race starts to help spool up the turbo and ensure cars could get away at their optimum performance. With the MGU-H gone, things are now much more difficult and drivers have to rev their cars for around 10 seconds to get their turbo into the right window. Getting that done consistently proved so hard at the start of the year that the FI reacted to fears of accidents and changed the procedure before the lights come on. There's now an extra 5 second pre-start window for drivers to rev their cars, but we're still seeing major differences in the quality of the starts. Drivers are now limited in terms of how much energy they are allowed to harvest on each lap. The limit is also in place for the formation lap before the start, which has triggered its fair share of headaches. With batteries getting rapidly charged under braking and drained when accelerating, the normal stop-and-go formation lap antics to warm the brakes and heat the rear tyres leaves drivers exposed to quickly burning through their recharge limit. Kimi Antonelli and George Russell found in Australia that they'd hit the harvesting ceiling before the end of the formation lap. They then couldn't charge their batteries anymore and were unable to do any burnouts, meaning super cold tyres and poor starts. The recharge limit has also proved difficult for drivers to adjust to for safety car restarts as well, because too much braking and accelerating induces the risk of getting close to the ceiling. This is exactly what caught out Russell in Japan, as he was left without enough battery power to defend from Hamilton at the restart following a safety car for Olly Behrman's big crash. 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A truly bizarre trick has been used by some teams this season to boost qualifying laps, using an emergency procedure to shut down some of the power unit. F1 drivers are supposed to follow a steady ramp-down reduction in battery deployment levels down the straights, typically dropping away from the maximum 350kW in 50kW steps every one second. This helps avoid the risk of a sudden cliff-edge drop-off from full to zero power in an instant. But Mercedes and Red Bull found a way to keep running flat-out for longer and avoid this ramp-down in the final dash to the line on a qualifying lap. They do this by activating an emergency measure that allows them to instantly switch off the MGU-K and go from the full 350kW down to zero. Consequent to this is that the MGU-K must then go into shutdown mode for 60 seconds, which should not be a problem for cool-down laps. But as has been seen several times by drivers, including Alex Alban in practice in Japan, it can cause cars to stop on track if the drivers are not ultra-careful in how they use their throttle. The dramatic speed drop-off that the F126 cars suffer on long straights has been labelled as soul-destroying by Lando Norris. Whereas it was not uncommon for the previous generation of cars to hit top speed towards the end of a straight before they ran out of battery and slowed slightly before the corners, things are much more extreme now. The Australian and Japanese Grand Prix showed the worst of this, as the cars dropped up to 50kph from their peak speed halfway down the straights. The way that this speed drop-off looks and sounds from onboard cameras has become one of the aspects of the new rules that fans are particularly unhappy about. And it's no wonder that addressing this issue, to try to find ways for cars to reach top speed much nearer the end of straights, is one of the key targets of technical meetings set before the Miami Grand Prix to improve the rules. The speed drop-offs at the end of straights, triggered by other cars running out of battery power and because they are harvesting, has triggered one of the biggest safety concerns. It's leading to situations where there are huge closing speeds, as the car in front slows dramatically with the one behind potentially using a bit more boost. It was this exact circumstance of cars on different engine deployment patterns that contributed to Olly Berman's huge crash at the Japanese Grand Prix. The Haas driver had been caught out by the slower Alpine of Franco Colapinto ahead of him and took avoiding action. That put him on the grass, where he lost control and then spun off into the barriers at 308kph. That incident has highlighted that some of the quirks of these cars can have very dangerous consequences which is why some fixes are urgently needed. The new generation of F1 cars have triggered a big rethink compared to previous eras because there are times when it's actually quicker to go slower, even in qualifying. The gains that can be had by harvesting a bit more energy on the way into a corner and delaying getting on the throttle out of it can be quite substantial when it comes to giving a driver a power boost on the straight afterwards. Of course, minimum speeds still count for a lot, but drivers are having to think a lot more about which corners are worth attacking on and where it's better to take it easy.