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Max Verstappen is right - F1 is losing its soul and the sports owners need to listen to him

23:01, 12 Feb

byBen Hunt

Verstappen is right - the new generation of F1 cars suck.

Not for the first time, I have found myself nodding in agreement with what Max Verstappen has to say. As he delivered his condemnation of the new formula the sport’s rulebook makers have concocted, it is impossible not to understand his point.

It has been nauseating reading news stories from F1 testing that focused on engine compression ratios, deployment, and battery harvesting.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about it here and how I felt the new rules had stripped away F1’s DNA. Talk of ‘lift and coast’ during a qualifying lap to recharge the car’s battery is at complete odds with the F1 I understand and love.

Drivers are being plugged into simulators to establish where an F1 driver can come off the accelerator and recharge a battery is not racing.

Managing is not racing

I put the point to Martin Brundle at a McLaren event at the team’s HQ last week that the sport had lost some of its magic. He rightly pointed out that racing had always been a case of managing, be it a fuel load or a clutch or brake pad, etc. But this just feels a step too far.

“I want to be realistic as a driver — the feeling is not very F1-like. It feels more like Formula E on steroids,” said Verstappen. “The rules are the same for everyone, so you have to deal with that, and that’s also not my problem, because I’m all for that — equal chances, I don’t mind that. But as a pure driver, I enjoy driving flat out, and at the moment, you cannot drive like that.”

It is for this reason, when one of the sport’s purest and most successful racers calls out something unacceptable, that F1 owners Liberty Media should take notice.

Fans at risk of being left in the dark

It’s all very well championing and claiming to boast record growth, new fans, a second F1 film, new lucrative sponsorship deals, but it’s worth reminding that it achieved all those because the core product - the racing - was great. Drivers got it, and, importantly, fans did too.

The situation we have now is that they don’t and won’t when the first race comes in Melbourne. I was there in 2016 when F1 tweaked the rules for the doomed ‘elimination qualifying’. It was a countdown where the slowest drivers were ejected every 90 seconds as part of a countdown clock.

It was an embarrassing disaster, a false way to spice up the action, and, thankfully, it was quickly scrapped. That is less easy to do when the rules relate to the design of the complete car design. We run the risk of having a very different racing formula in 2026 and one that risks alienating new and old fans, and crucially, it’s star drivers.

If it is not racing anymore, then what has F1 become? The sport has always had an identity crisis as it was torn between sport, entertainment, business, and politics, now though, it risks losing its core value, the spectacle of being on the limit. I hope I am proven wrong, but I have very real concerns that this latest attempt to spice up the action has gone too far and could have a negative impact on the sport we love.