Has Formula 1 Ever Felt Less Authentic?

Champions play chess at 210 miles per hour.

At the Red Bull Ring in Austria, Lewis Hamilton has Max Verstappen where he wants him. As Verstappen throws his Red Bull down the inside at Turn 3, Hamilton sees it coming and refuses to yield. He sweeps majestically around the outside, retakes the place and leaves Verstappen struggling for grip. It’s strategically flawless. 11 laps later, Verstappen attacks again at Turn 3. Hamilton fights back at Turn 4 but then we see something that doesn’t look like chess at all. At Turn 6, Max plunges down the inside with heavy braking, committing to a gap he seems to be willing into existence. The Red Bull goes through. The commentators shriek with disbelief. The grandstands erupt.

When Verstappen is hailed for the “Overtake Of The Month”, he is asked how he did it.

“I pressed my boost button and suddenly had a bit more horsepower than Lewis.”

The cheek! We’ve seen an immense trick, but the magician is telling us he merely found a switch. It is as if a concert pianist, asked how she played a Rachmaninoff concerto so fierily, pointed to the sustain pedal. “Sometimes it’s actually very funny,” Verstappen said, wryly outspoken about the new racing regulations, “where you see people in front of you fighting, they’re using their battery and actually, by doing nothing, you just pass them. You just pass them on the next straight by literally doing nothing".

It’s fair to say that Verstappen’s definition of “nothing” may not be the same as everyone else’s. He knows how to make other drivers—even those with more championships than him—appear mortal. Yet he has underlined the uncomfortable truth about Formula 1 in 2026. The cars are still astonishing feats of engineering, the drivers still operate at the outer limits of human reflexes and the stakes remain enormous. Yet the sport has suddenly become far too much about the battery.

The new regulations place a much greater emphasis on electrical power. Drivers must harvest energy, conserve it and decide when to deploy it. Complex calculations about where to spend precious electrical reserves lead to moments when a driver can gain a startling advantage simply because his rival has run out of charge. Overtaking has become a game of energy accounting. Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc offered a damning description during the Australian Grand Prix, likening the sudden surge of acceleration to “the mushroom in Mario Kart.” In that video game, you collect a mushroom, press a button and rocket forward. This is a perfectly fine mechanic for a game—not so much for a sport.

Formula 1 has, sadly, complicated the relationship between skill and reward.

A driver can spend an entire lap setting up an attack, only for the decisive moment to be determined by a battery deployment. Two cars pass one another repeatedly, trading places as their electrical reserves ebb and flow. “This is not racing, this is yoyo-ing,” last year’s champion Lando Norris said earlier this season.

The business of driving a racing car is already wonderfully complicated. A great driver knows how to brake later than his rival without locking up, how to feather the throttle on a corner exit to find traction without lighting up the rear tyres, how to place the car so that the next turn becomes an opportunity rather than a problem. Most thrilling of all, he knows when not to lift. Through a fast, frightening corner, where instinct screams how it would be sensible to ease off, the best drivers find the nerve to stay in it. A champion makes the difference that a stopwatch and spreadsheet cannot explain.

Energy management is part of racing and nobody expects drivers to ignore the machinery beneath them. There is a difference, however, between managing a car to extract its maximum performance and managing a system that dictates when that performance is available. The former rewards mastery. The latter can make mastery harder to see.

I first watched a race in the flesh exactly 20 years ago. At the 2006 Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai, the great Michael Schumacher won his final Grand Prix. It was a wet, slippery, unpredictable afternoon. Schumacher carved his way through the field with the sort of authority that makes greatness appear indecently easy. I didn’t need telemetry data to marvel at the Red Baron. The conditions were treacherous, the margins tiny and every pass felt both inevitable and unreal.

I desperately wanted to go to a race this season. But I held off. (I lifted, if you will.) I’ve decided to wait until the regulations make sense, until overtakes feel worth cheering for again. The regulations will correctively move in the right direction next year, and in 2030, fans are being assured F1 might return to its mighty and beloved V8 engines. One can only hope.

This videogamey season, fittingly, has crowned the youngest world champion of all time. After the Mexican Grand Prix where Italian prodigy Kimi Antonelli sealed the deal, the 20-year-old was hoisted on to the shoulders of Verstappen and Hamilton, two duellists who looked overcome with pride. It is an unforgettably cinematic image.

Antonelli is, without question, an exceptional talent. He has performed brilliantly and stayed unerringly cool, cool beyond his years, cool enough to remind us of another champ called Raikkonen who shares his first name. Yet the older drivers, the champions he joins in the pantheon—not to mention us older viewers—would like to see this Kimi sweat a little more. We want the young genius to win because he has found something nobody else can, because he has braked impossibly late or stayed flat through a corner that made everyone else blink. We want to see him wrestle the car, not negotiate its energy budget.

In Formula 1, a millisecond can separate immortality from anonymity. It has to be a place where drivers make machinery look miraculous, not where machinery makes drivers appear interchangeable. A grandmaster does not need extra queens or bishops to manufacture drama. Mushrooms, we must remember, belong in soup.

To read more stories from Esquire India's November 2026 issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest newspaper stand or bookstore. Or click here to subscribe to the magazine.