The tools F1 has to fix its racing problems without using a sledgehammer

Formula 1 can sometimes be guilty of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut when it comes to dealing with problems.

A season or two of single-team dominance often triggers a push to change the rules – unleashing several years of effort to come up with a new formula aimed at helping level the playing field.

Except by the time the new rules come into play, the field has converged hugely as diminishing returns hurt the team at the top – and then everything gets reset to see one squad seize the advantage to repeat the cycle. It is exactly what happened in 2022, when a year after F1 witnessed one of its most epic title battles between Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen, the switch to the current ground effect era opened the door for some Red Bull dominance. And now, just as the field once again appears to be coming together and moving us back to unpredictable grand prix weekends, many imagine that 2026 is going to see history repeat itself.

As F1 design genius Adrian Newey said recently: “Just as everything's starting to converge, and fans are starting to get what they want, we have got an even bigger change – because it’s the first time I can remember we’ve got a new PU and chassis happening at the same time. So, the chances of that blowing the grid apart have to be pretty significant.”

But it is not just when it comes to wide-sweeping rule changes where F1 sometimes gets obsessed with trying to over-complicate solutions.

Last weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix is another case in point, as many within the paddock asked questions about what F1 could do to spice up the Sundays around the principality. Invariably there were a lot of senior figures suggesting that the answer lay in reconfiguring the layout and trying to come up with some more overtaking opportunities – which is obviously not the work of the moment on the narrow streets crammed on the Mediterranean.

The Monaco GP was criticised for being a procession on Sunday again, but there is a simple solution within F1's grasp

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The more logical response is to take a step back and evaluate just why the Monaco GP was lacking in the entertainment factor this year – and the answer lay in the tyres. It was the early red flag that opened the door for a free tyre change and meant the race turned into a rubber-saving no-stopper – where the name of the game was in driving as slowly as possible to not risk requiring a pitstop late on. With the medium and especially the hard far too conservative for what Monaco really needs, it was the fact those compounds could last a whole race that was the root cause of the processional Sunday.

That is why Mercedes’s George Russell was absolutely spot on when he suggested that the answer to making Monaco a thriller again was not in expensive new corners, nor an overhaul of F1 cars – it was in changing the sporting regulations to only bring soft tyres to Monaco.

In removing the possibility for drivers to fit tyres that can comfortably run an entire race distance, it would guarantee tyre changes, would deliver a big undercut and ensure there was the overlap of car performance that is often required to deliver close racing and even overtaking. All it would take for Russell’s plan to become reality would be for a vote at the F1 Commission to change the sporting regulations for Monaco only: removing the requirement for Pirelli to deliver three compounds to teams, and instead make it a one-option-only weekend.

Could the sporting regulations be used to help eradicate debate about DRS and the risk of trains? One senior F1 source suggested that it could: why not make it powerful but then limit the number of times it can be used in a race?

The idea of using sporting regulations to cure technical limitations is something that F1’s senior staff have been pondering for a little while, especially ahead of the 2026 regulations which could throw up some particular challenges in matching the chassis performance to the new power units.

And in fact, we have seen the first hints of that – with the new turbo hybrid power units throwing out plenty of power (still around the current 1000hp level), but energy deployment being critical to the performance profile of the cars and how they will race.

If the teams had been left to their own devices, then it was obvious that the quickest way around a track like Monza would be to burn all the battery power at the start of a straight (as you can carry that speed for a long while), and then lift and coast until the braking zone.
That is not a way to make F1 cars look spectacular, and it is what prompted those concerns from last year about drivers needing to change down gears on the straights to try to recover some energy.

Russell raised one way to fix the Monaco boredom, and it is a pathway F1 is using for its 2026 rule tweaks

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

The initial calls at the time were for this problem to be sorted by changing the engine rules – ramping up the power element of the ICE compared to electrical, and shifting it away from the 50/50 split. Again, a sledgehammer to the problem of cracking a nut.

In response, as part of what seems to be a fresh attitude in being more willing to use sporting regulations, power delivery will now be limited through that rule book. But this willingness to be more open to sorting out problems through tweaks to the sporting regulations does not need to end there.

In recent races, as overtaking has become more difficult because cars are getting harder to follow each other, there has been some increased focus on DRS. A tool that the FIA has at its disposal to ensure DRS delivers what it was originally supposed to – making an overtaking possible but not inevitable – is to alter the length of the DRS zones on a grand prix weekend.
However, with not all DRS switches being equal, what works perfectly for one car is not necessarily the case for another. You could make an overtake possible for a midfield car, but then serve to make it too easy a pass for Red Bull. But if DRS ends up not being quite powerful enough to allow a pass, then that opens the door to DRS trains – where cars play follow-the-leader and circulate together without much opportunity for overtaking.

After a particularly bad DRS train race in Miami, George Russell told Sky Sports: "That race was just incredibly boring for everybody. It was just a DRS train. In F1 you can't overtake if you don't have DRS, and when all the cars have got DRS, you just can't overtake."

But again, could the sporting regulations be used to help eradicate debate about DRS and the risk of trains? One senior F1 source suggested that it could: why not make it powerful but then limit the number of times it can be used in a race? Over a 60-lap race, why not allow it to be used just 20 or 30 times – opening up another element that could deliver significant performance differences between the cars at various stages of the race?

It is being open to thinking outside the box like this – in considering better the core elements and using sporting rules as a tool to improve things - that hold the key to better racing much more than going on the rampage and changing the cars and tracks completely.

Will F1 learn from the past to make subtle tweaks to solve its current problems?

Photo by: Erik Junius