2026 Australian Grand Prix - Melbourne, March 06 - 08

[amr]

It's a game of cat and mouse. Merc slowed down to prevent making the case for ADUO for other teams. Ferrari realised this, and also that they can't really catch and overtake, and it's better to slow down and be just about in the Merc pit window with "protected" tyres while making the case for ADUO. Kimi just did not realise this, is young and eager and no match for the old foxes like Rus Lec Ham. Ham was free to push as he was not damaging the ADUO case since he was not the leading Ferrari.

ADUO is tested on a dyno, no? I don't understand how sandbagging in a race performance would affect this. Merc's rationale for sandbagging was probably to preserve the long stint on the hard tyres + engine life.

I looked into it.
The technical regulation specifies:
"For each ICE supplied by the PU Manufacturers, an average power will be calculated. The methodology to calculate this power can be found in the document FIA-F1-DOC-Cxxx."
I don't know if it's true, but I don't think that customer teams have ICE dynos. So I don't see how this would be measured on a dyno.

Thinking of it, Merc might be saved by the fact that their customers did not shine as much as they did regarding the PU. So they might be able to make the case that it is not the PU that gives them the edge, but rather the integration.

[avantman]

This is quite telling that in the Grand Prix thread people are talking about rules, cars, the batteries harvesting and top speeds, nobody discusses any of those amazing battles, incredible overtakes and defending maneuvers, which we saw so many , Just shows how hollow and meaningless all of that was.

[upsidedowntoast]

This is quite telling that in the Grand Prix thread people are talking about rules, cars, the batteries harvesting and top speeds, nobody discusses any of those amazing battles, incredible overtakes and defending maneuvers, which we saw so many , Just shows how hollow and meaningless all of that was.

F1 official social media has been actively deleting comments and stuff criticizing the new regs. It's honestly truly tragic.

I hope they have an emergency fix for next year where they do something like reduce the peak harvesting rate and allow greater fuel flow on the ICE side to account for the power deficit.

[motobaleno]

I'm looking at important race laps telemetry russel vs leclerc (if this site would be more user friendly I would have attached figures):definitely Mercedes is doing something weird with the battery...something like impulsive on off deployment...I see the result of a perturbative analysis in those graphs...they are minimizing a function...Other teams are not up to this yet. As a matter of fact we consider a battery as a fuel tank...X liters in implies always X liters out no matter how do you extract them...but inside a battery you have complex chemical going on: extraction method could change a little bit that X. A very important bit.

[avantman]

This is quite telling that in the Grand Prix thread people are talking about rules, cars, the batteries harvesting and top speeds, nobody discusses any of those amazing battles, incredible overtakes and defending maneuvers, which we saw so many , Just shows how hollow and meaningless all of that was.

F1 official social media has been actively deleting comments and stuff criticizing the new regs. It's honestly truly tragic.

I hope they have an emergency fix for next year where they do something like reduce the peak harvesting rate and allow greater fuel flow on the ICE side to account for the power deficit.

It is tragic indeed. What’s even worse they knew what all this will look like 3 years ago, Horner and Verstappen called it exactly as it is. But they still did do nothing. Mercedes selfishly and arrogantly vetoed any potential proposals their rivals could make, which would’ve prevented the current fiasco. I am afraid, they will do that again.