F1 2026 - How AI outsmarts Drivers and Engineers

[00:00:00]Today, of course, we have to talk about the energy management in Spa, which was quite weird and which showed the real problems of Formula 1 in 2026. As Max Verstappen said, "Welcome to Formula 1 2026." A number of pilots, not just George Russell, had huge problems with energy management. Now, we have to think about how these new drivetrains work. We have a much too small battery. We have a pretty strong electric motor, which can harvest a lot of energy, but is then limited by the regulators. And in Spa, you have pretty long straights and a pretty long lap. And so, super slipping is unavoidable. That then leads to some weird strategies that cars are suddenly super slow compared to previous years in some areas to have enough energy in other areas. And the energy management is different from car to car. And this whole topic is so complex that teams do not set up the cars themselves anymore.

[00:00:57]There's an AI in the background, which is optimizing the energy management of the car for the driver. But the problem is that teams and driver give away so much control of the system that this AI system is optimizing the car for them.

[00:01:12]And then, if something goes wrong, it's really hard to understand what's the real problem. So, one of the ways how F1 tried to hide these weird strategies was to not show the real speed of the cars in the onboard videos. So, people cannot see how slow the cars really are or how the car slow down on the straights of all the driver is on full throttle. And the system is so complex that we cannot imagine this to be like a button and you press it and suddenly you have the additional energy. And here, it's also important how the driver is driving the car. So, how is he accelerating? How is he pressing the throttle? Is he pressing it very quickly or is he smoothly pressing the pedal or is he releasing it super quickly or not? So, all of are factors which are changing the way how the AI is using the energy management within the car. So, it's highly complex and impossible to understand from someone outside. Not even the teams or the drivers themselves understand it.

[00:02:11]And so, half of the grid was complaining about weird energy management systems within their car because they never know what they get from this drivetrain. In one lap, you press full throttle at the same spot and you get more power than at the previous lap. And it's a really weird behavior that no one can understand. And we are now at a point where the algorithms, the AI, is outsmarting the drivers, the teams, and the fans. So, no one understands what's going on there anymore. And so, the most visible problem is with George Russell, who seems to be driving the car differently than Antonelli. And of course, George Russell said they checked it and it's not about the driving style.

[00:02:51]But in the end, the team confirmed that both had the same amount of energy available. And it was just driven in a different way. And George Russell's car, for example, used more energy in the first half of the lap, and Antonelli's car used more energy at the last part of the lap, which is then better for lap times, for example. The team also said even if the combustion engine in George Russell's car is a little bit worse than the one in Antonelli's, it's only explaining half of it. So, the other half comes from the way how the car is driven. And like I said, half of the grid were complaining about how the energy is being managed by their car, and they have no control over this. And we also saw this in the previous races where drivers suddenly spin on the track, and they say they were just surprised by how much energy they suddenly had. And the power is just spinning the car around because the last lap with the same throttle position, they had a different amount of power.

[00:03:44]So, it's really hard to drive these cars, and we reached a dangerous point now where no one understands these cars and the software that is running in the background anymore, not even the engineers and drivers themselves. And of course, at some tracks with shorter straights, you can cover all of this, but in tracks like Spa with pretty long straights and a pretty long lap, you cannot cover anything anymore. We've been discussing about the problem already for pretty long time. 2 years ago already, I was forecasting that this will be the slowest F1 we have ever seen with a lot of complexity no one wants, and now we have exactly that. We also analyzed that one of the key solutions for this, if you want to keep the hybrid system, would be to have electric motors at the front axle. So, you can harvest far more energy, and you will never run out of energy. So, there won't be any super clipping anymore. Or, you go back to a traditional drivetrain, but that seems like reinventing the dinosaur. So, what do you think? What would be the best solution? What can F1 do quickly to solve this situation? And how can we all find back to the love of F1 that we once had? Let me know the comments below, and see you at the next video.