Racing Formula One drivers now have to lift off on the straights.
The chequered flag has dropped on the F1 season opener. And I am grumpy. Nothing to do with my favourite team, Atlassian Williams F1 Team, being on the back foot. They will advance.. given time.
No, it’s the sight of F1 drivers engineering, not driving, their way to the fastest lap by having to lift the throttle on the straight and ‘harvest battery’. Instead of driving eyeballs out kamikaze style. They actually go slower in some parts of the lap.. so they can go faster overall.
Pushing buttons and fiddling with knobs on the steering wheel has long been a feature of Formula One. No problem with that. But getting drivers to do things like ‘lift and coast’ every lap to charge up the battery – which makes up 50% of the 2026 power units – is not racing. It’s engineering. And overly complicated engineering.
We want our drivers to race. Yes, they can also think. There’s nothing wrong with a Professor Prost duelling with an aggressive car-muscler like Mansell. A thinking driver – a Hill, Button or Sainz – has always appealed to me over a blunter instrument like an early-career Verstappen or a Montoya.
But we are asking our drivers to be systems engineers, not just pedallers.
The real F1 systems engineers – the brainiacs – aren’t behind the wheel. They are back at the factory monitoring screens or sitting on the pit wall calmly giving instructions over the intercom. They do the engineering. And the drivers do what they have always been best at. Race hard. Win gloriously. Spray the champers afterwards.
Life feels correct that way. Jobs done by those best suited to them. Each to their trade.. Socrates said that. Or maybe Plato.
An engineer looks stupid spraying champagne. A racing driver looks silly having to lift off to go faster.
It reminds me that singer, songwriter, harmonica player and guitarist Bob Dylan is rightly considered a genius. But add a pair of cymbals strapped between his knees… and he becomes a half-wit.
That’s all it takes.. one pair of cymbals and you go from lauded genius to joked-about one-man band.
Let the drivers race. Flat out.
Andrew Greenhalgh 