McLaren expecting ‘cat and mouse’ racing in F1 2026

McLaren expect to see “cat and mouse” racing between drivers as they adjust to and figure out F1’s new rules for 2026.

F1 is introducing the biggest regulation change in its history with new chassis and engine rules being introduced for the forthcoming season.

The new era of rules could reset F1’s competitive order and will give drivers more power in their hands to make key decisions over energy deployment, regeneration and conservation.

Drivers will have to manage electrical energy throughout races and qualifying laps and will have several new tools at their disposal, including overtake mode, boost mode, active aero and recharge mode.

McLaren’s technical director for performance, Mark Temple, expects the new rules to change the way drivers race each other.

“Obviously there's an amount that we can do to brief the drivers to help them understand the principles which the 2026 regulations and power units create around the need to use your energy more intelligently, more strategically around the lap, the need to harvest energy more consciously and then choose where you use it,” Temple told media including Crash.net.

“A lot of the management of that energy is done by the power unit control, but there's also some elements which are within the driver's control, which they need to understand and use optimally. The simulator is by far and away the best tool for that.

“So working with our partners at HPP, we've been able to kind of recreate some of those behaviours in our simulator, and then initially with the test drivers, then ultimately with the race drivers, do simulations and understand the different challenges that there are for maybe a qualifying lap or a race lap or even different racing situations.

“The part of it is going to involve the information that they receive from the car through the dash, the information they get from the engineers, but a lot of it will just be them learning and understanding how to use that energy and how to manage things for performance.

“I think the most interesting aspect, and in a way the thing that's the hardest to simulate, is going to be those kind of overtaking, attacking and defending scenarios.

“Previously, you got DRS. As long as you were close enough, there wasn't too much of a tactical element to how you used the controls that the driver had, whereas in 2026 the amount of energy that you have will be much more of a factor in the strategy.

“So if you think about somewhere like Bahrain, where you've got three long straights, one after the other, from kind of turn 13 and then on to the start finish straight to turn four, the amount where you use the energy that you have coming out of turn 13, how much you use on each of those three straights, I think will be a really interesting challenge for the drivers.

“And particularly in the beginning, I think they will be on quite a steep learning curve while they understand, ‘if I do this, how does my competitor react’. There’s a bit of cat and mouse there.

“So I think that'll be really both interesting and exciting and I'm very interested to see how that all goes. We can't predict that completely.”

Racing may look 'weird'

Temple has predicted there will be some “unexpected overtaking manoeuvres” as drivers learn best how to battle tactically.

“We've had in previous years the idea of wanting your pack full to help overtake,” he added. “But for the same battery capacity and energy that you have, you had a much lower level of power. So you used it for a longer period of time.

“Whereas now we have a similar capacity battery, but you have a higher level of power, so you can use that more on a single straight, get a bigger boost in that one straight from that extra battery capacity but then maybe your pack is empty.

“If you press your boost mode, and you choose to use all of the energy, you'll then go into the next corner and come out of it with only what you were able to recover in that corner. And that could then leave you exposed in a following straight, which maybe traditionally wouldn't be such an opportunity.

“When drivers are trying to figure out that it's not just about what do they do, it's also how will the cars around them to respond to what they do, we will see more variation, we will see perhaps some unexpected overtaking manoeuvres.

“Or indeed, you'll see a kind of a one driver over committing early getting past, but then compromising themselves in the following straight and I think that will be interesting and I think quite exciting, but also I think a good challenge for the drivers to figure out.

“Personally, I'm quite excited to see how that all plays out but it will definitely be different to what we've seen previously.”

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella added: "It may look a little weird that one car can overtake so easily another car.

"It's important the spectators understand why that was so easily [done], or even that in one car the battery is now quite full, while the car ahead has the battery quite empty. Therefore, something [new] is coming from a racing point of view.

"The power-unit exploitation as a racing and overtaking variable will be particularly important in being able to communicate effectively to our spectators."