Every driver on the 2026 grid has, at some point, been asked a version of the same question: how much of your F1 driving style has this year’s regulation reset taken away from you? Most reach for a version of frustration.
Reigning World Champion Lando Norris, characteristically, reached for a shrug. “I’ve had to change my driving style every single year of my life,” he told Motorsport.com in Hungary. He waved away George Russell’s struggles to get with Mercedes’ new-generation car as a problem of experience rather than regulation. For Norris, that kind of reinvention isn’t an obstacle 2026 introduced. It’s simply the job description.
The context for the quote is quite important to note. Norris was needled about Russell specifically because the contrast alongside him is so stark. Russell has spent much of 2026 explaining, weekend after weekend, why the fastest car on the grid hasn’t translated into the results he wants. His power until, which seems to reward fresh instincts over accumulated ones, visibly unsettled the Briton. His teammate, Kimi Antonelli has looked instantly at home in it.
Norris made the comparison explicit. “I guess for him it’s worked for 20 years. For me, it’s not worked,” he said, drawing a direct line between Russell’s largely unchanged approach and his constant reinvention. “It’s our job, it’s what we’ve got paid millions to do,” he said, describing adaptation not as a hardship but as the entire point of being paid to drive a Formula 1 car.
It’s a small distinction, but it’s one that matters for anyone trying to reach the grid behind him. Norris isn’t describing a skill some drivers have and others don’t. He’s describing an F1 driving style that teams now expect every driver to arrive already halfway trained in. That’s exactly the problem feeder-series programmes have spent the past year trying to solve.
Why 2026 Demanded a New F1 Driving Style
The reason Norris and his rivals keep returning to this theme has little to do with raw instead. Instead, it comes down to energy. This year’s power units run close to an even split between combustion and electrical power. Drivers now have to actively manage when they harvest and deploy it, rather than simply chasing grip lap after lap.
Braking zones double as charging opportunities, straight-line “super clipping” tops up the battery without sacrificing top speed, and a manual Boost mode hands drivers direct control over how much stores energy they release in a fight for position. None of it rewards an F1 driving style built purely on instinct and outright grip. Instead, it punishes it.
In fact, Norris has been specific about where this shows up most sharply. “Qualifying is very different to in previous years,” he said earlier in the season. He pointed to how drivers now have to think about battery deployment across an entire flying lap rather than simply carrying maximum speed through every corner.
That’s a wholly different mental exercise to the one junior categories still teach. Formula 2 and Formula 3 cars carry no equivalent energy strategy. So, drivers have to build the specific F1 driving style Norris is describing from nothing the moment they arrive. There’s nowhere lower down the ladder to learn it first.
Even so, drivers with a full season of the new cars behind them describe the adjustment as starting from zero. Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson, who arrived in F1 having raced through the junior single-seater ladder, DTM and Super Formula, said that the 2026 machinery still felt alien to him. “They’re unlike anything I’ve ever driven.”
Lawson’s own driving style, sharpened long before he ever reached F1, still hadn’t prepared him for the step up. What’s more, he was equally blunt about the jump from Formula 2, arguing the gap has always been too large to bridge gently. It isn’t smaller this year either. It is just differently shaped.
Formula 2 exists as a spec category almost by necessity. Organisers keep it deliberately affordable and mechanically simple, because most of the drivers racing in it are still, technically, amateurs building a CV rather than a living.
Nobody was ever going to redesign it around F1’s new power unit philosophy just to smooth the transition. So if the car itself can’t close the gap facing junior drivers, the coaching around it has to.
Coaching an F1 Driving Style It Can’t Yet Test
The shift now becomes visible. A generation of junior drivers who came up racing on simulators before they ever sat in a single-seater have an unusual advantage. Screens and data readouts shaped their instincts as much as seat-of-the-pants feel did. That happens to be exactly what a 2026 F1 driving style rewards. So programmes are leaning into that advantage rather than treating it as a curiosity.
Red Bull’s junior pathway is the clearest example on the current grid. Rather than a single pre-season outing in an old car, the team gave Arvid Lindblad three separate sessions in a two-year-old Racing Bulls chassis ahead of his rookie campaign. He did this along with his FP1 appearances at Silverstone and Mexico that Red Bull has since credited with confirming he was ready for promotion.
Granted, none of that mileage was in 2026-specification machinery – teams can’t simply hand a junior driver the current car outside a race weekend – but it built the one habit a 2026 F1 driving style can’t survive without: thinking several corners ahead of the throttle pedal instead of reacting to it.
Indeed, Lindblad himself has been candid that preparing for last year’s car barely translates to building the F1 driving style this one demands. He described his build-up as something closer to relearning the job from scratch than refining an existing one. Asked directly how differently he’d need to prepare, he waved the question off much the way Norris did in Hungary.
“It’s not really something I think about,” he told Autosport at the Bahrain test – a rookie’s version of the same shrug.
The F1 Driving Style Gap Coaching Alone Can’t Close
None of it fully closes the gap. Running an older car sharpens racecraft and rebuilds a driver’s sense of speed. However, it does nothing to teach the specific, counterintuitive habits – lifting on straights, sacrificing entry speed for a corner exit that recharges the battery – that define what a 2026 F1 driving style now demands.
Still, simulator work helps more. However, even the best simulator can’t fully replicate trusting a car that feels like it’s actively working against your instincts.
Which is why Norris’ blunt take from Hungary lands as more than a press conference throwaway. In a season where the sport’s most experienced drivers are relearning instinct just to keep their F1 driving style current, and its only rookie counts as fortunate for having no old habits to unlearn in the first place, adaptability has become the trait every junior programme is now coaching for.
Teams won’t judge the next driver to graduate from F2 on lap time alone. They’ll judge how quickly that driver can do what Norris has done every year of his career – rebuild an F1 driving style from nothing, and make it look instinctive.
Featured image credit: motorsport.com
Edited by Alexandra.
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