The biggest rule change in years. Every team started this season with a car nobody had built before — and the order at the front changed because of it.
Three things, and they are the three that matter most to how a car goes round a corner: new engines, new car designs, and 100% sustainable fuel.
That sounds like a short list. It is not. An F1 car is one object: change the engine and you change the shape of the bodywork around it, the cooling, the weight distribution and the way the car behaves under braking. Change the fuel and you change how the engine wants to be driven. Teams did not update last year's car for 2026 — they started a blank sheet of paper.
100% sustainable fuel is the part that will outlive the season. It means the fuel in the tank is not pumped out of the ground, and it is the reason car manufacturers are willing to spend money here at all. If it works at 300 km/h with an engine being destroyed by heat every Sunday, it works in an ordinary car.
A big rule change is a reset. The teams that had dominated the previous years lost the advantage they had built up, because the thing they were good at no longer exists in the same form. Somebody else understood the new rules faster. That is the whole story of 2026 so far, and it is why the championship table looks nothing like the one you would have seen two seasons ago.
2026 has 11 teams, and two of them are new entries: Audi and Cadillac. A rule reset is the only sensible moment to arrive, because everybody else is starting from a blank sheet as well. Joining in a stable year means turning up years behind teams who have been refining the same car since before you existed.
That last one gets reported wrongly all the time, so it is worth being precise about: one race was cancelled, a different race was relocated, and they are not the same event.