Charles Leclerc is among a growing number of Formula 1 drivers who have raised concerns about a lack of overtaking under the sport’s new regulations.
Sweeping changes to power unit, chassis and aerodynamic regulations for 2026 have resulted in a new generation of F1 cars that have already completed two preseason tests in Barcelona and Bahrain.
At the core of the new regulations is a desire to have cars that are powered 50 percent by an internal combustion engine and 50 percent by an electric motor — a target that was put in place to attract manufacturers like Audi to the sport.
The increased electrification, up from 20 percent with the previous generation of power units, has already received criticism from four-time champion Max Verstappen, who described the new formula as “anti-racing” and “like Formula E on steroids.”
Although Verstappen’s comments centered on the need for drivers to manage electrical energy instead of pushing flatout on a flying lap, Leclerc added that the new overtake mode, which replaces F1’s long-standing Drag Reduction System with an electrical boost, also suffers due to the limitations of the new power units.
To replace DRS, F1 has introduced a system that allows a car within a second of the one in front to have access to more electrical power at high speeds, while the lead car’s ability to deploy its electric power tails off.
Known simply as “overtake,” it is intended to give the chasing car a higher top speed to initiate a pass under braking, but Leclerc says it comes with the cost of depleting the battery and making the driver an easy target to be repassed further around the lap.
“I find it, at the moment, extremely difficult to get any overtakes,” he said.
“It might improve with time in how we manage these kinds of situations, but it always comes with a price whenever you’ve got to overtake and the price is a lot more costly than it was in the past.
“That’s why I think it’s very difficult to make an overtake and then pull away, like it was the case last year [with DRS].”
A similar issue has also been raised by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, who believes “simple” tweaks to the regulations — such as decreasing the maximum electrical power output of cars from 350kW to 200kW as previously suggested by the FIA — would help make overtake mode more effective.
“Our drivers have been racing with other drivers during these three days of testing in Bahrain and they found it extremely difficult to overtake,” Stella said. “The fact that you have an additional amount of energy when you follow and you are within one second is difficult to exploit because this extra energy may mean that there is just a little bit more deployment at the end of the straight, if anything.
“So I think, again, as an F1 community, we should look at what can be done to make sure that we have a sensible feasibility when it comes to overtaking. Otherwise, we lose one of the fundamental elements of the nature of racing, which is giving drivers the possibility to overtake.”
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McLaren driver Oscar Piastri reiterated some of his team principal’s concerns.
“Overtaking is certainly going to be different,” Piastri said. “DRS was obviously just a pure advantage you used to gain, whereas now, with the energy boost, you’ve obviously got to harvest that extra energy somehow and then deploy it, which with some of the rules in place is not always that straightforward.
“There’s also some optimisation from all the manufacturers to come, I’m sure, on how to redistribute things and make overtaking as easy as it can be. I think following [from an aerodynamic point of view] is very similar to last year, in all honesty, which is not a big surprise to me.”
Mercedes driver George Russell expects the effectiveness of the overtake mode to vary from circuit to circuit, with some layouts providing better opportunities than others.
“Of course, you can make an overtake by pressing a boost button and spending all of your energy, but you know if you use it unwisely you’ll just get re-overtaken again thereafter and you may get overtaken by more cars,” he explained. “So you will need to be strategic about it, but again we’ll have to wait and see.
“What is also true is every track is going to be different and then how you use your energy is going to be so different. I think circuits like Barcelona, you’ve only got one straight and you’re quite energy-rich there, so all of the teams will be deploying 350kW for quite a long duration down that main straight — therefore, when you use your boost there’s not much of a gain.
“Whereas if you go to a circuit like Saudi Arabia or Silverstone where you’ve got multiple straights one after another, you can’t deploy all of that energy in one straight, so you may see different strategies or different teams using more energy in one, less in another. I think it’s exciting and I think it’s going to be different. Time will tell.”
