How F1 Replaced DRS With Overtake Mode in 2026

Singapore. October eleventh, this year. Charles Leclerc is six tenths of a second behind Max Verstappen... and he is not trying to pass him. He's trying to stay EXACTLY there.

Why would you park yourself there? That's the worst place on track. Dirty air, boiling brakes.

Because under one second is where the magic unlocks. Formula One's own coverage spelled it out: Leclerc running six tenths behind, quote, allowing him to have Overtake Mode. He wasn't attacking. He was qualifying for a privilege.

Qualifying for a privilege. Okay. Back up. What actually happened to DRS?

Gone. Retired at the end of last season. The flap that opened on the straight, the one thing every fan understood in three seconds... replaced by a battery rule. These cars are roughly fifty-fifty now. Half combustion, half electric. And electricity, unlike a wing flap, runs out.

So the overtaking aid is just... more volts.

More volts, with conditions. Get within one second at a detection point, usually the final corner, and you earn an extra half a megajoule of recharge. Here's the chess part. You can dump it all on the main straight, or spread it over the whole lap. But only that next lap. Use it or lose it.

Wait. So the decision isn't where to pass. It's when to spend.

That's the whole season in one sentence. And hold onto it, because by the end I want to tell you about the day the sport simply switched that privilege off and didn't tell anyone.

Switched it off? You're going to make me wait for that?

I am. First, the drivers. They hated this thing. Esteban Ocon, after the opening races: it's painful, you can't really do much. He boosted past Pierre Gasly, got repassed. Three times. Same guy.

That's not a battle, that's a revolving door.

Lando Norris had the better line. Fighting Lewis Hamilton, he said, honestly, I didn't even want to overtake Lewis. The battery deployed on its own. He went past, had nothing left, Hamilton sailed back by. His verdict: this is not racing, this is yo-yoing.

Hang on. He overtook someone by ACCIDENT?

At Suzuka. One-thirty R, one of the fastest corners on earth. He lifted to avoid hitting the Ferrari, and when he got back on the throttle the rules decided what the power unit did. The Race called them accidental overtakes. Drivers said they were at the mercy of their engines.

Max must have loved that.

Verstappen called it Formula E on steroids. From a four-time champion, that is not a compliment.

So how does any of this make a good race? I'm hearing a lot of complaining.

Because they fixed the worst of it mid-season. April twentieth, teams, manufacturers, the FIA and the drivers sat down, and the changes landed at Miami. Maximum recharge cut from eight megajoules to seven. Super clipping raised from two hundred fifty kilowatts to three hundred fifty. Deployment outside what the FIA calls key acceleration zones, capped at two fifty.

Translate that for someone who isn't an engineer.

Less hoarding, fewer cars randomly firing past each other. Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA's single-seater director, said part of the aim was killing the unintended overtaking, because it was tied to closing speeds. That's a safety problem, not a taste problem.

And did it work?

Partly. Motor Sport Magazine is blunt about it: overtaking numbers went up, but a lot of it was charged batteries catching empty ones, then the favour reversing a lap later. Racing, they said, was intermittent.

So the stat sheet looks incredible and the actual racing is... negotiable.

Which brings us back to Singapore. Verstappen, on his two hundred fiftieth grand prix start, wins by seven point three seconds from Leclerc. Antonelli third. And his race engineer all afternoon sounds like a man reading a bank statement. Quote: if we can continue to eke this out, it will only help our cause.

Eke it out. That's household budgeting language. In a race car.

It is now. George Russell describes the whole lap as one energy account. Go faster through a corner, you harvest less, you pay for it on the straight. Gain two tenths braking, lose three tenths accelerating.

So the overtake I see on lap fifty was really decided on lap forty-eight.

Sometimes earlier. Hold station, build the charge, wait for the lap where the car ahead is clipping... then spend everything at once. It looks improvised on television. It almost never is.

Okay. Now tell me about the day it got switched off.

Five days before that race. October ninth, the FIA confirmed that in sprint qualifying at Singapore, after a red flag for Sergio Perez's crash, Overtake Mode simply wasn't available for a period. Their words: human error in race control. A separate timing fault delayed the next session.

So drivers were out there with less power than their rivals and had no idea.

That's what the FIA's own statement describes. Yes.

And I gather the sport's already backing away from fifty-fifty?

The World Motor Sport Council has signed it off. Moving away from fifty-fifty from next year, heading to sixty-forty by twenty twenty-eight. More engine, less battery. They've also disabled Overtake Mode in wet and low-grip conditions.

So the thing we spent all season learning to read is already being rewritten.

And that's the lesson. Formula One didn't swap a moving wing for a button. It swapped a geographical rule for an economic one. The question used to be where can I pass. Now it's can I afford to.

Austin's next, October twenty-third to twenty-fifth. I'm watching the gap now, not the move.

Watch the car sitting six tenths back, doing nothing. That's not a driver who's stuck. That's a driver with money in the bank.