Nate SaundersMar 8, 2026, 07:56 AM ET
MELBOURNE, Australia -- For 12 glorious laps, as George Russell and Charles Leclerc traded the lead of the Australian Grand Prix back and forth, you could have easily forgotten the furor around Formula 1's cars that dominated the opening weekend of the 2026 season.
The two drivers, both hoping this season is the year they win a first drivers' championship, thrilled the Albert Park crowd with a set of superb overtakes at various points of the racetrack. Russell and Leclerc traded blows until the intervention of the virtual safety car allowed Mercedes to pit -- something Ferrari, perhaps in classic Ferrari style, opted not to do -- and saw the preseason favorite eventually emerge in a comfortable one-two finish with Kimi Antonelli in second.
Their battle was manna from heaven for F1 after what can only be described as an absolutely brutal start to the sport's new era -- one featuring redesigned cars and, the most controversial bit, power units featuring a 50-50 split between combustion energy and electrical power. Russell and Leclerc's brief-but-spectacular duel gave F1 an obvious positive to point to: Through all the negativity, two teams fought for the win and traded places on track.
F1 was quick to circulate a statistic: Last year's opener featured 45 overtakes, Sunday's boasted 120. Leclerc and Russell contributed seven of those in the opening stint.
It felt like a Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of opening weekend. The good had been great, the bad had been very bad. And there was a lot more of the bad.
Drivers had eviscerated the new formula after stepping out of their cars following qualifying on Saturday; three world champions in Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton and Lando Norris all spoke out about the cars in various ways. Norris had said F1 had traded the best and most enjoyable cars to drive for the worst, and certainly there was a remarkably negative mood over the paddock after qualifying, one exacerbated by Mercedes' dominant front-row lockout.
Russell and Leclerc helped lift some of that doom and gloom during their brief fight, and Ferrari's lightning starts might well become a recurring feature in making races come alive this season. Seeing Leclerc's red car go into Turn 1 ahead was exactly the visual F1 needed after such a difficult few weeks from a PR perspective. Should that continue, the excitement of Ferrari having a shot at ending its title drought might well be enough to quiet the noise around these maligned new cars.
We should not get carried away by one good highlight-reel battle, however. As had been the case after qualifying, the glowing positivity of the men who had just fought for the top spots was not shared by those lower down the order.
Most drivers did not seem to have changed their minds and some had found new reasons to despise the revised F1. While the battle for the lead could be framed as a ringing endorsement of the energy deployment that has become so crucial to the new power units, that aspect of Sunday's race echoed just as loud as the criticisms of Saturday.
Video game racing
At one point during his epic battle out in front, Leclerc made a quip on the radio, "This is like the mushroom in Mario Kart."
It was a reference to the overtake and boost mode buttons drivers have at their disposal during a race. Both modes are part of the complicated new hybrid engines and were big selling points of the new rules.
Unlike the drag reduction system (DRS) of old, drivers can use the boosts whenever they want, which F1 hopes will create strategic battles throughout races. Russell called it a "yo-yo effect," and his battle with Leclerc certainly felt like that as they took turns powering past each other. Haas driver Oliver Bearman continued the theme after the race, saying, "Using the boost button, I felt like I was a bit in a video game."
Whether Formula 1 should feel like a video game is up for debate. While the criticisms of Saturday had revolved around how underwhelming a qualifying lap felt around Albert Park's circuit when drivers spent so much of it trying to conserve energy, Sunday's were centered around the moment the drivers got to use it in battles with other cars.
There could be little debate about what Formula 1's reigning world champion thought about the video game racing. Asked if the boost modes now at his fingertips were artificial, Norris replied, "Way too much. It's chaos, you're going to have a big accident. We're the ones just waiting for something to happen and go quite horribly wrong, and it's not a nice position to be in, but there's nothing we can really do about that now.
"It's a shame, it's very artificial, depending on what the [power unit] decides to do and randomly does at times, you can get overtaken by five cars or you can just do nothing about it sometimes, so, yeah, there's nothing we can change about it so there's no point saying any more."
Haas' Esteban Ocon shared Norris' doubts and frustrations and gave an interesting different take on back-and-forth position swaps he encountered, albeit ones that were not televised on the broadcast.
"Very painful," he said about racing with the new cars. "It's painful because you can't do much as drivers. Once you use the boost button, and you have not managed to overtake, or even if you overtake, you are just vulnerable again on the next straight. The other guy is going to overtake again, which happened with Pierre [Gasly] three times. It happened with [Gabriel Bortoleto] as well when I was fighting him two times. I just overtook and got overtaken again."
Cynically, you could replace the names Ocon mentioned with Russell and Leclerc and be left with a very different (and less glowing) description of the battle for the lead. Criticisms of the new formula and the new racing it has created appears to be a matter of perspective based on where a driver is relative to another in the competitive order.
While F1 had been quick to release the data concerning the number of overtakes, it had not included how many of these passes had come after a driver had pushed a boost mode. Given the massive emphasis on the battery boost, you would assume most, if not every single one of them.
That will raise a wider existential question about whether the battery boost has replaced one of the most revered and mythologized parts of wheel-to-wheel racing. Leclerc hinted at this himself when talking about his fight with Russell.
"I just think that it will definitely change the way we go about racing and overtaking," he said. "Before, it was more about who is the bravest at braking the latest. Maybe now there's a bit more of a strategic mind behind every move you make because every boost button activation, you know you're going to pay the price big time after that, and so you always try and think multiple steps ahead to try and end up eventually first. But it's a different way to go about racing, for sure."
This sport will have to face up to a more important question: Is what Leclerc described what Formula 1 should be about? It might well create a more strategic way of racing, but Ayrton Senna was not revered because he was better at using a battery boost than his rivals. It was only one sample, but an overwhelming opinion in the media pen on Sunday evening is that F1 has shifted some of the talent required by drivers when it comes to overtaking.
"It wasn't natural, in the way you've got to approach it," Gasly said, before offering a laundry list of what his job in the cockpit has now switched to. "There's just way more than just driving going on. It's the battery. The energy. The difference between the [power units], with deploying more into Turn 1, less Turn 3, more Turn 6, the lift-off you've got to do to regain, etc. We're taking quite a bit away from the pure driving."
Obviously, this was all after one race. Things might change and driving styles might adapt. Fans might well gain a new appreciation for the added tactical genius that is clearly going to be required to beat rivals going forward, but listening to a lot of the reaction, it was hard not to recall one of Verstappen's early criticisms of the regulations: they're like all-electric series Formula E "on steroids."
Verstappen actually flipped that quote around when he talked about how he wants to see the sport change in the coming weeks and months, and it was not hard to imagine one of the key things the grid's most thrilling wheel-to-wheel racer was missing.
"I love racing, but we can only take so much, right?" the exacerbated Dutchman said on Sunday. "I think they are willing to listen, FIA and F1, I just hope of course that there is some action. I mean, it's not that I'm the only one saying it, I think a lot are saying it, if it's drivers, fans, we just want the best for the sport. It's not like we are critical just to be critical, we are critical for a reason; we want it to be F1, proper F1 on steroids.
"Today, that of course was again not the case."
