Revealing every 2026 F1 car's strength and weakness
The Race F1 Podcast
The Race Media Ltd
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Three events into the 2026 season, the enforced one month gap is the perfect time to take a deep dive into the 11 cars fighting it out on track. Mark Hughes and Scott Mitchell-Malm join Edd Straw to pick out the key strengths and weakness of every team's machinery. Working through each group of teams defined by power unit, we delve into what each team is doing well and not only where each is struggling, but the reasons for these problems and the prospects of there being a fix.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Athletic |
| 0:02.7 | The race is on, and with three races in the history books and a big break in the calendar, |
| 0:16.4 | it's time to zero in on what we've learned about the strength and weaknesses of the 11 |
| 0:20.4 | F1 cars, and of course, the all-important power units. |
| 0:24.3 | I'm Edgure and joining me to sift through everything we've picked up so far are Mark Hughes and Scott Mitchell Mown. |
| 0:30.3 | Right, Mark, before we start getting into the detail, how difficult, how steep has the learning curve been for you in terms of trying to understand all this, given the challenge of the power units, both in terms of understanding what's going on there and how that interacts with the underlying characteristics of the chassis? |
| 0:47.6 | Yeah, well, it's changed that relationship between what's really driving the competitive order. |
| 0:57.4 | The power unit is assumed vastly more importance, hasn't it? And obviously downforce and balance are always going to be important. |
| 1:02.9 | But in terms of the percentages, they're less so than there were. And it's become very, very power unit dominated, especially in |
| 1:13.1 | these early stages where there's a big spread between the performance of the various power |
| 1:17.3 | units. |
| 1:18.4 | Each of the three races so far has given us slightly different things to learn about. |
| 1:26.3 | Some of the teams are learning some of these things for the first time, |
| 1:30.2 | but also in terms of what we are seeing, there's like different layouts and different |
| 1:37.4 | characteristics which are giving us new insights into some of the nuances of this formula. |
| 1:45.2 | And one of the things, Scott, that we've been doing so much in the paddock is just trying |
| 1:48.5 | to understand all of this, isn't it, running around, picking up the quirks of the power |
| 1:52.0 | unit, trying to work out what's in control of the drivers and teams, what's outside of the |
| 1:56.0 | control, why things are happening, how that influences all the other aspects of the car. |
| 2:00.5 | So it's almost like |
| 2:01.9 | a completely different thing, isn't it? All of those assumptions and those foundations for |
| 2:07.3 | evaluating performance of cars in the past actually has shifted quite dramatically. Yeah, |
... |
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