After years of stability, F1 reliability can no longer be taken for granted - Ars Technica

Overview

After years of stability, F1 reliability can no longer be taken for granted

Until recently, a driver had maybe a six in ten chance of finishing a race.

Details

First off, apologies for the lack of a Canadian Grand Prix report at the beginning of this week; Ferrari chose last weekend to show us its new electric vehicle, and between that and Memorial Day, one thing led to another, and here we are.

Canada was yet another sprint weekend, meaning limited practice time for teams that are desperate for it in order to collect data on their various upgrade packages. The race, held on an artificial island built for Expo 67, is often one of the season’s highlights, and 2026 did not disappoint, with some excellent duals among the field.

The 19-year-old Italian sophomore Kimi Antonelli now leads his Mercedes teammate George Russell by 43 points in the championship after four straight wins in a row. With 25 points for a win, that means Russell could soon be two whole race wins behind his young in-house rival; never a comfortable spot when competing against someone with identical equipment.

Then again, one need only look at last year’s championship to realize it’s far too soon to be declarative; we’re only five races in. Last year, Oscar Piastri led Max Verstappen by more than 100 points at the Dutch Grand Prix—race 15 out of 24 that year—yet finished the year 11 points in arrears.

It’s not that Russell doesn’t have the measure of Antonelli; he’d been in control of the race—just barely—when his battery suffered a catastrophic failure, ending his day on lap 30. As the late, great British F1 commentator Murray Walker was fond of saying, “To finish first, first you have to finish,” which sounds obvious but contains an important point, as the best Murray quotes always do.

The fragility of the current cars might strike some as odd, but if anything, it was the hyper-reliable hybrids that raced between 2017 and 2025 that are the real outliers. The last few seasons have been the most reliable in the sport’s history, and by some margin. Even in the 2000s, a driver went into each race knowing there was at least a 40 percent chance their car would fail before the checkered flag.

Russell’s exit from Canada surely stung; that much was clear from the way he threw his neck surround out of the car and onto the track in disgust. But reliability has robbed drivers in other races much closer to the flag.

Felipe Massa dominated the 2008 Hungarian Grand Prix, cementing the fact that it would be he and not Kimi Raikonnen who would be Ferrari’s title contender that year. But three laps before the end, a conrod failure destroyed his engine. Mika Hakkinen’s hydraulics failure at the 2001 Spanish Grand Prix happened on the final lap, handing the win to his arch rival and that year’s eventual champion, Michael Schumacher.

Felipe Massa, distraught after an engine failure at Hungary in 2008. His 2009 Hungarian GP had an even worse outcome.

Perhaps the most heartbreaking was Damon Hill’s 1997 Hungarian race. That year’s defending champion, Hill had been unceremoniously dismissed from Williams by the unsentimental team boss after Frank Williams decided that Heinz-Harald Frentzen was the driver his team needed to beat Schumacher. History proved Williams catastrophically wrong; the move was the final straw for head designer Adrian Newey, causing him to leave the team, and although Williams won the 1997 championship with Jacques Villeneuve, that was the last time it did so and marked the beginning of that team’s decline.

Hill, jettisoned too late in the season to find a competitive seat, was stuck with the underfunded Arrows team. But 1997 was the start of a tire war between Goodyear and Bridgestone, and Arrows had the Bridgestone tires, which proved to be the preferred rubber on that hot day in Hungary. After a season of failures and abject results, Hill qualified third but eventually took the lead after the Goodyears on Schumacher’s car blistered.

With three laps to go, Hill led by more than half a minute until a hydraulic leak slowed his car to the point that Villeneuve was able to close him down and steal what would have been a well-deserved and much-needed victory for Hill and the winless Arrows team.

Some practices of those days helped contribute to the problems. Taking each car apart and putting it back together every night almost certainly led to retirements when something didn’t go back together entirely right. Now the cars are left parked at night, and the mechanics are sent home to get some rest.

The rules played a huge part, too, requiring that engines and their components last multiple race weekends rather than using multiple engines in a single weekend. Indeed, retirements were so common that we used to joke that F1 engines ran on magic smoke because when you let the smoke out, the cars stopped working.

For most of the year, the Arrows A18 was an uncompetitive dog of a car. But on Bridgestone tires, in Hungary, it came alive. Until it died.

This year’s power unit reliability issues are due to the fact that these really are all-new power units, even if the 1.6 L capacity and the V6 layout sound near identical to those of 2017–2025. These engines had to be designed to work with conventional turbochargers and not the electronic MGU-H turbochargers of the previous generation.

Instead of a fuel flow restriction of 100 kg/hour, the engines are now limited to 3,000 MJ/hour. And the electric motor—properly called an MGU-K—and lithium-ion battery pack are all new designs for 2026, with more power and energy than last year’s cars. And lest we forget, the hybrids didn’t start with great reliability. They were first introduced in 2014, and that year saw plenty of retirements with power unit problems.

The sport currently has a different power unit problem. As readers are now no doubt aware, the 2026 regulations have painted the sport into a bit of a corner. An F1 car’s battery only has enough energy to power the MGU-K for a fraction of a lap, and the cars can’t make up that difference by regenerative braking alone; they have to divert power from the V6 to the battery. The fastest way to complete a lap, particularly in qualifying, is no longer to just go flat out the whole way.

A few weeks ago, it looked like we had a solution to the problem: rejiggering the balance between V6 and MGU-K, from the current 53:47 to 60:40. Mercedes liked this plan, as did Red Bull, which is desperate to keep its star driver Verstappen engaged in the sport. But to force through the change in rules for next year, at least four of the engine manufacturers have to be onboard, and the rest—Audi, Cadillac, Honda, and Ferrari—aren’t in a hurry to do so.

Ferrari has its hopes pinned on the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities, or ADUO, a process that allows engines more than 2% behind the competition to make performance upgrades to catch up. ADUO, it hopes, will let it catch up to Mercedes, but if everyone gets to tweak their power units for 2026 to make their V6s more powerful, the gap to Mercedes will remain.

So Ferrari thinks it’s in its interest to keep things as they are, even if it means shorter races next season or no more Verstappen. Consequently, Audi and Honda are key to making this happen, according to veteran paddock journalist Jon Noble.

“It feels like somebody doesn’t want me to fight or compete for this championship,” said George Russell after he failed to finish the Canadian Grand Prix.

Next up on the calendar is Monaco, which swapped places with Canada on the schedule to try to group some of the North American rounds closer to each other. With plenty of braking zones and not that many straights, Monaco should flatter the new cars, which are also smaller and more nimble than the machines we’ve seen race around the Principality for the last decade or more.

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Key Takeaways

• After years of stability, F1 reliability can no longer be taken for granted

• Until recently, a driver had maybe a six in ten chance of finishing a race

• First off, apologies for the lack of a Canadian Grand Prix report at the beginning of this week; Ferrari chose last weekend to show us its new electric vehicle, and between that and Memorial Day, one thing led to another, and here we are

• Canada was yet another sprint weekend, meaning limited practice time for teams that are desperate for it in order to collect data on their various upgrade packages

• The 19-year-old Italian sophomore Kimi Antonelli now leads his Mercedes teammate George Russell by 43 points in the championship after four straight wins in a row