Brundle: Warning Why 2026 Rules Threaten Spa Track
Spa-Francorchamps was built to expose the brave. Silverstone was built to reward the committed. For more than seventy years those two circuits have done the same job, they sort the exceptional from the merely fast through corners that demand absolute throttle and absolute belief.
At the 2026 Belgian Grand Prix, Martin Brundle stood trackside and said out loud what a lot of people inside the paddock have been whispering for months. It was not a pundit’s hot take. It was something closer to grief.
“I’ve got a bit of a tear in my eye because we’ve lost all the great corners at Silverstone, and here we are at Spa with the same situation,” Brundle told Sky F1. “These new regulations hurt us on the high-speed circuits”.
The former Grand Prix driver did not stop there. He acknowledged that changes are coming, but argued they are not enough. “We’re doing something about it for 2027 and 2028, and we have to get rid of this concept as soon as possible in 2030 or 2031,” he said.
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That is the story. A sport that set out to become more sustainable and more exciting has, on its most sacred high-speed tracks, made its most famous corners disappear.
The Comment That Stopped the Paddock
Brundle is not prone to drama. He raced at Spa and Silverstone in the turbo era, he has walked those run-offs when they were still grass, and he has commentated on every iteration of Eau Rouge from a near-vertical wall to a flat-out kink in a modern ground-effect car.
His comments came during Sky Sports F1’s build-up at Spa, in a wider discussion about Mercedes and straight-line speed anomalies, and they landed because they crystallized a feeling that had been building since Silverstone two weeks earlier.
Both weekends produced overtaking, but of a strange, unsatisfying kind. Observers in the media centre started calling it yo-yo racing and superclipping, a constant swapping of positions not because one driver braked later, but because one car had charge and the other did not. Live telemetry, usually a staple of the world feed, was largely hidden from viewers at Spa, but the audio told the story. Drivers were audibly lifting off the throttle through corners that for a decade have been flat.
At Silverstone, it was most obvious through Maggotts and Becketts, a complex that should be one long, breathless commitment. At Spa, it was Eau Rouge and Raidillon, and further around the lap at Pouhon. These are corners where Formula 1 used to look its most alive. Now they look like energy management zones.
Brundle was careful to add nuance, because the nuance matters. “When I’m out on track on a Friday, wow they look fast. And when they’re side by side and ducking and diving, it looks a lot of fun to watch. But for now, they’ve got to get on top of the complexities, and there are a lot of them,” he said. He is not saying the cars are slow. He is saying they are fast in the wrong places, and compromised in the places that used to define them.
Why the 2026 Cars Hate High Speed
To understand why a regulation set designed to improve racing has hurt Silverstone and Spa specifically, you have to understand what changed for 2026.
The sport removed the MGU-H, the exhaust energy recovery unit that made the previous power units so efficient and so complicated. In its place, it tripled the power of the MGU-K, the kinetic recovery system, and targeted a near 50/50 split between internal combustion and electric power. Active aerodynamics were introduced, with moveable front and rear wings replacing DRS. The fuel is now 100 percent sustainable. The cars are lighter and shorter than the 2022 to 2025 generation, but still carrying a much larger battery load.
On a stop-start circuit like Budapest or Monaco, the concept works. Heavy braking events give the MGU-K plenty of opportunity to harvest. On a high-speed, flowing circuit like Silverstone, Spa or Suzuka, it does not.
Spa is the longest lap on the calendar at just over seven kilometres. From La Source to Les Combes, the cars are effectively at full throttle for more than twenty seconds if you count Eau Rouge and Raidillon as a straight, which modern cars have. Silverstone is similar, with Copse, Maggotts, Becketts, Chapel and Stowe all flowing into each other. Suzuka, which Brundle also referenced, is the same story. On such circuits we have lost the driver-defining, and thrilling, high-speed corners.
Because there are so few big stops, the system cannot harvest enough energy naturally. Teams therefore have to create harvesting artificially. The internal combustion engine is used as a generator, even at high speed, which means the driver is asked to lift off the throttle, or run a clipped deployment map, through a corner that should be flat, so the battery can be recharged for the next straight.
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As one Sky analysis put it, with the need to charge the hybrid batteries on this fast track, the longest on the calendar, just as with Copse, Becketts, and Stowe at Silverstone, as the engine is used to charge those batteries the arrival speeds into corners like Pouhon at Spa are dulled such that the corner effectively becomes a bendy straight too.
That is the technical heart of Brundle’s tear. When arrival speed is dulled by software rather than by driver choice, the corner stops being a corner.
What It Looks Like On Track
In previous years, Pouhon at Spa was a fourth or fifth gear left-hander taken at close to 260 kph, the car loaded on the outside tyres, the driver feeling the rear start to slide. In 2026, several drivers described taking it flat out without any challenge. Lando Norris, after Friday practice, said it was “not a corner anymore.” Kimi Antonelli echoed him. Max Verstappen offered the most brutal summary of the whole second sector, saying it felt like Formula 3 power trying to push Formula 1 levels of downforce when the battery was empty.
The same pattern emerged at Silverstone. Drivers were lifting through Maggotts and Becketts, not because the car would not make it, but because lifting there gave them three tenths back on the Hangar Straight. It is rational. It is also ruinous to watch.
This is why the television experience felt odd at Spa. There was plenty of passing, but it was not racing as we understand it. Through the audio alone, it was evident that drivers were lifting off through several corners that would ordinarily be taken flat-out, including the fearsome Eau Rouge, in order to harvest battery energy. One car would attack with full deployment down the Kemmel Straight, pass, then immediately have to harvest through Les Combes and Pouhon, allowing the car behind to repass.
Engineers call this energy juggling. Fans call it artificial. Drivers call it exhausting.
Brundle’s second point, that “I think they’re all struggling to really fully understand it, to be honest,” speaks to the cognitive load. The steering wheel now manages deployment modes, harvest maps, active aero angles, and brake balance shifts that change corner to corner. The car is telling the driver how to drive the corner, rather than the driver telling the car.
The Drivers Have Been Warning About This Since Melbourne
Brundle is the most prominent voice, but he is not alone. The grid has been unusually unified on this topic.
Fernando Alonso was the first to sound the alarm on Thursday at Spa, warning that the current harvest and deployment window would make Spa a management exercise. He was proven right by Saturday. Verstappen, who rarely holds back on technical criticism, has talked repeatedly about deployment issues and the lack of connection between throttle pedal and rear wheels.
Lando Norris, Charles Leclerc, George Russell and Oscar Piastri have all spoken, in different tones, about the counterintuitive nature of the cars. In Melbourne, Brundle had already noted that a mistake in a slow corner could actually become an advantage because it allowed more harvesting for the next straight.
It is telling that the criticism is not about lap time. The 2026 cars are still monstrously quick on a single qualifying lap when the battery is fully deployed. The criticism is about rhythm and reward. A driver who gets Maggotts-Becketts perfectly right should be rewarded with speed and time. Under the current concept, that perfect sequence might actually punish him with a depleted battery and a vulnerability down the straight. So the optimal way to drive is to compromise the great corners deliberately.
That inversion is what hurts.
The 2027 and 2028 Patch Is Real, But It Is Not a Cure
The FIA and Formula 1 have not been deaf. After early season data from pre-season testing and the first three flyaway races showed the harvesting problem, the governing body moved to adjust the energy split.
The power split between the internal combustion engine and the MGU-K will shift to 58 percent ICE and 42 percent electric in 2027, before moving to 60/40 in 2028, reducing the electrical dependency. Deployment maps are also being liberalised, and there is discussion about allowing more total energy per lap on high-energy circuits like Spa.
Those changes are being addressed where possible for 2027 and again in 2028, and they will help. A 60/40 split means less energy needs to be recovered, which means less forced lifting. It will reduce the worst of the yo-yo.
But as Brundle argues, it does not fix the philosophy. As long as the formula requires a near-even split and relies entirely on the MGU-K for harvesting, high-speed circuits will always be an outlier that needs to be managed around. You can soften the symptom, you cannot remove the cause without a new power unit.
This is why the conversation has already jumped to 2030 and 2031. That is when the current homologation cycle ends and a new power unit can be introduced without manufacturers writing off billions in development.
FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem is pushing for a return of V8 engines, running on sustainable fuels, by 2030, or 2031 at the latest. The idea gaining traction in the paddock is not a simple return to the past, but a lighter hybrid, a high-revving V8 or V10 running on fully sustainable fuel with a much smaller KERS-style boost for overtaking, not for propulsion. Less harvesting, more noise, more direct throttle connection.
Brundle is now firmly in that camp. Count Brundle in, as one outlet put it.
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Why High-Speed Corners Matter More Than Lap Time
It is easy to dismiss this as nostalgia, to say that Formula 1 has always evolved and that Eau Rouge has not been a true corner since the early 2000s when cars first took it flat with ease. That misses the point of what Silverstone and Spa are selling.
Formula 1 sells itself on being the pinnacle of speed and bravery. There is no bravery in lifting at 260 kph because a battery graphic on your wheel says you must. There is bravery in holding the throttle through Pouhon when the rear is light, in threading Maggotts and Becketts while the car is dancing on the edge of the floor, in climbing Eau Rouge with the wall rushing towards you.
When those corners become energy zones, two things happen. First, the calendar loses its differentiation. If Spa drives like a series of straights connected by harvesting points, it feels no different to any other track. The reason fans save for months to camp at Pouhon or sit at Copse is because those corners are supposed to be different.
Second, the sport changes what kind of driver it rewards. The hybrid era since 2014 has always rewarded intelligence and efficiency. That is right. But it also rewarded drivers who could carry that extra speed through the fast stuff. The 2026 concept shifts the balance too far towards the engineer on the pit wall managing energy targets and away from the driver feeling grip through his fingertips.
We long ago lost Eau Rouge and Raidillon as corners to refined high-downforce cars with grippy tyres and a manicured racetrack, Brundle wrote in his Sky column after the race, but what is new is that we are now losing Pouhon, Copse and Becketts as well, not to grip but to battery state of charge. That is a different kind of loss, and a preventable one.
What Needs to Happen Now
There is no magic switch to bring back the old cars. The manufacturers, Mercedes, Ferrari, Honda, Audi and Red Bull Powertrains, have invested heavily in the current concept and need stability. The championship cannot afford to rip up the rules after one season.
What it can do is be honest about the trade-off. For 2027 and 2028, it should implement the power split change quickly, simplify deployment so drivers are not forced to lift mid-corner, and restore live energy data to the broadcast so fans can understand why a driver is lifting. Transparency would at least replace confusion with comprehension.
For 2030, it should listen to the emotional warning Brundle gave. The tear in his eye was not because the cars are ugly or slow. It was because two circuits that have defined his life in motorsport suddenly felt less special. Silverstone and Spa have survived world wars, track redesigns, V12s, V10s, V8s and V6s. They should not be asked to survive a regulatory concept that treats them as inconvenient.
Brundle’s final assessment after Spa was simple. The sport has known for a while about these issues, but the last two races have unequivocally confirmed that we need a major power unit philosophy change much sooner than later. The great corners are still there on the map. The question is whether Formula 1 will give the drivers the tools to attack them again.
If it wants to keep calling itself the fastest, bravest championship in the world, it has to.
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