Pierre Gasly has been careful about how he criticises Formula 1's 2026 regulations. He still ended up saying the quiet part out loud: the job of driving a grand prix car is not what it was.
Speaking to Autocar, the Alpine driver said the shift in the combustion-to-battery balance has gone further than it should have.
"Whenever you get the full power output out of a corner, it's a very unique feeling, something that I'll never get tired of," Gasly said. "Now the whole battery story this year, I'm not going to get into too much detail, because I'm not a big fan myself of all of that."
His objection is not raw lap time. It is that the fastest lap now rewards restraint in places where it used to reward commitment.
"I think it went a bit too far because now we have a lot to manage, actually. You've got to be driving efficiently, which doesn't mean necessarily going as fast as you can through all the corners," he said. "There is some sort of management and understanding of which corners need to be pushed absolutely to one hundred percent or which ones are you actually better off just taking a bit of margin."
Then the line that framed the whole thing: "If you ask me, from the day I started go-karting at six years old there's been only one rule: when you're behind the wheel you just go as fast as you can through the corners. I think that's the way it should be."
"I don't think I've changed my way of driving much. In fact, I actually don't like the term 'driving style,' because I don't believe a Formula 1 driver should be saying something like that," Bortoleto said. "We have to be able to adapt, even if it might not feel natural. We have to be capable of handling every type of car and driving the car the way it demands."
He also described a concrete change in technique rather than a loss of one: "You know you can attack the entry of a corner a bit harder and worry less about the exit, since no energy is being deployed there anyway."
Max Verstappen, one of the loudest critics of the 2026 era, sided with Bortoleto on the principle while making clear he does not enjoy where it has landed. Asked about the Brazilian's remarks, he replied: "Who said that? Yes, he's right. Your driving style must always adapt to what's fastest. I could say: 'This is my driving style and this is how I drive the car', but I can tell you that at Spa you'd lose half a second."
The Red Bull driver added: "That shows how strange things are at the moment. Welcome to Formula 1 in 2026: sometimes it's like a jungle."
From the pit wall, Andrea Stella does not dispute the scale of the change. The McLaren team principal simply reads it as a test his drivers have passed. In a mid-season interview with his team, he said the impact of the rules on Lando Norris, Oscar Piastri "and indeed for their twenty colleagues on the F1 grid" had "been nothing short of disruptive."
"The new generation of single-seaters requires not only an adaptation of driving style but, above all, much greater focus on understanding how to exploit the full potential offered by the new power units," Stella said, adding that the learning curve "has at times proved complicated and was slowed down, particularly in the early stages, by various reliability issues."
"You know me, we are not here to put the tape on the mouth of anyone. I mean, the beauty of our sport is that everyone can have an opinion, but the opinion is an opinion," he said. "I think that in the process we have highlighted the need to be constructive in that respect. I prefer to discuss things between four walls to find solutions."
At a roundtable attended by GPblog, he pushed the argument further, arguing the paddock and the audience are watching two different championships.
"There's been some, I would say, debate on the technical regulations, mainly from the inner world, some drivers, some people that are part of our ecosystem. But in a nutshell, the championship is becoming very, very fascinating," Domenicali said. "They don't understand our technology or clipping, chipping or whatever it is, because it's too technical for the wider base that we have."
That is the split, and it is not going to close over the summer. Gasly and Verstappen are describing a craft they think has been diluted. Bortoleto thinks adaptability was always the craft. Stella is grading the response rather than the rules. Domenicali is counting the crowd. All four can be right at once, which is precisely why the argument keeps restarting.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/gasly-says-f1-driving-has-changed-not-everyone-agrees). Visit for full coverage.*