A rule change for qualifying at the Japanese Grand Prix designed to reduce ‘lifting and coasting’ on fast laps has been largely welcomed by drivers. All five F1 power unit manufacturers — Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull‑Ford, Audi and Honda — agreed with the FIA to cut the permitted energy recharge per lap in Saturday’s qualifying hour from 9.0MJ to 8.0MJ.
The aim is to reduce ‘super clipping’ — when a car recharges its battery toward the end of a straight and slows before a corner — so drivers can attack turns more normally and carry higher speed into braking zones. The new 2026 cars have changed driving style, with lift-and-coast or deliberate super‑clipping used to optimise power unit output. While that has increased overtaking, many drivers agree qualifying laps should allow a closer push to the car’s limit.
The FIA said it is “continuing to embrace evolutions to energy management” together with teams and engine manufacturers and that “further discussions” are scheduled in the coming weeks.
Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc: “I don’t think it will be a game changer. I think it will be pretty similar, apart from for the driver where maybe there’s a little bit less lift and coast, which is I think a good thing.”
Lewis Hamilton: “They have changed it coming into the weekend. When we were on the simulator, you were having to do a tonne of lift and coast, which is really, really not enjoyable to do, particularly for a qualifying lap.”
Lando Norris: “It’s different. I need to go out and drive with it first. I think it will eliminate some things and it will shift around some other bits. I think the thing is you also have tracks where it will be better. Some tracks it will work and be a much better thing, some tracks it won’t change too much. So it should be a little bit better here. It’s not like it’s going to change the whole world.”
George Russell: “It’s just a small detail. It doesn’t change anything. You can recover less from your battery, so it means you need to be slightly more wise with how you spend it. Hopefully, what it means is we’ll be going slightly slower in the middle of the straight, but slightly faster at the end of the straight. It’s a small adjustment. I’ve yet to sort of see any data of the difference from what I drove on the simulator, so I’m not exactly sure.”
Max Verstappen, who has taken the last four Suzuka poles but whose Red Bull has been off the early pace this season, said: “I’ve not practiced it on the simulator so I cannot give you a clear answer. It was before not flat‑put, basically, so I hope this can be closer to flat out.”
Not everyone is convinced the tweak helps every team. Haas’ Oliver Bearman argued the change makes them “even slower”: “On one hand we don’t have to do any lift and coast any more, which is probably a bit better for us, but it just means we have to do a lot of… I mean we still have to recharge the energy and we spend a lot of time just with no energy because we’re losing one megajoule compared to what we had on the sim and prior to coming here. I think there’s better ways of achieving the same thing. If we could harvest at negative 350 kilowatts while on full throttle, I think it would make everyone’s lives a bit easier. But this is also a solution, I guess.”
Leclerc and others say more work is needed to improve the qualifying spectacle. “I think for qualifying there are still some changes that need to be done to make sure that we can push at the maximum, whatever the limit of the car is,” Leclerc said. “So far for the first two races, it was more about managing everything properly in qualifying rather than the actual flat‑out push that we were used to in Q3 in the past years. There’s still some fine‑tuning to be done on that, but I don’t think that this particular change will be a game changer for this weekend.”
Formula 1 heads to Suzuka for the Japanese Grand Prix this weekend, with practice, qualifying and the race scheduled across Friday to Sunday. The tweak to qualifying energy allowance should slightly reduce mid‑straight speeds but allow higher speed into corners, with teams and drivers set to judge its real impact once on track.