(Motorsport-Total.com) – The 2026 British Grand Prix is likely not going to be much fun for many drivers in the new cars. Especially Fernando Alonso appeared anything but enthusiastic on Thursday before the Grand Prix in Silverstone.
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“I think the next two races will be very different from what we are used to in Silverstone and Spa,” he said in a media round where our sister portal Motorsport.com was also present.
“In the past, these were beautiful tracks, especially with the [last generation] of ground-effect cars. Silverstone was probably the best of them and fit these cars perfectly.”
“This year,” Alonso said, “it will be completely different. Driving here will not be fun. If you look at the times in the simulator, it will be quite sad, both for us drivers and for the spectators.”
In Silverstone, the 2026 Formula 1 cars lack opportunities to recharge their batteries often enough. Accordingly, we can expect scenes like those we have already seen in Australia or Japan. In other words: superclipping in fast corners and a lot of lift-and-coast are on the agenda.
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The legendary Maggots-Becketts-Chapel section is therefore described by Alonso on Thursday as a “charging station” for the current cars. The problem? The iconic corner complex is followed by the long Hangar Straight, which requires a lot of battery power.
Such scenarios repeat more frequently on the 5.891-kilometer track. For example, the cars are likely to have already used a lot of energy on the way towards the Luffield corner, with a significant opportunity missing to recharge the battery without lift-and-coast or superclipping until Maggotts.
“If you have to slow down in a corner, then that is a somewhat worse feeling than at the end of a straight,” is the assessment of the current Aston Martin driver. “In my memory, these corners were very challenging and you could really feel the G-forces. These corners were physically very demanding, but now they are just much slower.”
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“The problem is,” Alonso said, “that if you are already slowing down in the corner, consequently your air resistance also increases. In addition, you have rolling resistance from your tires as soon as you steer. So you lose speed just from air resistance and lose even more speed when you turn in. The effect in the corner is therefore doubled.”
The reaction of the veteran is not too surprising. Max Verstappen also does not appear particularly happy after initial simulator tests before the weekend in Silverstone.
In addition, the FIA has lowered the so-called harvest limit for the British Grand Prix. This means less energy can be recovered per lap, which also leads to even slower lap times.
Some teams are anything but happy with this decision. After all, a few of them had already tried on Monday to optimize energy recovery during a lap based on a different limit.
“This is really tough,” Oliver Bearman explained on Thursday. “You spend the entire session optimizing the use of energy, clipping, and power at different points.”
“And then they take away a megajoule and you have to start over. And they do this at a time when it is impossible for you to go back into the simulator, especially with our limited sim days.”
Haas does not use its own simulator but uses a system operated by Toyota in Epsom. The in-house simulator is still under construction.
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