Hamilton slams new F1 rules

Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton slams new F1 rules - 'Fans won't understand it'

Hamilton imparted his thoughts on the new ruleset

Sheona Mountford F1 Journalist

Motorsport journalist working in F1 since 2024.

Wednesday 11 February 2026 18:53

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F1 superstar Lewis Hamilton has slammed the complexity of the new rules and has claimed fans will find them difficult to understand.

Following a whirlwind week with Kim Kardashian jetting from the Cotswolds, Paris and the Super Bowl, Hamilton returned to his day job with F1's first official test in Bahrain.

As ever, the attention was on F1's poster boy who jumped into his Ferrari for the first morning of testing on Wednesday and completed 52 laps.

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However, when he addressed the media after the opening stint of the test, his words did not bode well for the new regulations.

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Hamilton: F1 rules ridiculously complex

The 2026 season sees a whole lexicon of technical jargon being bandied about, from regenerative braking to active aerodynamics.

If the new rules have sent your head spinning then you're in good company, with the sport's biggest name hitting out at the complexity in Bahrain.

Hamilton told the media that the new rules make F1 "ridiculously complex" and that "none of the fans are going to understand it".

He added: "I sat in a meeting the other day and they're taking us through it. And yeah, it's like you need a degree to fully understand it all."

Elsewhere, F1 driver Esteban Ocon has warned of a lift-and-coast qualifying in 2026 following the Barcelona shakedown, and while Hamilton has delivered similar reports, he confirmed it was not the same issue in Bahrain.

"If you look at Barcelona, for example, we're doing 600 metres lift and coast on a qualifying lap. That's not what racing is about. Here (in Bahrain), we're not having to do that because there's lots of braking zones," he explained.

Energy recovery will be a huge part of 2026, which means during qualifying drivers will not go flat out exiting a corner and may back off on the straights to conserve energy.

Hamilton continued: "The low gears that we have to go down into is just because we can't recover enough battery power.

"We can't recover enough battery power, so that's why we have to go and rev the engines very, very, very high. So we're going down to second and first in some places just to try to recover that extra bit of power."

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