Formula One and the sport’s controversial new technical regulations have been taking fire from all directions in recent weeks and now a new clip is set to pour fuel on the fire.
Data from Ferrari driver Charles Leclerc in China has exposed how manufactured racing will be in the new era of hybrid cars, which require drivers to constantly manage the battery sourced power in the engines.
Fox Sports, available on Kayo Sports, is the only place to watch every practice, qualifying session and race in the 2026 FIA Formula One World Championship™ LIVE in 4K. New to Kayo? Join now and get your first month for just $1.
The Chinese Grand Prix, won by Mercedes rising star Kimi Antonelli, was raced under vastly different conditions to the season-opening race in Australia, revealing further quirks about the 2026 model cars.
A clip first published by The Race on YouTube, shows how Leclerc initially benefited from making an error during qualifying for the Sprint Race at the Shanghai International Circuit.
A flustered Leclerc was heard on team radio asking his team what was going on with his car during the third qualifying session for the sprint race.
F1 analyst John Noble said on the video stream the data from Leclerc’s lap is the clearest picture yet of why the current regulations “don’t make sense”.
You can watch Leclerc’s final lap struggle in the video player above.
Co-host Ed Straw described it as the “smoking gun”.
Noble explains in the clip that Leclerc lost 15kmh of speed down the back straight in China during his second flying lap compared to his first lap because of an unforeseen power surge that was inadvertently triggered by a small oversteer 30 seconds earlier in the lap.
“We finally get, I think, not only a proper picture of how these cars are, but also the complexities, the madness as one team boss described to me, of the rules and how difficult it is to drive, to not only get the best out of these cars, but to understand what’ going on,” Noble said.
Leclerc improved his final lap time by more than 0.2 seconds in his final run, but was let down by a slow third sector where he suffered energy deployment issues.
“This is a fascinating example because it’s something that confused Charles himself,” Noble said.
“During this lap in SQ3, Charles had been up in the first section of the lap and the time bled away on the back straight.
“He lost the power. He lost deployment. He came on team radio ad said, ‘What the hell is happening’. He said, ‘This deployment. My god’. Straight after the session, no answer from him. No answer from the team of what had happened. But you look at the telemetry data and we can see it here, all lap time bleeds away on that back straight.
“The peak speed doesn’t go as high. He’s up to 15kmh slower all the way down the back straight. Now our understanding normally is how you harvest going into a corner basically decides how good your deployment is coming out of it. But if we look at the previous section at turns 11, 12 and 13 there’s very little difference there so it doesn’t seem to be an obvious explanation.
“You need to look much further back in the lap to work out what’s happened. Now you can look at that straight between turns 10 and 11 and you can see there’s a lot more speed in that second lap from Leclerc.
“Much more power is being deployed. And that doesn’t particularly make sense And the reason now we can see, there is a slight throttle lift coming out of Turn 10. We can see the on board, Charles has a slight oversteer moment as the back steps out.
“He lifts off the throttle and this bizarrely, due to quirks in the rules, triggers a power boost randomly. And that power boost burns through more power than he wants and then leaves him without power coming down the back straight.”
Leclerc went on to qualify sixth overall for the sprint race. He qualified fourth for the Grand Prix and went on to finish the main race fourth behind teammate Lewis Hamilton and dominant Mercedes dip George Russell and Antonelli.
Leclerc and Hamilton jostled for positions throughout the race with, with many suggesting their wheel to wheel battle was the highlight of the race.
However, leading F1 analyst Peter Windsor said on the F1 Hour, there were no genuine overtakes between the roaring Ferraris, suggesting the battle was fought entirely through power boosts.
The term “super-clipping” has become a dirty word in the racing category this year.
Cars have consistently dropped significant speeds without using a brake, harvesting electricity while at full throttle, typically at the end of straights or in high-speed corners, to recharge the battery.
Leclerc said after the Australian Grand Prix the pattern “feels like the mushroom in Mario Kart”.
The Monagesque racer has taken it a step further ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai where he shared a video of himself pretending to play the popular Nintendo game while sitting in the cockpit of his Ferrari.
Ferrari will get more data to play with at the Japanese Grand Prix on March 29.
