The weekend
A standard weekend runs three one-hour practice sessions across Friday and Saturday before knockout qualifying. Q1 lasts 18 minutes and eliminates the slowest six of the 22-car field; Q2 drops six more; the final ten fight for pole in Q3. Times don't carry over between segments. Six rounds in 2026 — China, Miami, Canada, Silverstone, Zandvoort and Singapore — run the sprint format instead: a single practice on Friday, then Sprint Qualifying (its own three-segment shootout on mandated tyres), a roughly 100km sprint on Saturday, and grand prix qualifying later that day before Sunday's race. Two separate parc fermé windows mean teams can change set-up between the sprint and grand prix qualifying.
Points
The top ten in a grand prix score 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1. There is no fastest-lap point any more — it was scrapped from 2025 after backmarkers started taking free pit stops just to steal it. Sprints pay the top eight 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, so a perfect sprint weekend yields 33 points. Shortened races pay out on a sliding scale, with full points only once 75% of the distance is complete.
What decides things
2026 is a clean-sheet regulations year. The new power units split roughly 50/50 between combustion and electric power and run fully sustainable fuel, so energy management is now a core racing skill rather than an engineering footnote. DRS is gone: every car sheds drag on the straights with active aerodynamics ("straight mode"), and the passing aid is Overtake Mode — a burst of extra electrical deployment available when you're within a second of the car ahead at the detection point. On strategy, the long-standing tyre rule holds: two different dry compounds must be used in a grand prix, which forces at least one pit stop. Exceeding the season's allocation of power-unit components still brings grid penalties.
The championship
Two titles are at stake: the World Drivers' Championship and the World Constructors' Championship, with both of a team's cars scoring towards the latter at every round. Ties are broken on countback — most wins first, then most second places, and so on down the order. Cadillac's arrival makes it eleven teams and 22 cars, the first 22-car grid since 2016.