But, as he blasted down the back straight, he ran out of deployment much earlier than he expected and all the gains he had made earlier in the lap were wiped away.

The final Q3 run of 1m32.528s was an improvement on his earlier 1m32.732s effort. But after winding up seventh on the grid as others made bigger steps forward, he understood that it should have been so much better.

And he knew instantly on that back straight before the lap was complete that things had gone wrong.

“What the hell is happening?” he said over the team radio. “This deployment, my god.”

The answer only came up after some deeper analysis of telemetry.

Source: The Leclerc lap that’s exposed how F1 2026 has ruined qualifying

I thoroughly enjoy the racing under the current F1 rules. This piece, plus the video version embedded below, is the clearest explanation I have seen of the second-order effects that come with a rule set this complex.

But the rules do not allow teams to switch on and off the deployment at their whim; they are forced to use electrical power at times, and are limited in terms of how quickly it can be shut down.

As part of an effort to stop cars suddenly derating (going from the full 350kW to zero output) and causing safety issues, there are ramp down rates where the output can only be reduced by a certain amount.

In China, based on the layout of the track with a power-limited distance of 3125m, this was set at a maximum of 100kW reduction per second.

So for those areas of the track where using too much energy is not beneficial to laptime, teams set their engine maps to minimise deployment here to save energy so it can be used in places where full deployment delivers more benefit.

This is one example, but it exposes the problem pretty cleanly. I hope some of this gets addressed quickly. Allowing full regeneration feels like one plausible fix, because qualifying should reward maximum attack, not careful energy rationing. The cost is simple. Drivers are having to meter the lap in the one session that should be pure commitment.

I like that the racing is a happy consequence for now.

The risk is obvious: fix qualifying the wrong way and Sunday turns thin.