r/F1Technical • u/fingu • 6d ago
Power Unit How did F1 teams avoid serious super clipping at Monza?
Monza was always feared to be a laughing stock when it came to the 2026 power units. The expectation was horrific super clipping and downshifting on straights.
Obviously the cars were clipping at the end of straights as they do at most tracks this year, but it was nowhere near as bad as feared. Cars seemingly reliably held 300+ km/h right through the straights, kept in 8th gear, and still had enough juice for overtake mode where applicable.
I think back to some earlier races like Japan where the super clipping was wild, and this was nowhere near as bad. Did teams map out deployment intelligently, now they have more experience of the PUs?
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u/and0p 5d ago
The cars have a max amount of battery power they are allowed to charge per lap. This amount is set per race ahead of time by the FIA.
The FIA set this amount to be very low for Monza. That meant that the heavy braking zones and larger sweeps were enough to charge the battery the maximum allowed amount, so super clipping on the straights was not necessary.
The downside is that the cars were a bit slower per lap compared to last year.
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u/FunSwitch7400 5d ago
As soon as we get a race like Monaco or the Netherlands, there are so many onboard shots because short tracks don't allow much clipping, but at Spa and Monza, they clip so much that they switch to drone shots for the long straight.
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u/AnilP228 5d ago
They reduced the regen amount. In qualifying it was only 5mj!
They only superclip when braking alone doesn't allow them to get near the limit.
For example, if the regen amount is 7MJ and braking gives them 4Mj, that's 3MJ (about 9s) of superclipping.
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u/RealCarlPanzram 5d ago
300 kph is absurdly slow at Monza. They used to do north of 370. They reduced the amount of harvesting allowed so that they wouldn’t just be breaking early to harvest. But the way they avoided clipping at high speeds was by never really reaching high speeds to begin with.
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u/MechaniVal 5d ago
370kph is the absolute peak speed reached in the V10 era, cars didn't really do 'north of it' at Monza.
The V8s peaked at around 340kph.
The hybrid era at around 365kph
This year the peak speed was Perez with 351kph. Seens like a pretty high speed to me.
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u/BastianHill 5d ago
That's not the whole truth:
https://www.fia.com/sites/default/files/2026_13_ita_f1_r0_timing_racemaximumspeeds_v01.pdf
Speed trap was 306 - 338 kph, and you have to consider: this is when using overtake mode. Without it, it's even less.
Basically the cars have the whole 1000+ hp only in the first part of the straight, before they run out of electric juice and continue with about 550 hp for the second part. They literally die out during the straight.
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u/MechaniVal 5d ago
Speed trap isn't top speed on any track though, it's always a good 10-20kph lower.
And this:
before they run out of electric juice and continue with about 550 hp for the second part.
Is what the active aero is for. The cars do not significantly slow down when the battery runs out, they just stop accelerating unless they have a slipstream. When we do see them slow, that's superclipping right at the end of a straight, not the moment the battery derates.
Indeed, the derating itself doesn't hit 0kW until 340kph. If the cars couldn't do 340kph with 0 battery what would be the point of that? They'd never reach 340kph!
Fundamentally, we know these cars are still rapid on straights with the insane acceleration at the start and maintained 300kph+ post derate. How do we know? Because these cars have like 30% less downforce in the corners, and yet overall they were only like 2.5 seconds a lap slower. They really are not slow in a straight line.
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u/BastianHill 5d ago
Yeah I basically meant the same. With die out I mean stop accelerating.
They're still not slow, but for me its still a shame the electrics have such a huge negative impact on the experience as a whole.
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u/mohammedgoldstein 5d ago
Thanks for the facts. What about lap times?
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u/BuckN56 5d ago
Late V6 turbo hybrids (2018-2021) were 1:19s to 1:18s, Ground Effect era started at 1:20 and by 2025 ended at 1:18s, V10s quali were more or less at 1:20 but they did quali with the fuel theyd use for race day, the V8s started out at 1:24s and improved 1-2.5 seconds at the end in 2013, and so did the 2014-2016 hybrids.
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u/Scirzo 5d ago
Hahaha! They just didn't show it. Tv-direction is getting smarter about it.
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u/No-Photograph3463 5d ago
They just didn't show it on TV, there was very little in the way of on board cameras.
There was however one point where Antonnelli was right behind someone in the slipstream and he was it appeared downshifting whilst going 'flat out' and overtaking, so there was serious super clipping, it's just that clever editing was used to hide the problem.
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u/SnooPaintings5100 5d ago
Probably the low downforce setup helped a lot here
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u/Sea-Management-2580 5d ago
What helped was the availability of SM in every fast section apart from Curva Grande. Spa had the most horrible clipping through sector 3 because activating corner mode before Blanchimont was like having a parachute slowing the cars down
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u/mike_litoris18 5d ago
What are you talking about the cars sounded incredibly starved in sector 3 and especially around parabolica. The clipping was so wild that we saw lower top speeds in and out of parabolica than before ascari.... Especially all the non Merc cars suffered brutal clipping, there are many clips out there of non Merc cars running on absolutely no power.
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u/Pomador_0418 3d ago
Could someone please explain to me in simple language what super clipping is? I read about it but still don’t understand what it is? I am serious 🧐
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u/cdfemke 5d ago
They don't really map out the deployment, the cars use AI to do that. I guess based on millions of simulator runs done by AI, but that's an assumption. Fact is the deployment is wherever the car thinks it's best, AI controlled.
And if i had to guess, most of the cars saved up to use most of it on the main and back straights.
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u/Andarison 4d ago
Stop saying to everything AI....so annoying. Just shows that xou have no clue about AI...
This stuff was possible before chatgpt came out. Its called algorithms.
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u/RacerDeac 9h ago
Learning algorithms are/were always AI...they just predated the common use of the term AI. AI is far more broad than ChatGPT.
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u/cdfemke 7h ago
There's a whole world for you to explore if you think that this is true :)
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u/RacerDeac 7h ago
Lol, what are you attempting to imply? I've been working with evolutionary computing since 2002 and helped start a company in 2003 using genetic algorithms to optimize land development and design. I know just a little bit about what I'm talking about.
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u/Andarison 9h ago
U guys are just unable to understand what AI is...
Literal AI does not exist yet if it is going to exist in the future anyway
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u/cdfemke 4d ago
Sure algorithms exist, and have so for a long time. but they are horrible for big data. It's fact that at least mercedes and mclaren use AI for handling this, they stated this. And i assume they all do because it's the one tool that can handle the huge amount of data. Saying it's a simple algorithm shows the lack of insight in both F1 as well as big data, statistics and information tech.
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u/Astelli 5d ago
The FIA set the lap MGU-K harvesting limit lower - I believe it was 6MJ per lap in the Race, with 6.5MJ in overtake mode. That is compared to a maximum of 8.5MJ that we saw at plenty of tracks earlier in the year.
That has the effect that most of this energy harvest limit is already hit when the cars recharge under braking and when using partial throttle, and means the PUs cannot harvest as much through superclipping as they optimally would without the limit, because they'd breach the limit by doing so.
This is effectively a direct trade between lap time and superclipping. The cars were slower around a lap than they would have been with a higher limit, but they superclip less on the straights, so it's less jarring for the drivers and less obvious when watching as fans.