F1 25: 2026 Season Pack – Hands on the new (DLC) era of Formula One

Formula 1 feels different this year. New car regulations have brought new engines, more flappy wings, more battery management, more controversy and hand-wringing about the quality and authenticity of the racing than ever before. Is this still the pinnacle of motorsport? Or is it just F1 with Mario Kart mushrooms? A video game probably isn’t going to settle that debate, but Codemasters are giving it a good shot with F1 25: 2026 Season Pack.

That’s right. This is DLC. Codemasters have handled a fair few technical transitions since 2010, but this transition is unlike any other before – even 2014, where they stuck to the PS3 & Xbox 360 for the start of the turbo hybrid era, waiting until 2015 to jump to the PS4 and Xbox One. Yet, while this is a DLC expansion, it’s about as fully featured as you could want, with the new teams, driver and roster updates, all the new cars, and changes to how they work. There will even be the MADRING Madrid street circuit, ahead of its real world debut in September – sadly not something we were able to try out with this preview build, however.

Dipping into the 2026 season and cars is simply integrated into the options you run through when selecting the mode you want to race. You can kick off a new career, just hop into time trials, create a new team to race as, and just pick 2026 instead of 2025 to get the new cars. The major boon here is that time trial makes it so easy to swap cars and tracks, to go back and forth to make direct comparisons to understand and learn.

Immediately it’s clear that, for the video game racer, there is actually a fair bit of common ground between the generations of car. Last year’s ground effect beasts remain glued to the track, and there is that slight shift to having less grip and a little bit less stability when going through corners with the new 2026 cars – they have around 15% reduced downforce for cornering, with Codemasters aiming to represent lap times roughly 1.5 seconds slower for the median track.

DRS is gone, replaced by Straight Mode (S Mode for short) which opens up both front and rear wing and doesn’t rely on being within 1 second of a car in front. Instead there’s now Overtake Mode, which unlocks a bit more juice for the car’s battery if you are within that 1 second window, and which can be deployed as you see fit throughout the track. What this means practically is that you’ll have your thumb glued to the S Mode button to trigger the wings two or three times per lap, while Overtake extends the battery-based Boost Mode that was already present in F1 25.

Battery use has been a major bugbear through the first chunk of the Formula 1 season, with the teams and FOM agreeing to tweak the power balance and looking to make further changes for 2027. F1 25: 2026 Season Pack presents an idealised version of what this wanted to be. There’s no sign of Super Clipping – you might think there is as you go through 130R, but that’s actually the wings snapping back down – there’s no mysterious power dropouts as the battery programming gets out of sync, and you don’t really need to fret about lift and coast or deployment more than you were before, despite what your race engineer tries to tell you.

Instead, the ERS battery deployment has a default Medium deployment setting, which you can shift into Overtake or Hotlap for higher usage in the lap – this is a holdover nomenclature from F1 25, so this Overtake is separate to the added Overtake energy you’re given – while None switches over to full harvesting to top things back up. And you can still override and force the car to deploy, toggling this mode on and off for a serious acceleration boost. And I really mean it accelerates. It’s not the Mario Kart mushroom effect, but you do definitely get a good kick of extra speed, and it can be used to catch AI drivers napping out of corners.

It’s the same but different, in other words. Having S Mode every lap is the main new bit of car management you’ll need to think about, while there’s enough common ground and a light enough touch for the battery that you don’t really need to devote too much added thought to it. If you don’t want to manage it, then there are separate assists that can fully take over management of S Mode and ERS deployment for you, ensuring that this game is as accessible as possible.

There are, at the time of previewing, some areas that do still need a bit of uplift. Codemasters has told us that there will be a further update to cars and after launch, and I was slightly saddened to see that Ferrari’s “Macarena” wing and Red Bull’s version aren’t currently in the game. It’s also a shame that, outside of Madring, there’s no track changes for this year outside of the Overtake Mode timing marker. This isn’t a year with major track overhauls and changes, but there’s things like the Turn 8 runoff at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve from this past weekend that should have a mix of asphalt and grass since 2024, but is still just asphalt.

And the 2026 cars and regulations also aren’t available across the board. The DLC is not supported through F1 World Series, Co-op Career, Ranked, Leagues, Challenge Career and more. There’s also (very disappointingly) no way to transfer a career mode save from 2025 to 2026, which honestly would have been perfect. It’s in these areas that you will feel that, yes, this is more of an expansion than a new game.

Something that helps to balance that out, though, is that this is priced appropriately. It’s £25 on console or £22 on PC for the DLC, while a new bundle with the base game will be £50 on console and £45 on PC.

This ups and downs to this approach, then. A brand new game for 2026 would have felt more appropriate to latch onto the excitement and/or intrigue surrounding the new era of F1, the 2026 Season Pack will be the next best thing, perhaps giving Codemasters their own opportunity to look at their motorsports series, see its strengths and weaknesses, and chart a path forward for 2027 and beyond.