We’ve become used to EA pumping out yearly renditions of most of its top-tier sports titles, whether that’s your Maddens, your FCs or even your NHLs. This year, though, things are taking an unusual turn for the follow up to F1 25. Rather than giving us F1 26, we’re getting a dose of DLC, a pit stop if you will, that’s wanging new tyres and a new front wing on to keep F1 fans scooting around the track for another year. It’s an odd choice.
The reason it’s an odd choice is that the 2026 F1 season sees the biggest rule change in a decade, bringing smaller, more aerodynamic cars, chucking out the DRS overtakes of old and changing up the power units to have a more even split of electricity and combustion power. Besides that, there’s a new track and two new teams on the grid in the form of Audi (formerly Kick Sauber) and Cadillac, the American manufacturer making its first foray into F1. In context, that’s a hell of a lot of things to take in, so why aren’t we getting a fully-fledged new edition that reflects all those changes?
F1 25 remains a great rendition of F1 racing. We’ve continued to plough time into it all year, though as we load up the latest version with the DLC installed it’s funny finding it still emblazoned with the F1 Movie tie-ins that felt so crucial to it last year. Still, a year is a long time, and while Braking Point feels like a distant memory, F1 25 has held up incredibly well, with few foibles coming to light through repeated play. We’re ready for more, though, and the 2026 Season Pack has come close enough to the start of the real F1 season that we’re pretty much ready to accept whatever EA throw at us.
Besides the two new teams, and the new/returning drivers of Bottas, Perez and Lindblad, the other major addition is the all-caps MADRING, the new track in Madrid, and the first new track to be added to the F1 schedule since 2023. While we haven’t seen it yet in real life, it’s been great to jump in with Codemasters’ best guess (informed by all the architectural data they can grab) and check it out in the season pack.
From the main straight, pushing the top speed of your car and grabbing the opportunity to overtake, through to the second straight and its aero zones, this is a track that immediately feels like you’re at the limit. For being a street circuit, it’s got a great selection of corner types, with the second half feeling fast and flowing. It feels like a race track, something the other street circuits don’t always manage to pull off. As a preview of what we can expect to watch the real drivers tackle later in the season, it’s a tantalising taste, and it’ll be interesting to see where it falls in people’s tier list. For me? It’s somewhere in the middle.
This year’s F1 season is, however, all about the changes to the power unit and wings. All of those changes have been represented in the F1 26 Season Pack, bringing in the need to harvest energy, lift and coast, as well as the powerful boost mode. The way Codemasters have done this is by tweaking the existing DRS and ERS systems. As you enter into a designated straight you can engage S Mode to flap down both wings and shed downforce, and you can do this regardless of how close you are to another car. The ERS has been tweaked to match real life too. You harvest energy, you deploy your boost just as you did before, but you need to be on top of this far more than you did previously with ERS, and it’s easy to find yourself without any charge in your battery if you don’t take it seriously. Whether that’s an improvement for players is up for debate, and probably depends on how invested you are in it, but it is authentic to this year’s regulations.
As we’ve seen through the opening of the real season, there’s plenty of battling going on, but it can feel a little like you’re yo-yoing backwards and forwards, and there’s definitely more to juggle than before. You can set it to work automatically, but it’s nowhere near as efficient. Want to go fast? Better learn to make the most of the new systems.
Because of the new boost and the new cars, racing is more interesting and involved overall. The cars and smaller and lighter, and you can see that in the way they’re racing, with the AI utilising smaller gaps and making moves where they wouldn’t have in the 2025 cars. It feels more fun, and more lively, and the AI do seem to be more likely to make mistakes than they did before, at least when playing on Legendary difficulty. If you’re looking for racing that pushes you to the limit, working hard to make overtakes and then defend against them coming back at you, Codemasters have nailed it.
One of the biggest problems over the last couple of years of F1 games, and the real-life sport, has been the dreaded DRS train, with everyone backing up behind a car that they couldn’t get past. Where F1 25 did remedy that to a certain extent, the regulation changes for the 2026 Season Pack, and the overall shift in the AI, means that’s now a thing of the past, which is something everyone should be celebrating. Go on. Celebrate.
However, what’s perhaps more crucial than all those additions and changes is what we’re not getting, or what we’re losing, in fact. First up, while we greet the new teams, we’re waving goodbye to both the Braking Point’s Konnersport team, and the F1 Movie’s APXGP, which are locked out from the 2026 Driver Career and My Team modes. Admittedly, this makes plenty of sense in terms of the number of drivers on the grid, as they took up the Cadillac spot last year, and the fact that Codemasters would have had to design a new 2026 car for them, but if you’re particularly attached to Sonny Hayes, this might be a painful breakup. Who wouldn’t have wanted some crazy 26-driver race mode too?
Custom teams and career saves will correspondingly also not transfer to the 2026 season, which is a shame, but one that again makes sense in context. What doesn’t make sense is the fact that there’s no co-op career mode, and no ranked multiplayer, which are huge for those who play competitively, or who like to go for the long haul with a friend. The regular lobbies will be there, but their reputation for being more Mario Kart than F1 won’t please those who want to focus on the racing.
