Every headline about Formula 1's 2026 regulations seems to contain the same words: disappointment, lift-and-coast, battery management, emergency fixes. Drivers are openly critical, team principals are pushing for six mid-season tweaks, and the FIA is already convening stakeholders to debate what to change first.
Yet amid the noise, one supplier is apparently thrilled with how the new era is playing out. According to the Inside Line F1 Podcast, Pirelli is producing the best racing it has seen in years — and the reasoning is persuasive.
"The one company that's absolutely very pleased with them, not that I've asked them, but I'm assuming, is Pirelli," the show's host said, "because the tyres have turned out to be extremely good for racing. We are seeing passes and repasses and passes and repasses. And this could be down to two things. First is lower downforce, so the tyres are stressed less. And second is just slower cornering, so the tyres are even stressed less, right? That the loads going through are different. So at least Pirelli is happy."
It is a striking inversion of a long-running F1 storyline. For the better part of a decade the sport has blamed its tyre supplier for overly thermal-sensitive rubber that forced drivers to manage temperature rather than race. High-downforce ground-effect cars, introduced in 2022, only intensified the problem — the harder the cars cornered, the more stress went through the tyres, and the quicker they fell off a cliff.
The 2026 reset has inadvertently solved it. Cars now generate noticeably less downforce, take corners at lower speeds and, as a consequence, produce the kind of long, multi-lap battles that were rare under the previous rules.
"You can have battles that go lap after lap now," the F1 News commentator TacticalRab has observed of the new order. "Before, it was you would get battles, maybe it was more real racing, but once the battle happened, if someone fought too hard with the tyres, they were cooked."
The shift has raised a secondary question for Pirelli itself. Because drivers can manage tyre temperatures more comfortably and still post competitive laps thanks to energy harvesting benefits, the Italian firm may need to rebuild its compound ladder. "This is the problem, right?" TacticalRab argued. "The drivers can actually drive easier, can stress the tyre less and still go just as fast. So Pirelli really have to think about that in terms of their compound selection."
In other words, the supplier's new problem is a welcome one. Pirelli has spent years being asked to make tyres that degrade less and last longer; the 2026 regulations have handed it exactly that environment by accident. Compound choices that looked aggressive under the old rules now look conservative, and the company has room to push for softer rubber that produces even more strategic variation.
None of that will silence the podcast host's broader verdict — "F1 2026, we are all disappointed, right?" — but it does complicate the narrative. The current regulations may be hated by drivers and some fans, and they may yet be watered down by the emergency fixes being discussed between Formula 1, the FIA and the teams. But the on-track product they have produced, measured in overtakes per race, is precisely what the sport has been trying to engineer for two decades.
Pirelli, so often the scapegoat, has become the quiet beneficiary.
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*Originally published on [Formula One News](https://newsformula.one/article/pirelli-quiet-winner-f1-2026-regulations). Visit for full coverage.*