Prime Tire Newsletter | This is The Athletic’s F1 newsletter. Sign up here to receive Prime Tire directly in your inbox twice a week during the season and weekly in the offseason.Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I spent several hours traveling along a Belgian highway, contemplating the confusing race at Spa, which was impressively won by Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli.It’s not the most beautiful of routes along the pan-European E40 (a 5,000-mile road connecting France with northeast Kazakhstan, of all places), once the stunning hills of the Ardennes Forest are in your rearview mirror.And that about sums up where F1 is right now, with its baffling new cars.I’m Alex, and Madeline Coleman will be along later.Spoiled: Are classic tracks worth it in the modern era?“It sucks. I can’t really say it any other way than that,” said McLaren driver Oscar Piastri.“When you’ve got qualifying grids decided by computers behaving or misbehaving … it’s a pretty crap way of going racing.”As we covered in PT after the British GP, Piastri had been glum on the prospect of driving the previously fearsome Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps with the engine-electrical-energy-starved new F1 cars. And that was before he even arrived for the race which he won impressively in 2025.Midway through the Spa weekend, Piastri was decrying a new element of how the engines work, costing him valuable time against his teammate Lando Norris.McLaren also suspects this is what is hurting Mercedes driver George Russell against Kimi Antonelli, according to what it can see in its data.“This seems to be pretty much the same across the two Mercedes cars. When you overlay Antonelli and Russell, it looks like Lando and Oscar,” McLaren team principal Andrea Stella told reporters after Spa qualifying.This all centers on how the engine control units are essentially studying how a driver has acted on one lap, then adjusting how the electrical energy is deployed for top speed in real time on the next. The teams can’t simulate it — the engines are doing it by themselves. We’re going to be getting into this in greater detail in the coming weeks on The Athletic’s website, as it’s a hideously complex topic that requires proper explanation.There’s another neat summary of F1 2026.But my biggest gripe with this is that there’s a line in F1 sporting rule B1.8.1 that states: “The driver must drive the F1 car alone and unaided.”Is an engine deciding itself how much power a car should have unaided? I don’t think so. This is the very flummoxing thing with these cars and engines, and F1 overall in 2026.