There is a stubborn consensus in F1 pit walls that the undercut — pitting before your rival to exploit fresher rubber — is the default answer to almost any strategic problem. Traffic ahead? Undercut. Gap closing? Undercut. Uncertain about the safety car? Box now, undercut anyway. It has become less a tactical choice than a reflex.
The 2026 regulations have done something interesting to that reflex: they’ve made it significantly harder to justify.
The new power unit framework, with its heavier emphasis on electrical deployment, has changed how cars handle tyre warm-up. The additional torque available out of slow corners — particularly in the first lap on a fresh set — is putting rubber under stress earlier than it was in the hybrid era’s later iterations. Drivers are reporting that tyres are reaching their operating window faster but degrading more unpredictably once they’re there. That’s not a tyre management problem; it’s a timing problem. The classical undercut assumes you gain roughly half a second per lap over the overcut car for three or four laps after your stop. When the tyre warm-up is compressed but degradation spikes midway through the stint, that window collapses.
Yet teams are still calling undercuts at roughly the same rate. The instinct is baked in.
Part of this is conservatism — strategy directors who built their models in the Pirelli era between 2019 and 2024 aren’t going to abandon those models after a handful of races. Part of it is the peculiar asymmetry of blame in F1: a failed overcut is visible and embarrassing, while a failed undercut that costs three places can be buried in post-race analysis. Nobody gets fired for doing the conventional thing.
The teams that will pull away strategically in 2026 are the ones willing to sit on used rubber a few extra laps and trust that the rival’s fresher tyres will fade before the position is lost. That takes nerve and data confidence that most outfits don’t yet have on the new cars.
McLaren’s strategy group has shown flashes of it. Ferrari, despite their car’s underlying pace, keeps reaching for the undercut as a comfort blanket and getting mediocre returns. The gap between them in the constructors’ standings might eventually come down to which team figures out that an era-old playbook needs rewriting.