F1 bosses looking to ‘simplify’ 2026 technical terms

Fearing technical changes being introduced to spice up the sport next season may confuse fans, F1 bosses are looking to simplify their description.

Of course, when your targeted demographic appears to be pre-school, and you’re bringing in sponsors like Hello Kitty, Pottery Barn Kids, Lego and Hot Wheels, it’s important that you don’t confuse the little darlings.

Then there’s the broadcasters who insist on calling it “qualy” and – even worse – referring to the World Endurance Championship as “Weck!”, not to mention the God awful “Shootout”.

“We are revising some of the terminology because we want to make it clear and we want to make it simple for the fans to understand what’s happening,” says FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis.

“We want to have a unified terminology used by the teams when they speak to the drivers on the radio, but also by the commentators on TV, and also the same terminology in the regulations,” he adds. “So we are doing an exercise now to make sure that we create simple terminology.”

While Manual Override Mode, which essentially replaces DRS, was originally to be known as MOM, it is thought that this will now be called “overtake mode”, while standard battery deployment on straights is likely to be referred to as “boost mode”

The X-mode and Z-mode active aero system modes, which were to be referred to as straight-line and cornering modes, are also set to be simplified, and while some teams are already referring to the former as SLM it is thought that both modes could simply be referred to as “active aerodynamics”.

“I don’t want to get into the exact details of what each one of these terms will be now,” says Tombazis, “because we are collaborating with some other stakeholders on that. But we are looking at that.”

With DRS a thing of the past, we wonder how they will refer to the ‘train’ of eight or nine cars running twenty or so seconds behind the leaders.