Aston Martin‘s Canadian has spent the last year quietly auditioning for the role of the grid’s most undiplomatic driver, and ahead of this weekend’s Miami Grand Prix he’s gone ahead and won it. Lance Stroll arrived in Florida and used his media duties to take another swing at Formula 1‘s 2026 regulations, telling reporters the sport is still “miles off” from what he considers proper cars even after a package of mid-season rule tweaks designed specifically to address the complaints.

He’s not the only driver who thinks the new era has problems. He’s just the one who keeps saying it out loud.

What Stroll Has Actually Been Saying

Stroll’s complaints are not new. He spent last summer telling anyone who’d listen that the 2026 rules were a mistake, calling the direction “a bit sad” and dismissing the championship as more “science project” than racing . His core gripe is that the new power units, which split power roughly fifty-fifty between internal combustion and battery power, have forced teams to focus on energy harvesting over all-out pace.

What he wants instead is, in his words, “light, nimble, fast cars with a lot of downforce” and a championship that’s less about software-managed energy harvesting. He’s also gone further and accused the rest of the grid of staying quiet for self-interested reasons, suggesting a lot of drivers privately agree but can’t speak out due to political reasons.

For the Miami weekend specifically, he’s reiterated that the cars are still nowhere near where he thinks F1 should be, even with the FIA’s emergency package now in force.

“I think it’s fundamentally, just, so flawed,” he said according to Jon Noble on X (below). “F1 is not so fun to drive. I drove other cars over the break, I tested some F3 cars, and it’s like 1,000 times more fun and better to drive, because you have your right foot, you give what you want and you get what you want.”

Talking on how F1 has defended itself so far this season, he was relentless in his comments:

“F1’s a business and they want to protect their business and make it look good, and we’re drivers and we know what it feels like to drive good cars! So there’s two different perspectives on it.

“People are watching the sport no matter what, and watching the Netflix, turning on F1 – so F1 is happy. But the drivers, the fans, the people that really know about racing, know what it was before, the drivers that know what it’s like to drive really good, proper cars.

“There’s no hiding from the fact that right now it’s not as good as it can be. It’s far from as good as it can be.”

The Rule Tweaks Stroll Doesn’t Think Go Far Enough

The reason this is landing in Miami and not somewhere else is that F1 used the unscheduled five-week break, caused by the cancellation of the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian rounds, to address a growing pile of driver complaints.

After two discussions with technical chiefs, a meeting between the FIA, F1, the teams and power unit manufacturers worked through how the technical regulations could be improved based on the opening three rounds, ahead of the Miami Grand Prix.

The changes come down to energy management, for the most part.

The FIA and F1 stakeholders agreed to reduce maximum permitted recharge from 8MJ to 7MJ per lap and increase peak superclip power from 250kW to 350kW , the goal being to keep drivers flat on the throttle for longer and cut down on the lift-and-coast that turned the first three qualifying sessions into a spectator’s nightmare. There’s also a new “low power start detection system” that the FIA will test from Miami onwards, capable of identifying cars with abnormally low acceleration shortly after clutch release , after Oliver Bearman’s near-miss with Franco Colapinto in Japan flagged how dangerous the closing-speed differentials had become.

Whether Stroll is right is a a question we’re all asking. Aston Martin sit seventh in the constructors’ standings, the AMR26 has been comfortably outside the points on pace for a long time, and Stroll’s qualifying record recently is one of the worst on the grid.

It’s easier to call the regulations a science project when the experiment isn’t going well for you. But the fact remains that Verstappen, Leclerc and Perez are saying broadly the same thing, and they don’t all share the same excuse.