Scott Mitchell-Malm

It's part of this just unideal 2026 engine landscape that just every month there seems to be something new, basically, that just makes it obfuscating for everybody.

Yeah, it just makes it hard to understand.

And the reason it's been kind of argued over what to say basically comes down to some concerns the FIA has had, I guess, based on what manufacturers have told them.

There's this claim that it would breach intellectual property, basically, if you revealed a

If you put a number on how much someone's internal combustion engine is off someone else's.

I wouldn't have thought so, but it's been enough of a concern to have created this scenario.

Maybe that'll have changed.

And also maybe it leaking out in the way that it did on Sunday evening before it was official and the reaction to it could prompt it to be more transparent this time, ideally, but maybe in the future as well.

I don't know if they can bake... I would have thought it would be solvable simply by having it in the engine technical regulations or financial regulations that basically by...

um in order to be eligible for aduo you um you agree to have the the percentage findings of it um shared publicly like that's to me seems to a very obvious solution and again if someone's got the speciality to be able to say why that's not not doable or wouldn't have been doable in the first place uh please please do let us know but yeah i i get why people would look at this and have a load of questions because when there are gaps like this people will

people will move to fill them in like you do it all the time it's human nature to want to know what's going on and especially when it's something as significant as you know the you know the pecking order of of the thing itself it's not like this is just some kind of um arbitrary little thing off to the side and you can say oh you're making a mountain out of a molehill or anything like that you know this is absolutely central to the performance of uh of the overall

Well, and also, while they're going around trying to round up the horses, the cows have got three and have tipped over a bunch of tractors.

That feels like it's what's happening.

There's just problems being caused elsewhere while they're trying to solve these issues.

In Monaco, I do wonder how much it was exacerbated by one of the variables for this year that we really barely spoke about in those first few races because the engine influence on the pecking order was so great.

But certainly, a couple of the last most recent weekends, it's come to the fore as the engine situation in relative terms has normalised.

is the usage of the tyre and the way that the tyre performs which came to the fore in Monaco in particular because a lot of people in Monaco were surprised by just how difficult it was to get the tyres kind of fired up in the right window and then

stay in the right window on this track which is obviously low speed so it's low energy for the tires anyway but also there's less load from these cars than there was a year ago because the the cars are completely changed they're producing less downforce overall and that did catch a few drivers out and a few teams out in terms of just how big an impact that actually had and something andrea stella said over the weekend which i thought was very interesting was kind of the way that the

And this was, you know, I think I said this in the post-race podcast in the context of Charles Leclerc's issues at Ferrari, which might not be a million miles away from Russell's, but not necessarily for the same reasons and with the same output.

But Stella said that the tyres this year, which we know, you know, they're slightly smaller.