F1 2026 Championship — own an F1 car, manage a 24-round season

Yes. The Calendar tab lists all 24 rounds in the order they are run, each with its circuit, lap length, lap count, total race distance and whether it is a sprint round and over how many laps. Every round shows its date, derived from the fixed 4-day cadence, so you always know when the next one is; dates still to come are estimates, because a postponed round shifts every round after it. As each round is settled the row fills in with who took pole and who won — sprint pole and sprint winner too on sprint weekends. At the end of the season the whole calendar resets with the standings and starts again on the new one.

Yes. The eight hours between one race finishing and the next Q1 opening are a live free practice session. You choose a programme — a qualifying simulation on low fuel or a race simulation on full tanks — a compound, a new or scrubbed set, and how many laps, then the cars circulate on the track map in real time with a live timing tower. Practice is where the setup, energy-map, tyre-life and pit-stop advice comes from: it used to be given away for free and is now earned, low-fuel laps answering setup and energy, race laps answering tyre life and stops. The data is also worth a small amount of lap time (capped at 0.2%) in qualifying and the race, to the driver who gathered it and to nobody else. Practice tyres come out of the same finite round allocation qualifying and the race spend, so a soft you burn here is a fresh qualifying set you no longer have, and entering practice enters you in the Grand Prix. Every bot on track runs the identical simulation through the identical function, spends the same allocation and picks its own programme and run count from its own driver personality — some do the mileage, some only chase one lap, some skip the session entirely — so the field behaves like 22 drivers rather than a backdrop.

Six sets of softs, four of mediums and three of hards for the whole round, shared across every session. Intermediates and wets are unlimited. Qualifying always runs on softs and each timed run puts three laps on the set it uses (out-lap, flying lap, in-lap), so six softs is exactly a full weekend of new rubber and not one set more — two attempts in each of Q1, Q2 and Q3. Before every run you choose a new set or a scrubbed one, and a scrubbed set is genuinely slower on the same wear curve the race uses, so saving new rubber for Q3 is a real call. Race stints are fitted from what is left: plan a soft stint after spending every soft in qualifying and the game refuses the strategy, or fits the most durable set you still have. Past its cliff a set is finished and stops being offered.

Yes. Every round publishes a rain forecast for the Grand Prix as a real percentage, and the wet plan (box immediately, wait two laps, gamble on staying out) is chosen against it. The number is honest rather than decorative: it is drawn from the same hidden roll that decides whether rain actually arrives, so across many races a 50% forecast is followed by rain about half the time — and it never reveals what happens in your race, because a 15% round still rains sometimes and an 85% round often stays dry. You also get a push notification if another driver takes your pole position during a qualifying session, sent once per session and only to the driver who lost P1. Stewards' penalties — track limits, jump start, unsafe pit release, five seconds each — are added to the finishing time and shown on the result.

Yes. The starting grid updates live while a session is open: when any driver sets a time it appears immediately with an on-screen alert, no page reload. Tap any driver on the grid — bots included — to replay their qualifying lap in the full broadcast, with the live timer, the delta against the session best, the sector splits in timing-screen colours and every incident on that lap (traffic, mistakes, the purple sector). You can also export the grid as a shareable image showing your position, your lap time, your gap to pole and the top five.

Every F1 car mints from AURA at the same flat AuraCoins price with identical baseline performance — the first ten players to ever mint get their first car free. A free car is a seat on loan: it can never be listed for sale, pressing sell releases it back to the market free for the next player, and missing a single settled round loses it the same way, while a car bought with AuraCoins is yours to keep and to resell. After purchase you buy Engine, Aero & Gearbox and Reliability upgrades separately (five levels each, rising AuraCoins cost) to make your car faster and more reliable than a stock one.

Each wet-weather tyre has a band of track wetness it is designed for, and the race prices how far outside that band the circuit is. Intermediates work on a damp track; full wets are for standing water. Run a full wet on a track that is drying and it loses pace and wears out up to two and a half times faster, because there is no water left to cool it. Run intermediates in a downpour and they cannot move the water. A race declared wet before lights out publishes how wet the circuit will be, so you choose your compounds against a number you can actually see — and free practice and qualifying run in their own conditions, because a wet weekend is not equally wet on every day of it.

Before each Grand Prix you choose your tire compounds (soft, medium, hard, intermediate or wet) and a pit-stop count (1-3), and the race then simulates them lap by lap. A fresh soft is the quickest tire on track but loses grip every lap it stays on, so a worn soft ends up slower than a fresh hard; each stop costs real time in the pit lane and hands you a new set. That makes undercuts and overcuts decide actual positions, and a stop that happens to fall while a Safety Car is out is far cheaper than one under green. Rain is not a switch: the race tracks how much water is actually on the circuit, so an intermediate and a full wet each have a window they work in. A full wet on a drying track is slow and tears itself apart; an intermediate in standing water aquaplanes; a slick in the wet costs up to a fifth of your lap time. A front can also pass through and leave the circuit drying lap by lap, back through both crossovers, and your pit wall reacts on the wet plan you committed to before the start.

The Drivers' Championship ranks real players by individual points from their true finish position each round. The Constructors' Championship sums the points of both cars from the same real-world team across the season. Both pay a separate AuraCoins bonus pool to their top three at season end.

No — it is a fully separate series with its own catalog, economy and standings. Your Car Spotting garage, Aura Car Racing cars and GT3 Championship cars never race against or merge with F1 Championship cars.

The full real 2026 calendar: 24 Grands Prix, one live round every 4 days, so a complete season runs about 96 days before the standings reset and a new season begins immediately on the same calendar.

Each round runs on a 4-day cycle. Q1 opens the day after the previous race and stays open 24 hours; Q2 runs the next 24 hours for the top 15; Q3 the 24 hours after that for the top 10. The grid then locks and the Grand Prix runs on day 4, at the same time of day every round. On sprint rounds the sprint is run one hour after Q1 closes, on the Q1 order.

Yes. A car bought mid-round takes over the seat of the bot driving it, so you never have to sit out a race. Join during Q1 or Q2 and you qualify normally and keep a real grid slot; join from Q3 onward — and up to one hour before the race starts — and you are added to the grid but start from the pit lane, behind every qualified car. Grid position costs real race time, so a pit-lane start is a genuine handicap, not just a label.

Every race is simulated lap by lap with the things that actually decide a Grand Prix. Tyres lose grip as the stint goes on and fall off a cliff if you stretch them too far; pit stops cost real time on the lap you box, and a stop that lands under a Safety Car is far cheaper. Cars running within a second of each other trade slipstream on the straights against dirty air in the corners, so Monza produces overtakes where Monaco produces a train. There are launches off the line, jump-start and track-limits penalties, unsafe-release calls, safety cars caused by real incidents, red flags that stop the race outright, fuel burning off across the race, and weather that changes underneath you: a front arrives at its own intensity, the track wetness rises, and it can stop again and dry out over a handful of laps so the field has to guess when the intermediate stops being the quickest tyre. Every one of those is seeded and deterministic: the same race always plays out the same way, for every viewer.

The 2026 regulations removed the MGU-H and raised the MGU-K to 350kW, so roughly half a car's output is electric and that energy has to be recovered under braking. Before each Grand Prix you pick an energy map: Attack deploys hard and wins time on circuits with heavy braking zones that refill the battery, but runs it flat where there is nothing to harvest; Harvest lifts and coasts, giving up outright pace to stay alive down long straights; Balanced costs nothing either way. Manual Override Mode has replaced DRS — there is no rear-wing flap any more — so a car within a second of the one ahead gets an extra burst of deployment on the straights, and because it comes out of the same battery, a car in Attack has more of it to spend than one in Harvest. The game tells you what each circuit favours before you commit.

Exactly like the real regulation, your aero setup is sealed the moment you set a qualifying time and cannot be touched again before the race. Everything that is not a parc ferme item in the real rules stays open until one hour before lights out: your tyre compounds, pit-stop count, wet-weather plan and energy deployment map — the calls a real team makes on race morning with the forecast in front of them.