Twelve of the twenty-two drivers on the grid have never raced at Sepang. Antonelli, Russell, Leclerc, Norris, Piastri, Hadjar, Lawson, Lindblad, Colapinto, Bearman, Bortoleto, and Albon. Four of the top six in the championship are on that list: Antonelli, Russell, Norris, and Leclerc have never raced a lap here. Verstappen and Hamilton are the only front-runners who have, and Verstappen won the last race here, in 2017.
The last race in Sepang was under completely different regulations, and with a different car. The ten drivers who have raced here aren’t carrying an advantage. They’re carrying a memory. Corners that once defined the lap in 2017 behave differently now. Norris put it plainly: “Because you have no battery, the two high-speed corners that should be high-speed, you run out of battery and are easy flat.” DRS is gone too, at a circuit built for overtaking twelve years before DRS existed.
The track itself has changed as well. The final corner was reprofiled in 2016, raised and made off-camber, and Carlos Sainz still hasn’t forgiven them for it: “I don’t understand why they did this change to the last corner.” He called it a terrible mistake. He is one of the ten who has actually driven it.
And nobody knows what the tires will do here. No one has any data on tire degradation at this track under the new regulations. Antonelli is expecting it to matter: “We might see two, three stops, because tyre deg is going to be big, but another question mark is going to be the weather.”
Weather will also be a big problem. A heat hazard is expected to be declared for the race, with the heat index around 104°F, and afternoon thunderstorms are normal in Malaysia in early October. Nobody has wet weather data on the 2026 cars either.
Half the grid has never been here and the other half is working from a memory of driving on the track nine years ago. Everyone arrives with the same amount of nothing.