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In 2025, 10.7% of race starts ended in retirement. In 2026 so far it is 18.7%. That is four cars per race instead of two.
The reliability story of the season has been about Mercedes power units. Mercedes are retiring from 13.6% of their starts, which is below the field average.
Aston Martin are retiring from 45.5%.
2026 is the least reliable season in this window by a clear margin, and the jump from 2025 is a 75% increase in the rate.
This has happened before, inside the same dataset.
2022 was the first year of the last big aerodynamic reset, and the retirement rate jumped from 12.6% to 16.8%. It then fell for three straight years as teams matured those designs, bottoming out at 10.3% in 2024.
2026 is a far larger reset than 2022 was. It changed the aerodynamics and the power unit, moving to a roughly even split between internal combustion and electrical power with an entirely new battery and deployment architecture. A bigger change has produced a bigger spike: 18.7%, higher than 2022 managed.
The pattern is the useful part. Reliability in Formula 1 is not a fixed property of the sport. It is a function of how long teams have had to debug what they are running, and every reset restarts that clock.
If 2022 is the guide, this improves from here.
Read the 2026 season through the headlines and it is a Mercedes story. George Russell losing power while leading in Montreal. Kimi Antonelli's electrical failure in Barcelona. Toto Wolff calling the reliability "not good enough". James Allison eventually identifying a battery issue. McLaren, as a Mercedes customer, failing to start in China with twin battery problems.
All of that happened. But it is not where the retirements are.
Aston Martin have retired from nearly half their starts. Cadillac, in their first season in the sport, are barely better. Between them those two teams account for 19 of the 44 retirements in the entire field.
Mercedes sit seventh of eleven, below the field average.
Because retirements are not equally expensive.
A retirement from the lead costs 25 points. A retirement from fourteenth costs nothing. Russell was running at the front in Montreal when his car shut down. That single failure was worth more in championship terms than several of Cadillac's put together.
The coverage is not wrong about the impact. It is just measuring something different from what it sounds like it is measuring. Mercedes have a points problem caused by reliability. Aston Martin and Cadillac have a reliability problem.
This is worth holding onto whenever you see a reliability discussion. "Most affected" almost always means most points lost, and that is dominated by where a car was running, not how often it broke.
Expect a car to go out. Four per race is the 2026 rate, against two last year.
A first-year team breaking down is normal. Cadillac at 40.9% is what a brand new operation looks like, and it is not a verdict on them.
Expect this to improve. The last reset spiked and then fell for three years. The mechanism is teams learning what they built.
Be careful with "worst reliability". Ask whether you are being told about failure frequency or points lost. They point at completely different teams this season.
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Retirements are announced in race control messages and confirmed in documents.
The Formula Dream app collects every FIA document of the weekend as it is released, which is where the decision behind a penalty actually appears, usually before the commentary catches up. It also runs a live Dashboard through every session with all the cars on the circuit map, a timing tower carrying lap times, gaps, intervals, tyre compound and age, flag and safety car alerts the moment race control calls them, and live driver radio as it is broadcast.
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Russell took the lead at turn one and crashed at the final corner of the same lap. Verstappen won, Hamilton charged to second, and the McLarens hit each other.
