Drivers insist that vast differences in speeds while harvesting does not pose a safety issue.

At a time Esteban Ocon and Oliver Bearman are pouring cold water on the belief that the new regulations will produce a feast of overtaking, there is one aspect of the new rules that will allow drivers to nail a rival.

With a 50/50 split between ICE and electrical power, drivers will need to harvest energy as often as possible, which, as previously predicted, will lead to occasions when drivers actually slow on straights, often by means of downshifting rather than simply lifting-off.

While one driver slows, the driver behind, assuming that he too isn't harvesting energy, will make his move and pass.

"George passed Colapinto whilst Colapinto was doing his long runs," revealed Toto Wolff following the Barcelona shakedown. "I think it was like 60km/h (37 mph) or 50km/h (31 mph) straight-line speed difference.

"We are going to see much more overtaking," he added. "We're going to see it in areas that we wouldn't expect. So, apart from the fact of the quickest cars with the best drivers, it's also going to have this additional dimension of intelligent driving and tactics that are going to be easy to understand, in my opinion, for Formula 1."

Of course, this huge differential in speed raises safety concerns, and while one immediately thinks of Montreal, where a driver on a hot lap suddenly finds himself behind a much slower car about to dive into the pitlane, as George Russell has previously pointed out, there are tracks like Jeddah, with its numerous blind corners, and tracks like Monza and Baku.

"It's going to have so little downforce in the straights," said the Mercedes driver in Canada in 2024. "It's almost going to feel like you're just flying through the air.

"You can imagine in a race that it starts raining and you're on slick tyres, and you're doing 250 mph on a street circuit, that's going to be a bit of a sketchy place to be, so these are questions that need to be answered," the Grand Prix Drivers Association director warned.

"When it comes to safety, unfortunately, history has told us that incidents need to happen before changes are made," he added. "Everybody needs to do a really thorough job ahead of these regulations, because the cars are going to be so quick.

While his fears relating to wet races remain, he is now more relaxed about the difference in speeds in 'normal' conditions.

"There are going to be some examples of major closing speeds," he admitted following Barcelona, "I don't think that'll be a problem in dry conditions. It would be a problem in low-visibility races. However, if there's low visibility, that obviously means it's wet and if you're driving in the wet, because you're going around the corners so much slower and the braking distances are longer, you're re-harvesting much more and you're spending much less energy.

"Over the course of a lap, you'll have much more to spend and there'll be less of these major de-rates. So, in wet conditions, there should be plenty of energy to spend across the lap and you shouldn't have these major closing speeds."

"I got close to a couple of cars, and I made one overtake, which was a pretty big speed difference," said Oscar Piastri post-Barcelona, "but I think that person was just being nice and letting me pass.

"I think the speed differences will be maybe a little bit bigger than what we had with DRS," he added, "but I don't think there's going to be any dangerous scenarios of cars doing wildly different speeds.

"With such a big difference in power, when you don't have the battery deploying at full power, it's 350 kilowatts, it's a lot of horsepower difference, so we kind of need some indication," admitted the Australian. "So we've worked pretty closely with the FIA across all the teams in trying to make it as safe and as obvious as possible when things are happening that we might not expect."