An overtake is decided three corners before it happens

Energy deployment maps are written in advance, and a driver who is out of charge at the wrong moment never had the move available.

Hybrid power units store a finite amount of energy and release it on a schedule. That schedule is not improvised. It is a map, built for the circuit, deciding where energy goes in and where it comes out, and it constrains what a driver can do far more than the commentary suggests.

Here is what this means for a pass. To be alongside at the end of a straight you need speed at the start of it, which means traction out of the previous corner and deployment through the acceleration phase. If your map has already spent its energy earlier in the lap, you arrive at the straight with the same engine as the car ahead and nothing extra to bring. The move was lost two corners earlier when the software decided where to put the charge.

Good teams build maps with a bias toward the overtaking straight when they expect to be racing, and a bias toward pure lap time when they expect clean air. Those are different maps for the same circuit, and choosing between them requires predicting the race, which nobody can do.

There is also the recovery side, which is less discussed and equally binding. Energy comes back under braking and from exhaust heat, and both are limited by regulation and by physics. A circuit with few heavy braking zones simply does not refill the store as fast, so the deployment has to be rationed, and a driver who follows closely and uses extra energy defending will find themselves short later in the lap. Defending costs you the ability to defend again.

I think this is why some races that look processional are actually tense. Two drivers are managing an invisible budget, and the gap between them is not about grip at all. It is about who has to lift first.

The argument against all of this is that it makes racing opaque. A viewer cannot see charge state, so a pass that was set up by three laps of careful energy management looks like it happened because one car was faster. Broadcast graphics have improved and still do not carry it.

Motor racing has always had hidden variables. Fuel loads, tyre age, brake wear.

This one is different because it is decided by code and the driver mostly obeys it.