EA Charges $29.99 for F1 25’s 2026 Season Pack, Wipes 2025 Saves

Electronic Arts released a feature breakdown for the F1 25: 2026 Season Pack on May 26, confirming a June 3 launch that asks players to pay $29.99 for the kind of mid-cycle season update Codemasters used to deliver as a free patch. The download replaces 2025’s grid, regulations, calendar and physics with the rule reset that arrives on the real Formula 1 grid next season.

That includes the new MADRING street circuit in Madrid, a rebuilt active-aerodynamics package, and an expanded 11-team field carrying Audi and Cadillac, a structural change the championship has not seen since 2016. The pack also wipes the player’s 2025 Career and My Team saves at install, a friction point EA’s announcement page does not lead with.

The 17-Year Break From EA’s F1 Update Pattern

For seventeen seasons, Codemasters has shipped a new F1 title every spring with that year’s grid, livery and rule book baked in. The base release in May 2025 handled the current championship. Buying a single annual game got you the season from race one through the finale.

The 2026 pack rewrites that arrangement. EA’s pricing puts the standalone download at $29.99 on console and $24.99 on PC, with a bundled “2026 Season Edition” of base game plus content at $49.99 across most regions. For players who already own the current title, the next season is no longer a free patch; it is roughly two thirds the price of the original game.

The publisher’s framing leans on scale. Lee Mather, senior creative director at Codemasters, called the pack “the beginning of a bold new era for Formula 1 with regulation changes redefining the grid” in the official release. The implicit argument is that next season is not iteration, it is enough new content to charge for.

That argument has a counterweight EA does not surface. Mid-year content drops from Codemasters, including the in-cycle livery and transfer refreshes shipped late in 2024 and 2025, arrived as free downloads. Putting the next-year championship behind a paywall while the current game is still on shelves is new ground for the studio.

Why the 2026 Regulations Force This Specific Reset

Formula 1’s governing body, the FIA (Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, the sport’s rulemaker), rewrote three core rule books at once for next year: chassis, power unit, and sporting regulations. Cars drop roughly 30 kilograms in minimum mass, narrow by 100 millimetres, and shift to a near 50/50 split between internal combustion and electric power.

The hybrid component triples from the current generation. The Motor Generator Unit Kinetic (MGU-K, the system that recovers braking energy) jumps from 120 kW to 350 kW of deployment, while the heat-recovery MGU-H is dropped entirely. Sustainable drop-in fuel becomes mandatory across all engine suppliers.

Translating that into a game engine takes more than a livery swap. The car physics model has to handle a 30-kilo mass shift and active wings that change shape mid-corner. Tyre wear curves, brake balance, fuel maps and the new Overtake mode that replaces DRS all need fresh telemetry. None of that is a UI patch, and EA’s argument for charging is that none of it was deliverable inside the F1 25 build that shipped in May 2025.

MADRING Lands in Madrid With 22 Corners

MADRING is the first brand-new Formula 1 circuit added to a Codemasters game since the Las Vegas Strip Circuit landed in F1 23. The track also replaces Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya as host of the Spanish Grand Prix, the first venue change for the race since 1991.

EA describes the layout as a 5.4 km hybrid built around the IFEMA convention centre on Madrid’s northern edge, mixing pure street furniture with three sections of new purpose-built tarmac. The full lap holds 22 corners and a long banked turn that links the permanent and street sections.

Key technical points from the F1 25 feature deep dive page:

• 5.4 km layout with 22 corners
• Street and permanent hybrid construction
• Spanish Grand Prix host venue (replaces Catalunya)
• Locked to 2026 car models only (cannot be driven in any current-season mode)
• Available in Time Trial, Grand Prix, Driver Career, My Team, Split-Screen, and Unranked Multiplayer

Locking the circuit to the new car list is the pack’s strongest upsell hook. Players who own the base game but skip the download will see the new track on streams and in their friends’ lobbies, with no path to drive it themselves. Codemasters has gated content like this before, with Portimao during the pandemic-era calendar, but never tied to a paywall on this scale.

The Eleven-Team Grid and Your Twelfth Seat

Next year’s grid is the first 11-team field since Marussia and Caterham left after 2014, and the first with a brand-new constructor entering on debut since Haas in 2016. Audi joins through its acquisition of the Sauber Group, completed in 2024, with the Hinwil team rebadged and running an in-house works power unit. Cadillac slots in as a fresh constructor running Ferrari customer engines while it develops its own.

That hands the player base two debutante liveries to learn and four real-world driver swaps to absorb at launch. In My Team mode, the custom squad rolls in as the twelfth on the grid, a slot that did not exist in any annual F1 title between 2017 and 2025.

The grid expansion is also why the calendar shifts. With eleven teams running two cars each plus the player’s My Team entry, race lobbies must accommodate 24 AI cars before any multiplayer overlay. EA confirmed in the deep dive that the pack updates the AI roster across every existing circuit, not just MADRING.

What 2025 Save Owners Lose at Launch

Buried in the Steam product listing is a line every returning player should read. The pack is a hard reset, and EA states the terms plainly.

Custom teams and career saves from 2025 don’t transfer to 2026; some final car models arrive in post-launch updates.

That language sits inside the Steam product page for the season download, dated May 2026. The two clauses bracket the full friction of the upgrade. A player three-quarters through a Driver Career has to either finish that arc in the existing game or start fresh next month. A My Team build six in-game years deep loses the livery, the sponsors, the driver development tree, and the team finances at install.

EA has not detailed which assets, if any, port across. The omission is conspicuous in a feature breakdown that otherwise spent runway on every other content vector. The post-launch model rollout adds a second irritation: some car models, EA confirms, are not finished and will arrive in patches after June 3. Buyers pay full pack price on day one for a build that is still completing.

Pricing the Pack Against EA’s Last F1 Releases

The headline numbers are tight. The download lands at $29.99 on console, $24.99 on PC, and the Season Edition bundle ships at $49.99 in the US, matching the F1 24 launch RRP from a year ago. For a returning F1 25 owner, the choice is the standalone pack at $29.99 or skipping the season entirely.

• $29.99 console download (US)
• $24.99 PC download (US)
• $49.99 Season Edition bundle (US)
• £49.99 / €59.99 Season Edition (UK / EU console)

That puts the season update at roughly 60 percent of the base game’s launch RRP. Compare against the EA SPORTS FC season pass model, which charges nothing for the calendar refresh and gates premium content behind Ultimate Team microtransactions, or against the Forza Motorsport season-update model, which delivers car drops and tracks through the Premium Edition pipeline at no extra spend.

The closest precedent inside Codemasters’ own history is the F1 2010 Championship Edition for PSP, which shipped as a paid mid-cycle product. That was a different platform era. On current-generation consoles, the new season download establishes a monetization line that competing racing publishers will study closely.

Where June 3 Lands in EA’s Wider Sports Calendar

EA’s sports portfolio has spent the past 18 months experimenting with paid mid-cycle content. EA SPORTS FC 25 launched a Rush mode update in March that arrived free; NHL 25 sold a $19.99 World of Chel expansion last November. The F1 download sits at the high end of that range and tests how much a sim-racing audience will pay for a single-year regulation reset.

If June 3 sales clear EA’s internal targets, expect the model to migrate. The next NHL release cycle, EA SPORTS WRC’s calendar update, and the next Madden roster cycle are the most obvious candidates for similar treatment. If sales underperform, the 2027 F1 release reverts to the all-in-one annual model and the experiment ends with a single data point.

The download ships on June 3 across PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via the F1 25 product page. Wishlisting is live on Steam and the Xbox storefront. The real Spanish Grand Prix runs the MADRING layout for the first time later this year.