There are less than three weeks until the season-opening Australian Grand Prix. Some teams believe this would be the ideal time to change the rules.
Formula 1 is in the midst of the biggest regulatory shake-up in generations, with both the chassis and the power unit rules completely different in 2026. With no carry-over between seasons, the pre-season testing campaign is the first tentative steps into the great unknown.
Some teams and drivers don’t like what they’ve discovered.
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Max Verstappen has been on the front foot deriding pretty much every element of the new Formula 1 but in particular the need for the drivers to constantly manage the state of charge of their batteries in what he described as “Formula E on steroids”. Reports suggest some other drivers are also critical of the new rules but are unwilling to hit out publicly.
But their issues really pertain to the power unit rather than the chassis. Drivers seem generally happy to have ditched the ground-effect cars in favour of the more conventional 2026 model.
“The car’s shorter, it’s lighter, it’s actually easier to catch,” Lewis Hamilton said. “It’s quite fun, like rallying a lot”
It’s the electrically limited power unit that’s caused most of the consternation, and the debate has now stepped up a notch with the intervention of McLaren team principal Andrea Stella, who sees three key flaws with the regulations — beyond the drivers’ likes and dislikes — he believes need to be urgently fixed before the first race.
“Three simple things: starts, overtaking and finding measures to avoid the lift and cost,” he said.
“I think these simple technical solutions exist and they will be discussed in the next F1 Commission.”
The next commission meeting is this Wednesday, 16 days before first practice in Melbourne.
There is no shortage of self-interest in the F1 paddock, and that’s particularly true when these rule changes have created so many unknowns. It’s not unusual for teams, which thrive on certainty, to panic in the face of not knowing what’s coming next.
But Stella has couched his call for change in the idea of safety.
Safety is the most important remit of governing body the FIA. Describing his complaints as matters of safety could prove compelling in changing the rules on the eve of the season.
But what are those three complaints, and is it really possible to separate them from the sport’s febrile political scene?
History made in crash-ridden 12-hour | 01:19
LAUNCH SEQUENCE ‘A RECIPE FOR DISASTER’
The first problem has been brewing not just since testing but for much of last year.
F1 starts are set to become considerably more complicated and unpredictable this year.
Some key engine changes have made it so.
The first is the removal of the MGU-H, a simplification designed to attract new brands to F1. The MGU-H turned wasted heat energy into electrical power, which was used to keep the turbocharger spooled up to eliminate turbo lag. Turbo lag is the time between the driver putting their foot down and the turbo suddenly kicking in, massively increasing power.
The other change is the big increase in electrical power and reduction in combustion power, making an almost 50-50 split between the two — but the electrical power cannot be used until the car has reached 50 kilometres per hour.
That means in 2026 a normal race start would have drivers accessing just a fraction of the 750 kilowatts they normally have available.
Then the electrical energy might suddenly kick in — depending on whether a driver chooses to use it or not — and then, a few seconds later, the turbo will kick in, boosting power again in a chaotic and unpredictable race start.
To smooth the process, drivers rev their engines to around 12,000rpm for 10 seconds or more to spool up the turbo before launching. The bizarreness must be seen to be understood.
The problem, though, is that spooling up the turbo while stationary is a very delicate process easy to get wrong.
“The difference between a good and bad start last year was you got a bit of wheel spin or you had a bad reaction time,” Oscar Piastri said, per The Race.
“This year it could be effectively like an F2 race where you almost go into anti-stall. You’re not just losing five metres or so; you can be losing six or seven spots if it doesn’t go well.”
And that’s when drivers are practising without pressure and without having to respond to the starting lights.
That also does little for drivers starting at the back of the grid. The five-second light sequence starts pretty much as soon as the last car parks in their grid spot — too little time to undertake the required preparation.
There’s also the variable of whether drivers have their aerodynamics set to straight-line mode or high-downforce cornering mode.
“A pack of 22 cars with a couple hundred points less downforce sounds like a recipe for disaster to me,” Piastri said.
‘WE ARE TALKING ABOUT SAFETY’
It’s worth noting here that the viral video of what appears to be a highly haphazard practice start during testing is also highly misleading.
The video shows seven cars lining up on the grid for a practice start, but when the lights go out, only three of them actually get going.
This wasn’t because of the rules, however, with Piastri saying it was down to “a mix up in instructions”.
“I got told to wait until whoever was in front of me had gone, so do my own launch and not do it to the lights,” he said.
“Clearly some other people had a different idea. So that was nothing to do with the power units.”
But it was nonetheless illustrative of McLaren boss Stella’s concerns about the new rules — that is, bad starts from a couple of drivers would essentially look much the same.
“We need to make sure that the race start procedure allows all cars to have the power unit ready to go because the grid is not the place in which you want to have cars slow in taking off the grid,” he said, per Autosport.
“We’re not talking about how fast you are in qualifying. We are not talking about what’s your race pace. We are talking about safety on the grid.
“There’s some topics which are simply bigger than the competitive interest, and for me, having safety on the grid, which can be achieved with a simple adjustment, is just a no-brainer.”
But Ferrari might argue that it isn’t bigger than competitive interest today because it wasn’t bigger than competitive interest when the Italian team first raised it more than a year ago, potentially as early as 2024.
According to The Race, Ferrari principal Frédéric Vasseur raised the race-starts issue long ago but was shut down by rivals.
Ferrari subsequently designed its engine to better handle race starts. Speculation suggests it did so with a smaller turbocharger, which would need less time to spool up in exchange for less performance on power-sensitive tracks.
The issue was raised by other teams in the middle of last year, but this time Ferrari shut it down, having already committed to a design based on the regulations.
It’s perhaps why Stella has emphasised the safety implications this time around — the FIA can force through any rule change on safety regardless of disagreement among the teams.
“I think it’s imperative,” he said. “I think it’s imperative because it’s possible and it’s simple.
“We should not complicate what is simple and we should not postpone what is possible immediately. Therefore, I think it’s something that we should definitely achieve before Australia.”
Drivers walk away from two fiery crashes | 01:21
WHAT ABOUT OVERTAKING?
Stella also believes overtaking will be much harder this year after having seen the cars on track for six days over two weeks of testing so far.
Between 2011 and 2025 cars were equipped with DRS, which boosted speed down the straights when a driver was less than a second behind another car.
This year the DRS has been replaced by a push-to-pass system called overtake mode.
Currently the rules mandate electrical power tapers down to zero between 290 kilometres per hour and 345 kilometres per hour. Overtake mode will allow a driver to use the full 350 kilowatts up to 355 kilometres per hour, replicating the DRS effect.
But that’s only useful if a driver has the extra power to use in the first place.
“Our drivers have been racing with other drivers during these three days of testing in Bahrain and they found it extremely difficult to overtake,” Stella said.
“The fact that you have an additional amount of energy when you follow and you are within the one second is difficult to exploit because this extra energy may mean that there is just a little bit more deployment at the end of the straight, if anything.
“As an F1 community we should look at what can be done to make sure that we have a sensible feasibility when it comes to overtaking, otherwise we lose one of the fundamental elements of the nature of racing, which is giving drivers the possibility to overtake.”
The options to address this may are clear but may not be palatable.
One is to reduce how much electrical energy a driver can deploy around the lap, which would have the effect of keeping the battery at a higher rate of charge for longer. That would, however, make the cars theoretically slower.
The other option could be to taper electrical power more aggressively down the straights, though this would have the same effect — and it would still do nothing if drivers don’t have enough power to use in the first place.
Huge crash reigns chaos at Bathurst | 03:11
THERE ARE NO NON-POLITICAL ISSUES IN F1
The problem is closely related to Stella’s third issue, which he raises on safety grounds: that the need to charge battery could result in massive and dangerous differences in speed at the end of the straights.
To maximise power regeneration, drivers are lifting and coasting at the end of the straights.
Lifting and coasting has long been part of Formula 1, albeit for other reasons — usually to save fuel or protect the floor of the car in the ground-effect era. But Stella argues it could be more aggressive this year, especially at tracks featuring fewer big braking zones, like Melbourne.
There’s also the risk of a driver suddenly running out of electrical energy, which would have the same effect.
“This may not be an ideal situation when you follow closely, and this can give a race situation like we have seen before a few times with (Mark) Webber in Valencia,” Stella said, recalling Webber’s airborne crash in 2010. “Definitely we don’t want to see (that) anymore in Formula 1.”
One way to fix this could be to change the rules to allow cars to generate more power at other parts of the lap. Autosport has reported the phrase ‘superclipping’, which refers to the amount of power that can be directed from the combustion engine to the electric motor for charging. It’s currently limited at 250 kilowatts; boosting it to the maximum electrical output of 350 kilowatts could reduce the need for novel regeneration techniques.
The safety argument appears self-evident, but this too could easily become politicised.
McLaren uses the Mercedes power unit, and Mercedes immediately pointed to the Red Bull Powertrains unit appearing to have much better regeneration and deployment characteristics during testing — that is, Red Bull appeared to be charging the battery more efficiently, giving the drivers more power to use down the straights.
Red Bull Powertrains — if it were so inclined — could argue that a Mercedes engine customer is simply trying to get the rules changes to benefit its own shortcomings.
Remember that this comes at a time non-Mercedes teams are attempting to close the loophole around compression ratios, which they believe Mercedes is exploiting to significant benefit.
The compression ratio issue will be discussed again this week, along with the rest of the growing list of complaints about the new rules.
The odds of the compression ratio loophole being closed for this season appears slim. But then again, if Mercedes and its customers succeed in getting the rules tweaked in their favour — if in fact it’s seen that way — what motivation would Red Bull or Ferrari have not to play hardball in reply?
There are few non-political issues in Formula 1. The sport’s new power unit certainly isn’t among them.
And while the arguing continues, so too does the countdown to the Australian Grand Prix.