Carlos Sainz doesn’t sound like a man trying to lobby for an advantage. He sounds like someone who’s stared at the 2026 rulebook, driven the first real laps in anger, and decided the sport needs an escape hatch before it locks itself into something that looks clever on paper but gets awkward at certain tracks.
With Formula 1 now committed to its new power-unit era — a 50/50 split between electrical and combustion power — energy management has moved from a background skill to the centre of the show. Harvesting and deployment aren’t just “part of the lap” anymore; they *are* the lap. And with boost and overtake modes layered on top, drivers are juggling more moving pieces than F1 has ever asked them to handle in real time.
Sainz’s point is simple: if the season starts revealing that the balance is off at the wrong venues, the FIA and FOM should be ready to adjust rather than stubbornly letting the championship grind through races where the cars are being forced into exaggerated harvesting or compromised deployment just to survive the distance.
“I think in general, my message to FOM and FIA is, I think the start of the year, we need to stay a bit open-minded in case the regulations that we’ve come up with are maybe a bit exaggerated on the amount of harvesting or deployment that we have to do through a lap,” Sainz said during testing.
That word — *exaggerated* — is doing the heavy lifting. Because this isn’t a general complaint about complex tech. It’s a warning that the rules may inadvertently dictate driving styles and race patterns in a way that isn’t consistent from circuit to circuit. Some tracks may be “okay”. Others may quickly become exercises in conservation.
Sainz singled out Melbourne as a likely step up in difficulty compared to Bahrain, while also pointing to Jeddah as another circuit where the energy demands could expose the limits of the current framework. He conceded he hadn’t yet run all the simulator calibrations for Albert Park, but the direction of travel is clear: the more power-hungry the lap, the more the regulations risk forcing teams and drivers into a narrow operating window — and the more likely it becomes that the sport has to intervene.
“And fair play is not easy,” he added, acknowledging the brutal reality of 2026: nobody truly knew, in a fully joined-up way, what the downforce and drag targets would look like once the cars and engines met on track. The knock-on effects are everywhere. Aerodynamic efficiency changes the harvesting picture. The harvesting picture changes the deployment picture. The deployment picture changes how often you can lean on boost or overtake. And that changes racing.
Even before the opening round, engine politics have already bubbled up. The FIA is dealing with a compression ratio saga — with Mercedes believed to have found a way to run at 18:1 rather than the mandated 16:1 under “ambient conditions” — and the governing body is set to resolve the matter via an e-vote that could alter how that measurement is defined from 1 August. Separately, safety concerns around race starts have prompted an extra blue light warning for drivers ahead of the start process.
Sainz’s argument lands in the same neighbourhood: the sport is discovering in real time where the new era’s stress points are. Some will be clarified quickly. Others might only become obvious once a few different track types have been ticked off.
The catch, of course, is that F1 can’t just tweak the dials on a whim. Any regulation changes would have to go through the F1 Commission and then be ratified by the World Motor Sport Council. On top of that, the new engines are due to be homologated on March 1 — after which meaningful changes are effectively frozen until season’s end.
So Sainz can ask for flexibility, but he’s also realistic about how slowly the machinery of governance moves. That creates an uncomfortable possibility: if a couple of early races expose a genuine problem with the energy-management model, everyone may simply have to live with it for months.
Against that wider backdrop, Sainz’s own pre-season has been about something more basic: mileage, and catching up. Williams lost time in Barcelona, so Bahrain became a recovery mission as much as an evaluation of outright pace. Sainz logged 66 laps on Friday morning in the FW48 and set a best of 1:35.252, ending the session 1.5s shy of Charles Leclerc’s benchmark.
The lap time isn’t the headline — not yet. What matters is that Williams got the car running reliably early in the test, giving Sainz and the team a chance to map limitations and begin nudging the FW48 towards a more usable setup window.
“What we needed over the last few days was to recover the time lost in Barcelona by adding a lot of mileage to the car,” Sainz said. “I think we’ve managed to do that well, the car is running reliably from the beginning.”
There’s an edge to how he describes the next part: yes, the reliability allows them to identify weaknesses — and “unfortunately, there are quite a few.” That’s not melodrama; it’s an experienced driver describing what it looks like when you’re not yet on top of a new rule set, having already surrendered precious test time. Miss the early learning, and you can spend the rest of the week chasing the wrong things.
He also noted how the conditions shifted. The earlier running had been dominated by wind — the sort that turns any attempt at clean correlation into a guessing game. With calmer weather later, the cars became more predictable for everyone, and Williams could finally layer in setup changes that better suit the new regulations.
The subtext is hard to miss. F1 has sold 2026 as a reset, but resets don’t reset equally. If the energy-management framework proves too prescriptive at certain venues, it won’t just be a sporting issue — it’ll become another multiplier on existing performance gaps.
Sainz isn’t asking for the sport to panic. He’s asking it not to be proud. If the first flyaway stretch shows that some circuits are pushing the new energy model into strange, show-damaging shapes, the smartest move may be to admit it early — and start lining up the fix, even if the bureaucracy means the fix comes later than everyone would like.
