McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has urged F1’s rulemakers not to let the opening weekend of 2026 pass as a “no harm done” anecdote, warning the new-era race start is already flirting with a serious incident.
The season-opening Australian Grand Prix delivered a strangely hesitant first getaway, with drivers initially given a window to let the turbo reach full speed before launching. In practice, it exposed a far messier reality: varying battery states meant some cars simply didn’t have the punch when the lights went out, while others did — and the result was the sort of closing speeds that make engineers wince and drivers brace.
Stella’s read was blunt: it’s a question of when, not if, that speed differential becomes a crash.
“For me personally, I had three points of view that I wanted to double check… and now, having had the first race,” Stella said. “The first case was the start and I think the concern remains today, the start was a bit of a near miss. There were huge speed differentials on the grid.
“We can hope for the best, or we can just do something further to make sure that we reduce this speed differential… my appeal… is to say we should do more, keep attention on the start, because at some stage that will become a problem.”
One moment in particular crystallised the issue: Liam Lawson appeared to be left almost stranded as cars with healthier charge states swept around him. It’s not the first time the sport has wrestled with launch-phase variability, but the uncomfortable difference here is that it’s been baked into the new technical ecosystem rather than emerging as an outlier.
Stella was careful not to prescribe solutions in public — and you can understand why. The last thing any team boss wants is to throw a technical hand grenade into the FIA’s inbox that conveniently benefits their own package. But his point wasn’t subtle: this is now a safety topic, not a “let’s see how it develops” sporting one.
His second concern sits adjacent to the first and, in some ways, feeds it. Stella highlighted that the new deployment dynamics can create unpredictable speed swings even once the field is moving, particularly in the opening lap when everyone’s still juggling battery use in traffic.
“The second perspective was to do with the cars following and the fact that there may be large speed differentials on track between cars,” he said. “Today, in my view, this was mainly a point of concern in the first lap.
“Lando, in particular, made the point that it’s quite tricky when you have cars very close to you that may have still deployment ongoing or not, to create this differential. This becomes quite unpredictable.”
That “unpredictable” word is doing a lot of work. Drivers can manage dirty air, tyre temperatures and braking references. What’s much harder to manage is a car in front suddenly becoming a different animal because its energy state is on a different page — or a car behind arriving faster than expected because it’s still deploying while you’re not. In the tight margins of a first-lap concertina, that’s precisely the sort of variable that turns a normal squeeze into an avoidable hit.
Then comes the third strand of Stella’s critique, and it’s the most politically charged: overtaking. He didn’t deny the early-race action was entertaining — the Melbourne start produced plenty of movement, including skirmishes between Mercedes and Ferrari — but he questioned whether the spectacle is coming from the right place.
“To me, this still looks like a little bit of an artificial overtaking which has to do with how we are using the battery,” Stella said. “Actually, when the pace settles and everyone is on the same pattern from a deployment schedule point of view, then I think the overtaking becomes difficult.”
That’s a familiar fear in new regulations: an initial burst of novelty, followed by convergence as teams and drivers settle on the same optimal energy patterns. If overtaking becomes less about creating a genuine performance delta and more about who’s timed their electrical spend for the straight, you risk replacing one kind of frustration with another — and, in Stella’s view, introducing a layer of “gameplay” that can look compelling on TV while still leaving drivers feeling the racing is being decided by algorithmic rhythms.
What makes Stella’s comments notable is the timing. Team principals typically prefer to keep their powder dry early in a new cycle, particularly when everyone is still learning where their own weaknesses are. But Melbourne was enough for him to go on record with a warning: don’t wait for the accident report before acting.
“And even from this point of view,” Stella added, referencing Norris’ own remarks, “we should not be happy because nothing happened. We should always be on the front foot when it has to do with safety.”
It’s a line that will resonate in the FIA offices. F1 doesn’t need to be reminded what happens when a “near miss” becomes normalised. The sport has spent the last decade building a safety culture that tries to anticipate failure modes rather than react to them.
Australia has effectively served as the first real-world stress test of 2026’s start and deployment behaviours, and Stella’s view is that the data already says enough. Whether the FIA and F1 treat this as a tweakable problem to be solved quickly — or another “monitoring” item that drifts until it bites — is now one of the regulation reset’s first serious governance questions.
