Martin Brundle isn’t usually one to reach for the regulatory spanner after a single race weekend, but Melbourne’s first proper taste of Formula 1’s 2026 power unit era left him convinced something needs tidying up — and quickly.
The Australian Grand Prix delivered plenty of what the new rules promised: lively-looking cars, narrower tyres that reward commitment, and a jittery edge that makes drivers look like they’re actually wrestling something again. Up front, George Russell and Charles Leclerc gave us an early-season scrap worth sitting up for, trading the lead repeatedly before strategy and a Virtual Safety Car shuffled the order and Russell went on to win in a Mercedes 1–2, with Leclerc third.
But Brundle’s point — and it’s one being muttered around the paddock already — is that the spectacle we saw in those opening laps wasn’t always the pure, old-fashioned kind. It was often the by-product of battery arithmetic.
With the new 50/50 split between electrical and combustion contribution at maximum power, energy deployment and harvesting has become the dominant lever. Manage it well and you can place your car into an overtaking window; get it wrong and you’re suddenly a sitting duck. That sounds fine in theory. In practice, Brundle says it’s producing behaviour that feels counterintuitive even to elite drivers: slowing the car in places that shouldn’t be slow, then “repaying” that time later because the battery state is healthier.
“I enjoyed the Melbourne race,” Brundle wrote in his Sky F1 column, “the opening 11 laps were very dynamic and it appeared that a well-managed battery deployment could get a car into an overtake position, but the driver then had to finish the job off into the corner.”
The Russell-Leclerc “punch and counter-punch” was entertaining, he said — yet it also highlighted how quickly this era can turn into a game of deliberate compromise. A driver might be late back on the throttle through a corner, look like they’ve made a mess of it, and still end up with an advantage down the next straight because they’ve banked more energy. The risk, Brundle argues, is that the sport starts rewarding the strange stuff: the “mistake” that isn’t a mistake, the slow corner that becomes the set-up for an artificially strong straight.
That’s where the more alarming element comes in. Brundle revealed teams are already floating tweaks aimed at stopping what’s being described as a “crazy situation”: cars slowing near the end of straights as drivers downshift — while still flat-out — to harvest energy. The technique, known in the jargon as “super clipping”, is exactly the kind of thing engineers will optimise and drivers will adapt to… right up until it starts producing incidents.
Brundle’s preferred direction is a recalibration of the electrical side: less top-end punch, but available for longer. In other words, soften the spike and stretch the curve. It would reduce the incentive for end-of-straight harvesting games and, crucially, lower the chance of speed differentials that could lead to rear-end shunts.
“We don’t need well over 1000 horsepower or brief 230mph top speeds,” Brundle wrote. “Cars never look faster than when they are wheel-to-wheel… we are a sport and a show and that must take absolute priority.”
The safety angle isn’t hypothetical. Brundle pointed to Melbourne’s start drama, when Franco Colapinto’s near-miss became a paddock-wide talking point. As Liam Lawson struggled to get his Racing Bulls off the line cleanly, Colapinto was forced into sharp avoiding action. Brundle described it as “scary” and urged fixes to start protocols as well as the broader deployment problem.
Underneath it all is the logic — and the compromise — of how these rules were drawn up. Brundle notes that the MGU-K’s output has effectively been tripled while the MGU-H, the turbo-mounted generator that helped keep the battery topped up efficiently, has been removed. That combination, he argues, always made it difficult to harvest enough energy at high-speed, low-braking circuits like Melbourne. Without heavy braking zones to replenish the store, the cars can burn through their usable electrical capacity in “one decent straight”, in Brundle’s words, and the knock-on effects are appearing everywhere: in how drivers race, in how they defend, and in how they launch.
Yes, the teams will get on top of it — that’s what they do. Brundle is clear on that. But he’s equally clear that this shouldn’t simply be left to the engineers to game the loopholes. The FIA has long said the parameters can be adjusted if the racing product needs it, and Brundle believes that moment is already approaching, even if a couple more circuits will help confirm the pattern.
For all the grumbling, he isn’t painting the new cars as a write-off. Quite the opposite: when they’re in the right operating window, he thinks they look “more svelte and nimble, and a bit lively,” and he’s enjoyed how recoverable they appear in a slide compared with last year’s machinery. The concern is that F1’s first impression of 2026 shouldn’t be defined by drivers lifting, downshifting, and harvesting at the exact point the cars ought to be doing the simplest thing in racing: accelerating.
Melbourne delivered a headline battle and a memorable opener. It also delivered a warning light on the dash — and Brundle, having watched this sport morph through regulations for four decades, is effectively saying the same thing the drivers are saying more quietly: sort the energy story out, before it starts writing the racing for them.
