Ayao Komatsu isn’t pretending Formula 1’s new 2026 machinery has landed perfectly formed. But as the paddock starts to grumble about energy management dominating the on-track product after Melbourne, the Haas team principal is pushing back on the instinct to reach for the rulebook after a single uncomfortable weekend.
The Australian Grand Prix delivered plenty of movement at the front — George Russell and Charles Leclerc swapping the lead more than once — yet the sport quickly ran into an awkward truth: a lot of that “racing” was dictated by who had energy available to deploy and when, rather than drivers forcing the issue on merit through a braking zone. Leclerc was among those to describe the new dynamic as “artificial”, a word that tends to spread fast when drivers feel they’re being asked to compete against dashboards as much as each other.
That backdrop is why FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis has already signalled a sit-down with teams after the Chinese Grand Prix, with the governing body hinting it has “aces up its sleeve” on further tweaks to energy harvesting and deployment — even if that comes at the cost of lap time. It’s not a small admission two races into a new era.
Komatsu’s point, though, is less about denying there’s an issue and more about warning everyone how quickly F1 can make itself look silly by overcorrecting before it understands what it’s correcting.
“Two races is still a small sample,” Komatsu said, arguing that any meaningful judgement on the new regulations needs to be grounded in a broader spread of circuit types. The subtext is obvious: Melbourne has always been a poor courtroom for passing debates, regardless of technical era, and drawing sweeping conclusions from Albert Park tends to be a paddock hobby that ages badly by mid-season.
He also pointed out what everyone in the technical meetings knows, even when the public conversation gets emotional: these cars are ferociously circuit-dependent. Energy recovery and deployment profiles don’t just shift from track to track — they can flip the nature of the race. Shanghai’s long straight offers a very different recharge and overtaking picture to Melbourne. Suzuka is traditionally tight for passing. Bahrain tends to flatter following. Jeddah introduces its own set of compromises. Miami adds another variable.
Komatsu’s view is that something like five race weekends — across that sort of mix — is the minimum required before anyone can honestly claim they’ve got the “global” problem diagnosed, rather than simply reacting to whatever the last Sunday felt like.
That patience plea extends beyond the show and into the less glamorous mechanics of making the cars work. The start procedure has already become a talking point, and not in the way the sport would like. With the MGU-H gone from the 2026 power units, drivers now have to spool the turbo into a usable window themselves to ensure a clean launch. The FIA has extended the start procedure to compensate, but Melbourne still produced messy getaways — including a moment when Franco Colapinto nearly drove into the back of Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls car.
There’s also the formation lap battery choreography: drivers need charge in the bank to defend or attack into Turn 1, and the interplay between tyre prep, turbo behaviour and energy state is clearly still being learned. Komatsu admitted Haas itself discovered it had drained the battery far more than intended in Australia because the team “weren’t aware of certain things” — then improved its understanding drastically within days simply by combing through the data.
That, in his mind, is precisely why you don’t start shifting the goalposts mid-learning curve. Engineers and drivers adapt fast when the target stays still. Move it too early and you risk creating a fresh problem while the original one was already on its way to being solved by teams’ own development and operational refinement.
Komatsu even referenced the Australian weekend’s odd episode around straight-line mode — initially removed on safety grounds, then reinstated hours later — as a live example of what happens when decisions are taken on the fly without the full collaborative process. From the outside it reads as chaos; inside the sport it also becomes a warning label: if this is how quickly procedures can be changed in-season, how stable is anything?
His concern isn’t theoretical. The more frequently the FIA tweaks operational rules — formation lap instructions, start sequences, energy deployment parameters — the more time teams burn validating new procedures, the more drivers have to re-calibrate their instincts, and the more likely it is that the cure introduces side effects. F1 doesn’t just change one thing at a time; everything is interconnected.
Komatsu’s stance also touches a nerve the paddock doesn’t often say out loud: drivers need a chance to build muscle memory with these cars. They can adapt — they always do — but constant midstream alterations can leave them permanently chasing a moving reference point, which only amplifies frustration and the impression that the sport is making it up as it goes.
That doesn’t mean “do nothing”. It means separating what’s genuinely safety-critical from what’s merely uncomfortable, and separating what’s an inherent characteristic of the new regulations from what’s a first-weekend operational teething issue. The temptation after one race is to treat every oddity as a flaw in the rules. Sometimes it’s just the field learning where the edges are.
Whether the FIA holds its nerve is another matter. Driver complaints about “artificial” racing tend to carry weight, and Tombazis has already made clear that energy management is on the agenda immediately after China. But Komatsu has planted a sensible flag: if F1 is going to adjust this new era, it needs to do it once, do it properly, and do it with enough evidence that it doesn’t spend the next six months fixing the fixes.
