McLaren boss Andrea Stella has put a marker down ahead of the next round of 2026 regulation talks: if Formula 1 wants to protect what it sells as “the pinnacle”, qualifying has to be fixed.
The new rules have unquestionably moved the racing in the right direction. There’s been a noticeable uptick in overtaking, and the cars are creating opportunities rather than dead air. But the same package has also handed drivers a weird, compromised one-lap rhythm — and it’s that contradiction that’s now dominating the paddock conversation heading into an unplanned April pause and a fresh set of meetings between the teams, the FIA and FOM.
At the centre of it is energy. With the current battery requirements, drivers aren’t always being rewarded for committing to a corner on the limit. In some scenarios, the better lap comes from doing the opposite: lifting earlier, rolling more speed out of the entry, and saving deployment for the straight that follows. It’s clever in an engineering sense, but it’s not what qualifying is supposed to feel like — and Stella’s not pretending it’s a minor gripe.
“I think as an F1 community, we have identified the priority number one, apart from safety issues,” Stella said in Japan, making clear McLaren has been one of the teams pushing hardest on the subject. For him, the big performance-and-driving “opportunity” is simple: restoring qualifying as the session where the driver who can exploit grip — and occasionally flirt with the limit — gets paid back on the stopwatch.
That’s where the 2026 debate is getting interesting, because it’s no longer framed as a pure safety or sporting argument. It’s about identity. If qualifying turns into an energy-management exercise, you don’t just change lap times; you change the product F1 has built for decades around the idea of the perfect lap.
Suzuka, Stella argued, exposes the issue in its purest form. Corners that used to be shorthand for bravery and precision have become places where drivers are thinking about the battery before they think about the apex.
Degner One is his go-to example. In the old mental library of F1 qualifying laps, that corner sits in the “don’t blink” folder — the kind of commitment that separates a tidy lap from a special one. Stella’s point is that it isn’t being treated like that anymore. Drivers are “almost lift and roll” through it, then deliberately avoid getting back on the power between Degner One and Two because it’s an inefficient way to spend energy.
Spoon, too, has drifted in that direction. Stella highlighted the same logic between the first and second parts of the corner: less focus on extracting every last fraction from the chassis, more focus on how you want to spend the battery over the remainder of the lap. And when those sorts of corners are “managed” rather than attacked, Suzuka loses some of what makes it Suzuka — and F1 risks sanding off the sharp edges of its own spectacle.
None of this is to say teams want to bin the ruleset. They’ve invested heavily and, crucially, the racing has improved. That’s the tightrope the sport is now walking: how to keep the gains in wheel-to-wheel action without turning Saturday into a semi-coached exercise in restraint.
Stella also nodded at a separate strand of concern that’s been raised around the way lift-and-coast can play out in traffic — the risks attached when the car behind arrives expecting a “normal” minimum speed, only to find the lead car backing up in places it traditionally wouldn’t. But even with that on the table, he was clear his main push is about the driving experience in qualifying.
“I can understand that the drivers push the F1 community to fix this,” Stella said, because qualifying should retain “the excitement, the challenge, the DNA” of the moment when “the best driver gets rewarded” — especially at tracks where courage and feel can still make a difference.
The awkward part, and Stella didn’t dodge it, is that the fix isn’t obvious. The sport has designed itself into a corner where energy use isn’t a secondary layer anymore; it’s shaping the fundamentals of how a lap is built. Any adjustment has to be careful not to unravel the improvements in racing, and it has to land in a political environment where every team will be doing its own sums on who benefits and who loses.
Still, the fact Stella is talking in “priority number one” terms tells you plenty about the temperature of the discussions. This isn’t being filed away as a year-one quirk teams will solve quietly through development. It’s an issue the grid wants addressed collectively, because it touches the thing everyone has to sell — to fans, to sponsors, to drivers themselves.
Further meetings are due before Miami, and Stella expects the subject to stay live throughout. The message from McLaren is blunt: qualifying should be about grip, not spreadsheets. If 2026 is going to be remembered as the era that brought the racing back, it can’t also be the one that made a flat-out lap feel optional.
