Kimi Antonelli’s verdict on the engine deployment workaround that’s just been stamped out by the FIA was blunt: whatever it offered on paper, it didn’t feel remotely worth it once you were the one crawling around a live circuit with a car that wouldn’t answer back.
The Mercedes rookie has now conceded the tactic was “not so safe” after he found himself effectively defenceless at Suzuka, where the margin for anything abnormal is thin at the best of times. And that, more than any competitive outrage, is what’s driven the sport’s latest technical clampdown.
The FIA has issued a new technical directive banning a qualifying-lap trick understood to have been exploited by Mercedes and Red Bull Powertrains-powered cars. The idea was to sidestep the mandatory ramp-down in energy deployment approaching the timing line on a single lap — a rule that normally forces cars to reduce deployment by 50kW per second. If you could keep full beans for longer, you were effectively carrying an extra 50–100kW over rivals whose power was being wound off progressively.
The loophole leaned on wording that allows teams to shut down the MGU-K after a technical issue to protect components from damage. In practice, that meant you could take the hit afterwards — a 60-second shutdown period with no electrical power — in exchange for a sharper qualifying lap.
That “afterwards” part is where it stopped looking clever and started looking reckless.
“Obviously, it wasn’t the nicest of feelings,” Antonelli admitted when asked about the FIA’s intervention. “Of course, we tried to squeeze every bit of performance. On one side, you can [end up] facing some issues or some unexpected situations.
“I was aware that could have happened, but obviously I didn’t really experience it up until Melbourne and Suzuka.”
Suzuka, in particular, exposed the human reality behind the numbers. With the MGU-K shut down following a push lap, Antonelli was left coasting through one of the fastest, most rhythm-dependent sequences on the calendar — surrounded by cars at wildly different phases of their runs.
“First of all, it’s not so safe because, especially at Suzuka, I was a sitting duck at the chicane and the esses, knowing that the track is also not very wide, there’s not a lot of space,” he said. “It was quite stressful, for sure, not being able to do anything, because obviously the car was not responding to any input and I was just rolling very slowly on track.”
The detail that will ring loudest inside the FIA isn’t the lost time — it’s that line about the car “not responding”. Modern F1 cars don’t suddenly become un-driveable without consequence; if a driver is describing a period where inputs aren’t delivering expected response while they’re still on the racing surface, you can almost hear the safety alarm bells.
It also carries a competitive sting that’s easy to overlook. Even if a team judged the lap-time benefit worth gambling on, the downstream risk was always going to land on the driver: get unlucky with traffic, end up in the wrong place, and you’re not just compromising your own session — you’re potentially triggering an impeding penalty. Antonelli acknowledged as much.
“Also in qualifying, you could easily get a penalty for this,” he said. “You can easily impede someone on a lap and then you can easily get a penalty and that’s not what you want.
“So of course, this comes with giving up maybe a couple of hundredths of a second, so very little time. But at least it gives the confidence that this thing is not going to happen again.”
That last sentence is quietly telling. For all the usual posturing that comes when the FIA closes a grey area, Antonelli’s response isn’t drenched in frustration about a lost advantage. It’s relief — the sort you hear from someone who’s had one too many moments wondering what’s coming in the mirrors with no realistic way of getting out of the way.
Antonelli is believed to have run the approach in Australia and Japan, where he was seen moving slowly through Suzuka’s esses after a push lap in practice. Mercedes, according to reports, chose not to continue using the trick for the remainder of the Japanese Grand Prix weekend following discussions with the FIA and in light of Antonelli’s temporary shutdown.
It wasn’t only Mercedes who felt the blowback. The Mercedes-powered Williams of Alex Albon stopped on track during practice at Suzuka, also linked to complications stemming from the same mechanism. Ferrari, meanwhile, reportedly raised the matter with the FIA — not difficult to imagine given the potential for dangerous closing speeds between a car on a hot lap and another effectively limping.
There’s also a track-specific element to why this flared in Japan. Suzuka’s layout offers limited real estate to disappear on a slow return, and the consequences of being stranded in the wrong place are higher than at a circuit with generous run-off and multiple off-line options. Reports suggest the trick wasn’t used in China anyway, largely because the run from the final corner to the timing line is relatively short, reducing the upside.
All of this lands at an intriguing moment in the standings. Antonelli heads to the Miami restart leading the 2026 world championship by nine points over teammate George Russell, having won the last two races. That means any technical reining-in isn’t just about who found what; it’s about whether the competitive order stays where it is once a small but meaningful qualifying lever has been taken away.
If Antonelli’s comments are any guide, Mercedes won’t be mourning the loss too loudly. When the upside is “a couple of hundredths” and the downside is becoming a passenger at Suzuka, the choice stops being about performance and starts being about basic self-preservation — even in Formula 1.
