Max Verstappen didn’t dress it up at Suzuka. Ask him about Oliver Bearman’s enormous Spoon Curve crash and you don’t get sympathy-laced platitudes or a careful wait-and-see line — you get a blunt verdict on what 2026 has baked into the racing.
“It’s what you get with these things,” Verstappen said, pointing straight at the energy behaviour of the new cars and the now-familiar phenomenon drivers have started calling “mushroom mode” — one car effectively a sitting duck on usable power while another arrives with deployment switched fully on.
Bearman’s accident was the nasty proof-of-concept nobody wanted. The Haas driver ran onto the grass while rapidly closing on Franco Colapinto’s Alpine, lost control, and hit the barrier with a 50G impact. He was taken to the medical centre and later emerged bruised around the knee, fortunate to avoid fractures, but visibly sore as he walked away.
The FIA didn’t pretend it was a random freak moment. In a statement released shortly after the race, it acknowledged the “high closing speeds” of the 2026 cars as a contributing factor and confirmed a number of meetings are scheduled during the April break to refine the regulations.
That matters, because the incident has landed in the middle of a growing paddock unease: this isn’t just about drivers needing to be a bit more cautious, it’s about whether the rule set is creating situations where the margins disappear faster than human judgment can keep up.
Verstappen’s description of the speed delta was stark. He estimated the difference between cars on the straights — between one “completely stuck with no power, basically” and another using the aggressive deployment phase — can be as much as 50-60km/h.
“It can be 50-60 kilometres difference. Really big,” he said.
That’s not a small exaggeration for effect, either. Even the best racing drivers in the world make decisions based on patterns — where a car should be, what it’s likely to do next, how quickly it will arrive at an apex or a braking marker. When the closing speed becomes that extreme, the whole decision tree compresses. A move that would normally be read as “late” suddenly looks like you’ve swerved in the braking zone. A car you’d expect to be alongside in a heartbeat arrives in half that time. And if anyone is even slightly off-line — or, as in Bearman’s case, touches a low-grip surface while reacting — the consequences escalate immediately.
Verstappen was asked if he’d had similar moments with deployment at Suzuka. He said he didn’t think so, though he admitted there were occasions where he “boosted past very heavily”.
“But luckily I was already committed to one side,” he added — a small phrase that says plenty. The safest version of these encounters, in other words, is when everyone has already chosen their lane early enough. The dangerous version is when the speed difference forces a decision late, or creates the illusion that a driver has changed line when they’re simply arriving far faster than the other car expects.
Put to him that drivers have to reconsider how they approach racing situations in 2026, Verstappen didn’t argue.
“Yeah, I know. It can be very dangerous,” he said. “It looks like moving in the braking zone or moving in general, but it also happens when you have that quick acceleration. You can have a big crash.”
There’s also a wider subtext here, and Verstappen isn’t hiding it. He has been a long-term critic of the 2026 rules, and in Japan he openly admitted his unhappiness could push him away from Formula 1. In that light, his comments on Bearman’s crash weren’t just a reaction to one terrifying moment — they were ammunition in an argument he’s been building for a while: that the sport has wandered into a regulation set where the cars’ energy states are creating hazards that are too fundamental to be solved by “drivers being smarter”.
The next step now sits with the FIA’s April meetings. The governing body has already acknowledged the closing speeds; the question is what it’s willing to change, and how quickly, without tearing apart the philosophy of the new regulations.
Because if Verstappen is right — that incidents like Bearman’s are simply what you get — then Suzuka won’t be remembered as an outlier. It’ll be remembered as the warning shot.
