Jeremy Clarkson has never been shy about poking the sport where it’s sensitive, and F1’s first proper look at the 2026 machinery in Bahrain has given him plenty of exposed nerves to prod. Six days of running on a brand-new ruleset and a brand-new power unit philosophy was always going to look messy in places — but Clarkson’s takeaway is that some of the mess might be structural, not just early-season scruffiness.
His headline fear is the one engineers and strategists have been circling for months: what happens when electrical deployment becomes the limiting factor at the end of long straights. With the 2026 engines producing far more electrical power — peaking at 350kW — energy management isn’t a minor subplot anymore. It’s the plot. Clarkson’s argument is blunt: if cars hit the point where the battery contribution drops away before the braking zone at places like Monza or China, you’re not just changing lap time, you’re changing closing speeds. In his mind, that’s where “suddenly and dramatically slow down” stops being a colourful phrase and starts being a recipe for awkward, potentially dangerous concertina moments.
The sport will counter — fairly — that this is exactly why the regulations are a “genuine reset”, and why teams exist. Everyone’s learning where the cliff edges are. But Clarkson’s concern lands because it’s not framed as some romantic longing for a simpler era; it’s a practical question about how racing behaves when the power curve becomes less predictable from the cockpit behind.
He’s just as sceptical about what Bahrain hinted regarding starts. With the MGU-H gone for 2026, one of the hybrid era’s great silencers — the bit that helped disguise turbo lag and made the whole system feel more elastic at low revs — has disappeared. The result, as testing showed, is that getting these cars ready to launch cleanly is harder and slower. That’s not a marginal detail when you’ve got 20 cars sat on a grid and a start procedure that’s been tuned over years for a different breed of power unit.
Bahrain’s response was telling: rather than shrugging, F1 trialled a revised start procedure using a blue flashing light to give drivers extra warning that the start sequence was about to begin. The very fact that the sport felt the need to trial a procedural fix in testing says plenty. It also underlines that the issue wasn’t simply “drivers need to adapt”; it was about giving them the time window to do what the car now demands.
That test solution seemed to take some heat out of the situation, addressing safety worries aired in the paddock by McLaren team principal Andrea Stella and Oscar Piastri. It’s one of those moments where F1’s instincts are split: the purists roll their eyes at more choreography, while the people who’ve actually got to launch these things in anger will take any layer of clarity they can get.
Clarkson, though, isn’t in the business of being reassured by a flashing light. He wrapped his unease in a typically Clarkson-ish gag, joking that with so many unfamiliar parts and unknowns in play, “Drive to Survive” risks becoming “Don’t Break Down to Survive”. Behind the punchline is a point teams privately accept at this stage of a regulation cycle: when everything’s new — smaller and lighter cars, active aerodynamics, different tyres, and power units with a fundamentally different split — failures aren’t an “if”, they’re a “when”.
He also threw performance spread into the pile, referencing claims that Aston Martin could be as much as four seconds a lap slower than Mercedes. That sort of number is exactly the kind of early-testing grenade that gets lobbed into the paddock with a grin and a shrug, and it may or may not survive contact with Melbourne. But it does capture the real mood: 2026 is supposed to reset the grid, and early running has instead amplified the sense that some teams have hit the concept cleanly while others are still arguing with the basics.
There was at least one bright note in the noise. Bahrain’s running suggested Ferrari’s engine could be among the better candidates for a clean launch — an early nugget that will get obsessed over because starts are one of the few moments where the car’s behaviour is brutally public and immediately costly.
Still, this is testing. It always looks worse than it ends up being because the sport’s operating at its least optimised point: software not fully honed, procedures still being debated, engineers deliberately exploring uncomfortable settings to map the limits. The gap between “this is odd” and “this is normal” can close quickly in Formula 1 once teams understand the tricks — how to build a launch map that doesn’t ask for miracles, where to harvest and where to spend, and how to shape racecraft around energy peaks and troughs.
Clarkson’s column lands because it captures what a lot of fans felt watching the early 2026 footage: exciting, yes, but also unfamiliar in a way that could change the texture of racing. Whether that ends up being a genuine problem or just the initial shock of a new era will become clearer once the cars stop being test projects and start being race cars — and once someone tries to defend into Turn 1 at Albert Park with a battery percentage in the back of their mind.
