Andrea Stella doesn’t sound like a team boss gearing up for a political knife-fight. If anything, McLaren’s principal is bracing for something more awkward: the sport having to admit, in real time, that the first version of 2026 needs a few lines of code rewritten.
With the new rules only three races old, F1’s senior figures are set to use the unexpected breather between Japan and Miami to sit down with the FIA and FOM and take stock of what’s working — and what clearly isn’t. The early verdict has been mixed. There’s been more overtaking, which was the headline objective, but the new power unit behaviour has become the lightning rod, particularly across a single lap.
Qualifying, in other words, is starting to look like the soft underbelly of the regulations. And Stella is unusually candid about where he thinks the sport needs to act.
“I cannot say whether the solutions will be implemented for Miami or later,” he said, pointing to the practical reality that these things move at the speed of validation, not the speed of a social media pile-on. “But I think that there will be adjustments made in 2026 in order to improve the way in which we utilise what’s available in the power unit to retain, for instance, the challenge of qualifying and the excitement of qualifying… I would expect changes in ’26.”
The crux of the complaint is simple enough for anyone who’s watched the new era unfold: drivers are being forced into artificial management within what should be the purest form of performance. Instead of building a lap around commitment and precision, they’re sometimes building it around energy harvesting and deployment compromises — “super-clipping” and mid-lap recharging quirks that can punish a driver for doing the thing qualifying is meant to reward: attacking.
Stella’s argument isn’t framed as nostalgia. He’s not pining for the old days, nor is he dismissing the broader direction of travel. He’s making the more pointed observation that the spectacle of qualifying has its own ecosystem — and it’s fragile. If the fastest way to deliver a lap is to back out of a corner to protect what the battery will (or won’t) give you later, then the sport is engineering hesitation into the one session that should be defined by nerve.
His more interesting line, though, is about how this gets fixed.
“When we had the last F1 Commission, the attitude by all parties was very constructive,” Stella said. “It wasn’t very difficult to identify the areas to work on… I don’t think it will be too much of a political game. I think it’s actually more of a technical challenge.”
That’s a notable stance in a paddock that can turn any technical meeting into trench warfare if the competitive incentives are lined up that way. Stella is essentially suggesting the bigger problem isn’t whether teams will agree qualifying needs help — it’s whether the sport can adjust the dials without opening a can of unintended consequences.
That “dials” point matters. These regulations are an interconnected system: power unit behaviour influences driving style, which influences tyre temperature and preparation, which influences how closely cars can follow, which influences the racing product that the new package was designed to improve. Changing one piece to “fix” qualifying risks knocking something else out of alignment.
It’s also why Stella’s language is careful. He’s not pushing a silver bullet. He’s talking about “adapting what’s available in the current regulations” — basically finding a way, within the existing framework, to stop qualifying laps being decided by whether a driver has been forced into an energy budget that feels at odds with the idea of pole position.
The other subtext is timing. With Miami next up on May 3, any changes discussed now would have to clear the sport’s various technical and governance hurdles, and then actually be implementable by teams without creating a rushed, uneven playing field. Stella openly concedes he doesn’t know if anything can land as early as Miami. That uncertainty is telling in itself: it suggests the conversations are real, but so are the constraints.
A preliminary date of Thursday, April 9 has been earmarked for the talks to begin. And while Stella insists the atmosphere is “constructive”, it’s hard to ignore what’s at stake. This isn’t a niche tweak to clean up an edge case. Qualifying is one of F1’s most reliable products — a guaranteed hit, session after session — and the sport can’t afford it becoming an exercise in invisible arithmetic.
If the first three races of 2026 have proved anything, it’s that F1 got some of what it wanted straight away. But it’s also learned, quickly, that performance frameworks don’t just shape lap times; they shape behaviour. And if the behaviour the rules encourage is drivers lifting and coasting in the middle of a qualifying lap because the deployment model says so, then the sport will do what it always ends up doing: adjust.
Stella is already treating that as inevitable. The only real question now is whether F1 can make qualifying feel instinctive again without dulling the racing improvements it’s been chasing for years.
