There was a telling moment in Bahrain that you could hear long before you could properly see it. A car would roll to the end of the pitlane, pause for a practice start — and then just sit there, engine note hovering and rising, for what felt like an age. Ten seconds. Fifteen, sometimes. Only then would the clutch bite and the car finally lurch forward.
That little slice of pre-season theatre is now one of the more awkward 2026 realities: getting these new cars off the line cleanly isn’t just a question of driver feel or who’s nailed the maps. It’s become a procedural problem, and potentially a safety one, because the current start sequence doesn’t really care how long your power unit needs to be in its happy place.
The root cause is baked into the new power unit architecture. With the MGU-H gone from the 1.6-litre V6 hybrids, teams have lost the neat trick of using an electric machine to spool the turbo and smooth out that low-rev dead zone. In previous years, the MGU-H effectively papered over turbo lag at the most delicate phase of a launch — right when the driver is trying to balance clutch bite, rear grip, and torque delivery without stalling or smoking the rears.
Now, without that electric “hand” on the turbocharger, the internal combustion engine and turbo have to do more of the heavy lifting in the earliest moments. Teams can’t manage the turbo’s inertia in quite the same controlled way, and the whole process of building boost and landing in the right launch window takes longer — and, crucially, it isn’t the same length of time for everyone. It’s understood to vary depending on turbo sizing, and the result is a grid where some cars can be ready quickly while others are still effectively “arming” themselves.
Oliver Bearman summed up the knife-edge nature of it in brutally modern F1 terms: “milliseconds” either side of the sweet spot, too early or too late. That’s fine when you’re doing practice starts at the end of a session. It’s a lot less fine when you’re 17th on the grid, watching the final car roll into its box while you’re still waiting for the power unit to come to you.
And that’s where the Sporting Regulations become the silent antagonist.
Under the current procedure, once the last car stops in its grid box, the five red lights begin their sequence: one light per second for five seconds, then lights out at a moment chosen by the starter — usually only a couple of seconds’ hold. In total, it’s typically less than 10 seconds from the last car stopping to the race beginning.
In 2026, that’s suddenly not much time at all.
For the front of the grid, where cars have been stationary longer simply because they arrived first, the new routine is already more manageable — there’s more opportunity to cycle through whatever pre-launch steps are required before the lights start their countdown. But further back, the timing compresses brutally. You can end up with a split-screen start: the front rows launching cleanly toward Turn 1 while the back is still juggling revs, boost and clutch — or worse, bogging down and becoming a stationary hazard in the middle of a pack that’s accelerating hard.
Pierre Gasly didn’t exactly hide his expectation that the season’s opening starts could be messy. “I advise you to be sitting with your TV on in Australia, because it could be one that everybody remembers,” he said in Bahrain. It wasn’t said for laughs.
The FIA, to its credit, has been treating it like more than a curiosity. During the Bahrain test it carried out simulations and process evaluations, effectively using the test as a live laboratory to understand how pronounced the problem is across manufacturers and how it manifests when multiple cars are trying to hit the same procedural beats.
The issue is set to land in front of the F1 Commission next week, with a tweak to the start procedure on the table as early as the Australian Grand Prix. It’s the kind of change teams would usually squabble over on competitive grounds — any modification to timings can create winners and losers — but the governing body doesn’t need unanimity if it deems the situation a safety risk.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has already framed it in precisely those terms: this isn’t about gaining an edge, it’s about ensuring the grid isn’t the worst possible place to have cars hesitating or stalling as the field launches. He pointed directly at the obvious lever the sport can pull: timings. The gap before the lights, the cadence of the lights themselves, and making sure every car can be “power unit ready to go” before you ask 20 drivers to react on instinct.
Oscar Piastri’s view was blunter still, noting that drivers are battling just to “have a safe start, let alone a competitive one”. That’s not the sort of line drivers throw out lightly in February — not when everyone’s still trying to keep their technical cards close and not when the opening races are about avoiding self-inflicted damage.
Mercedes’ George Russell offered a more nuanced snapshot of where the paddock is: yes, it was worse in Barcelona, and yes, it’s improved significantly since then — but the fundamental mismatch remains. Drivers go when the lights go out, not when their turbo is in the perfect window. Russell also hinted at how varied the landscape may be between manufacturers, suggesting Ferrari appears able to run higher gears than others, potentially indicating a smaller turbo and, by extension, a more forgiving launch characteristic.
That’s the uncomfortable part for the FIA and the teams. If this is genuinely turbo- and manufacturer-dependent, then the sport’s traditional one-size-fits-all start procedure has to accommodate the slowest-to-ready cars, not the best. Otherwise, you’re effectively designing the grid around whoever’s found the cleanest workaround — and accepting that others might be compromised in the most crowded, high-risk seconds of the entire race.
It’s easy to romanticise messy starts as “old-school” unpredictability. F1’s always had the occasional bog-down, the surprise rocket ship from row four, the driver who gets it wrong and pays for it. But there’s a line between human error and systemic awkwardness, and 2026 is threatening to blur it.
If Australia arrives and the lights sequence is unchanged, don’t be surprised if the first lap looks less like a drag race and more like a staggered release. And if the FIA does move quickly to adjust the procedure, it’ll be one of the clearest early signals of this new era: the power unit rules haven’t just reshaped performance — they’ve forced F1 to rethink even the basics of how it goes racing.
