Liam Lawson’s not pretending the 2026 rulebook is anywhere close to “finished”. But as Formula 1 arrives in Miami with another midstream tweak package in its pocket, the Racing Bulls driver has been clear about what he wants the sport to prioritise while it finds its feet: stop the scary stuff first, then worry about making the cars feel better to hustle on the limit.
The FIA’s latest adjustments — set to be introduced at next weekend’s Miami Grand Prix — are aimed at two problems that have been impossible to ignore through the opening trio of races: qualifying laps that don’t let drivers properly commit, and race scenarios where the new energy deployment rules are creating uncomfortable closing speeds.
On the performance side, the paddock’s complaint has been remarkably consistent. Drivers have struggled to produce the kind of flat-out, no-excuses qualifying lap we associate with F1 because of “super-clipping” and the compromises it forces. Rather than simply attacking every braking zone and apex, they’ve been managing when and where the power unit gives them the goods, and lifting at points that feel alien in what should be the most aggressive part of the weekend.
To address that, the FIA, teams, FOM and the power unit manufacturers have agreed changes that effectively shift the balance. The permitted amount of energy regeneration across a lap is being reduced, with the intention of cutting the incentive — or necessity — for lift-and-coast during qualifying. At the same time, peak super-clipping power is being increased, so the battery can be replenished in less time. In plain terms: fewer “dead” moments in the lap, and less of that frustrating sensation of having to drive around the system rather than through a corner.
Lawson, though, isn’t dressing it up as some neat performance fix that’ll suddenly make everyone happy. If anything, he sounds like a driver looking at the bigger picture and thinking: don’t lose sight of what’s actually biting right now.
“Honestly, I really don’t know,” Lawson said when asked how he expects the 2026 regulations to evolve. “At the end of the day, there are always going to be things that we want from the car. I mean, as racing drivers, we complain about everything, literally. So I think that’ll never change.”
It’s a line delivered with a bit of self-awareness, but his point lands. This set of regulations is still in its early life, and the sport will spend years sanding off its rough edges. The more pressing issue, in Lawson’s mind, is keeping the racing within a sensible safety envelope as teams and drivers probe the limits of what the current deployment and “Boost Mode” behaviours allow.
He doesn’t have to reach far for examples. In Australia, Lawson bogged down on the start line, and it required sharp reactions from Franco Colapinto to avoid what could have been a sickening first-lap accident on the start/finish straight. Then in Suzuka, Oliver Bearman’s heavy crash underlined how quickly things can go wrong when cars approach corners with different power profiles and the closing speeds spike.
That’s why another element of the Miami changes matters as much as the qualifying clean-up: a cap on power available in Boost Mode, designed to reduce those high closing speeds in race trim. The goal is straightforward — make the speed differentials less brutal when one car is in an aggressive deployment phase and the other isn’t, and remove some of the “surprise” that can catch a driver out when they’re already committed.
“For me, on the regulation side, I think the biggest thing right now is probably the safety aspect of it, especially with what we saw in Japan,” Lawson said. “And I think that’s something that we know we want to avoid, obviously, in the future, going forwards.”
There’s an interesting undertone to his comments, too: an acceptance that performance will take care of itself. Teams always find lap time. Give them five years and they’ll turn a new formula into something sharp, fast and, eventually, familiar. Lawson referenced that development arc — that regulations rarely look polished at the start, but the march of engineering tends to iron things out.
What’s harder to “develop” away is the feeling that in qualifying, right now, the car isn’t letting the driver do the job in the way they’re wired to do it.
“I’m sure we’ll find ways to make the cars nicer to drive, or I hope that we do,” Lawson said. “Because I think, at the moment, especially in qualifying, we’re trying to put the car on the limit and extract everything out of it. In ways, at the moment, it feels like we’re not able to do that.”
That’s the nub of it. Nobody in F1 expects a regulation set to be perfect from day one — not the FIA, not the teams, certainly not the drivers. But there’s a difference between a car that’s tricky and a car that’s restrictive, one that demands commitment versus one that forces compromise in the exact moments the sport sells as its purest test.
Lawson’s view is refreshingly ordered. Make it safe. Make it drivable. The rest — the inevitable arms race, the speed, the lap time — will come anyway.
“I think that’s really the first focus for us that we would like out of the cars,” he added. “But I think really that safety side probably comes first more than anything.”
Miami, then, becomes an early litmus test for how responsive this new era is willing to be. Not a revolution, not a rewrite — just a correction, in public, while the stakes are still manageable. And if it gives drivers a qualifying lap they can actually attack without doing mental arithmetic on the steering wheel, nobody in the paddock is going to complain about that. Well, not too loudly.
