With Melbourne looming less than three weeks away, Formula 1’s shiny new 2026 era is already dealing with an old-fashioned problem: getting the field off the line cleanly.
The switch to the new power-unit formula — 50 per cent electrification, sustainable fuels, and the removal of the MGU-H — has brought turbo lag back into the conversation in a way the paddock hasn’t had to seriously consider for years. And in Bahrain testing, it didn’t take long before people started asking the uncomfortable question: what happens if a car hesitates or stalls on a packed grid with everyone behind unsighted and fully committed?
Alex Brundle has been one of the loudest voices pushing for action, urging the FIA and Formula 1 to “step in” and adjust start protocols before the Australian Grand Prix. The concern isn’t theoretical; it’s the kind of risk that only needs to go wrong once.
“The smart thing to do is step in on these grand prix start protocols,” Brundle wrote on social media. “It’s a pure safety concern. Sitting on the grid stationary, waiting for the unsighted driver from P20 to hit you, is one of the scariest things in racing.”
He’s not arguing about advantage or disadvantage — the sort of thing teams can turn into weeks of politics and legalese — but about the reality that, in the heat of a start, drivers behind won’t know which car has bogged down until it’s almost too late. They’ll be blinded by the cars around them, then forced into last-second avoidance moves that can turn a stalled car into the centre of a chain-reaction crash.
Brundle’s suggested fix is disarmingly simple: bake in a longer buffer between the last car arriving on the grid and the lights sequence beginning. Put to him that a 10-second gap could help, he agreed: “Yeah exactly something like that will help.”
It’s telling that this conversation has gathered momentum now, in the immediate run-up to the season, rather than being neatly filed away as “teething issues” for later. That’s partly because the feedback on the 2026 cars has been mixed at best. Max Verstappen has already taken a swing at the new machinery, branding it “anti-racing”, while Lewis Hamilton has voiced similar unease about what these cars demand from the driver and how that translates into racing.
But safety is the lever that changes the tone. A team can argue its corner over procedures when it thinks there’s performance in it. When the discussion shifts to what might happen if a car sits stranded on the grid while the field launches, the room tends to go quieter — and the FIA’s mandate becomes much clearer.
McLaren team principal Andrea Stella didn’t dress it up when asked about it during the Bahrain test. His message was that whatever competitive quirks teams think they can exploit through start preparation, they’re secondary to the basic requirement that every car on the grid has the power unit in the right state to take off properly.
“We need to make sure that the race start procedure allows all cars to have the power unit ready to go,” Stella said. “Because the grid is not the place in which you want to have cars slow in taking off.
“This is a bigger interest than any competitive interest, so I think all teams and the FIA should play the game of responsibility when it comes to what is needed in terms of the race start procedure.”
He pointed directly at the controllable part of the equation: timings. Not the headline tech of 2026 — the electrification split or active aero — but the mundane choreography of how long cars sit in position, when the sequence begins, and whether that window matches what the new systems require.
“I’m thinking about the timings, for instance, the timing of the lights, the timing before the lights – they need to be in the right place to make sure that, first of all, that’s a safe phase of the way we go racing,” Stella added.
There’s also a political undercurrent here, as ever. It’s understood Ferrari resisted efforts last year to tweak the start procedure for 2026. That’s not unusual in a sport where “procedure” can quickly become “performance”, and where teams are trained to look for unintended consequences in every regulatory nudge. But the key point is that the FIA doesn’t need unanimous goodwill to act if it deems something a safety issue — and the governing body can force through changes ahead of Melbourne if it believes the risk is real.
That’s why this story matters now. The 2026 rules were always going to bring a bedding-in period, and drivers have already made plenty of noise about how the cars feel and race. But starts are different: they’re the one moment every grand prix compresses into the same few seconds, the same strip of tarmac, the same limited sightlines. If turbo lag and power-unit readiness make that phase less predictable, then the sport can either adjust the process — or wait for the kind of incident everyone will later claim was obvious in hindsight.
And F1 doesn’t need another lesson like that, especially not in race one of a new era.
