Verstappen on slicks at Sepang during the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia. Photo: Red Bull Media House, via Ford (editorial use).
Fifteen rounds into the 2026 rules, F1’s new power units had been asked plenty of hard questions at 300-plus km/h. The one that floored them came at Sepang, at roughly 35 km/h, uphill, in the wet, behind a Safety Car.
Sunday’s Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia was due to start at 15:00 local time. Heavy rain pushed the first formation lap back by around 40 minutes. When the field finally rolled out, a cluster of cars lost drive, Lewis Hamilton had to stop his Ferrari and restart it on the circuit, and the start was suspended. A further 53-minute wait followed before anyone raced. Max Verstappen eventually won by 2.307 seconds from Kimi Antonelli, with Hamilton third, and we’ve already broken down how Red Bull’s tyre calls won it. This piece is about the 53 minutes, because they say more about where these regulations stand than the result does.
What the FIA says broke
The governing body’s post-race statement points to four conditions stacking up at once: “an unprecedented combination of low engine speed, low-grip conditions, wet-weather energy management settings and the Sepang circuit’s sector configuration led to an unintended loss of power for a number of cars.”
The fix tells you where the fault lived. The FIA Technical Department “removed the energy limit constraint in the affected sectors” and pushed an updated software release to every team during the delay, so each could load it into its power unit before the restart. The FIA also said the problem “had not been detected by the FIA or the teams during testing or during the laps to the grid,” and that a full review with the teams and power unit manufacturers will follow.
Read that carefully. This wasn’t a single manufacturer’s calibration going sideways, and it wasn’t a hardware failure. It was the shared, FIA-controlled layer of energy rules, the part that decides how much electrical energy a car may use in a given stretch of track, colliding with a situation nobody had modelled.
Why a parade lap is the hardest test
The 2026 power units lean on electrical deployment far more than the previous generation, with an MGU-K allowed up to 350 kW. Energy is the currency of this formula, and the FIA polices how it’s spent, track section by track section. That works beautifully when cars are running at racing speed and the maps were built for racing speed.
A wet formation lap behind the Safety Car is the opposite of that. Engine revs are low, the tyres have no grip so drivers feather the throttle, the cars are in a wet-weather energy mode, and the whole thing is happening in a pack that keeps concertinaing. Verstappen described what it felt like in the post-race press conference: “It was just like driving at, what, 35 kilometres, going uphill, actually losing speed.” He explained that when speed and RPM drop too low the engine “just bogs down,” and that normally “it takes one or two seconds and it comes back.” On Sunday, under the first software release, it didn’t.
Put his account next to the FIA’s wording and a plausible picture emerges: the cars needed electrical help to climb back out of a low-rev hole, and in certain sectors the energy limit didn’t let it arrive. That’s our reading of the official explanation rather than a confirmed diagnosis, and the FIA’s review should settle it. But it explains why the problem was invisible on the laps to the grid. Those are run individually and at speed. Nobody runs them at walking pace in a 22-car queue.
“Five-wide on the straight”
The drivers’ complaints were less about embarrassment than about what a pack of powerless cars actually looks like. “I triggered it first and then I look in my mirror,” Verstappen said, describing cars bunched behind him at the same crawl. “At some point we were five-wide on the straight because we couldn’t understand what was going on.” Hamilton went further than anyone: “I had to stop on track and stop the car and engine and restart it. I’ve never done that before.”
That’s the part the review can’t wave away. Race control spends its wet-weather energy keeping speed differences small in spray. On Sunday, the software created them: some cars recovered, some crawled, one stopped. Nobody got hurt, but the scenario is exactly the one Safety Car procedures exist to prevent. Cadillac’s Sergio Perez put it diplomatically afterwards, saying some cars had “a software-related issue” and that the FIA was looking into it closely.
The delay picked the tyres, too
The bug didn’t just cost time. It changed the race. Hamilton laid out Ferrari’s thinking: he’d seen spray and a wet pit lane, but the pit wall argued that “because it’s been so long, it’s definitely going to dry up real quick.” Hamilton went out on Soft slicks; Verstappen and both Mercedes went out on Intermediates. Hamilton dropped from second on the grid to 17th on the opening lap and was about a minute down at one stage before 29 laps on the Soft hauled him back to the podium.
You can argue that was simply a bad read. But the variable Ferrari was betting on, how much drying time the delay would buy, only existed because the FIA’s software needed patching. There’s a subtler sporting point as well. Verstappen joked that Red Bull’s data partner gave it a fast connection and that the team was ready and waiting for half an hour; Hamilton suggested “some had some faster laptops than others.” Every team got the same file. Whether every team could use it at the same speed is a fair question for the review, because in a formula this dependent on software, distribution time is part of the competition.
The fix that’s already coming, and what it should include
None of this lands in a vacuum. The FIA and stakeholders have already agreed a staged rebalancing of combustion and ERS contribution across 2027 and 2028, with adjustments to engine output, fuel energy flow and deployment, plus “increased flexibility in energy management.” On September 21 the F1 Commission also cut the 2027 race distance from 305 km to 290 km, in line with the planned fuel-flow refinements. Further out, the sport has already decided where it’s heading, with the 2030 V8 now confirmed.
Sepang adds a requirement to that list. “Flexibility” can’t just mean giving engineers more room to optimise lap time. The energy rules need a defined safe state: below a certain speed, under a Safety Car, or in wet mode, the car should always be allowed enough deployment to keep moving. The upside of a software-defined formula is that this can be written in days, not seasons. Sunday proved the FIA can ship a patch to the whole grid in under an hour. The job now is shipping it before the cars leave the pit lane.
What to watch in Singapore
Marina Bay comes next Sunday, and it’s a tropical night race with plenty of slow running behind the Safety Car in its history. Three things to track:
- The paperwork. Whether the FIA confirms the Sepang patch, or a broader low-speed safeguard, as the standing configuration before Friday’s running, and whether its review publishes findings.
- Low-speed checks in practice. Expect teams to want to see wet-mode behaviour at Safety Car speeds now that everyone knows it can bite.
- Mercedes reliability. George Russell retired five laps from the end with a suspected power unit issue while running third, which is why Antonelli’s lead is now 84 points. Our title math was already tight for Russell before Sunday.
F1 spent years engineering these power units for the quickest laps of a weekend. Sepang showed the slowest ones deserve the same attention. A formula built on energy management has to manage the boring laps, too.
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