Formula 1 has stopped arguing about whether the 2026 regulations launched badly. The argument now is about whose signature is on the failure — and the FIA's answer involves naming a voting threshold it could not reach.
The symptom was visible from Melbourne. Cars were lifting and losing speed on the approach to quick corners, unable to harvest enough energy to keep their batteries alive. Formula 1 revised its energy-harvesting limits after the Miami Grand Prix, four rounds into a brand-new era.
David Coulthard's objection is to the reaction time, not the rules alone.
"The new regs came at us with drivers and engineers going, 'This is not going to be good.' Pretty much silence from everyone else," he said on the Up To Speed podcast. "We get to Melbourne and we go, 'Ah, they have deceleration as they go towards certain corners.'"
The repair work, he allows, has landed. "Now, the comeback from that disappointment, I've got to say, from Miami onwards, has been good. The fact that we've had five different winners in the last five Grand Prixs is testament to a varied season."
What he cannot accept is that a sport built on simulation needed a race to discover the problem.
"I feel that we saw this coming and nobody really was listening, and the fact they had to react to the reality, in a sport that simulates the hell out of the future, was a bit disappointing," the 13-time grand prix winner said. "That has to fall really with the FIA."
He anticipated the rebuttal and dismissed it in advance. "I know they'll get sensitive and go, 'Well, we are a small group of people, and the Formula 1 teams have hundreds of people,' but all of the evidence was there that having 50/50 on electrical and battery was going to be challenging."
The direction of the fixes is, to him, the giveaway — more internal combustion in 2027 and more again in 2028. "What are we doing going forward? We're going to have more internal combustion next year, and suggested even more the year after. To see the obvious and then react is a bit disappointing." He filed the era's opening months alongside the World Cup final half-time show as "a bit of a disappointment".
FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis disputes the central charge. Speaking to The Race, he said the FIA did anticipate much of what drivers have complained about, in the two years before the season began, and did attempt adjustments — but the governance structure defeated it.
The reason those adjustments needed such broad approval traces back to keeping incoming manufacturers honest.
"If a PU manufacturer who was not participating in F1, let's say Audi, for example, they still had to be bound by the regulations," Tombazis said. "They could not come to us and say, 'Well, you know we're not participating, hence we can spend five times the money', for example. That would have been unfair."
Binding them to the rules meant giving them a vote on the rules.
"On the other hand, it puts limitations as to how much we can change things unilaterally as the FIA," he said. "Therefore, any change had to be approved by a significant number of the PU manufacturers. And so, for the sort of changes we did, we needed at least four of them to agree."
And then: "Quite simply, four of them did not agree during the years when we discussed adjustments."
Read plainly, that is the governing body conceding it wanted the formula changed before Melbourne and was voted down by the companies supplying the engines. Tombazis has said elsewhere this year that engine regulations cannot be left hostage to power unit manufacturers.
None of it has settled the paddock. Max Verstappen flagged concerns about this direction back in Austria in 2023, and he, Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri have all criticised battery-dictated racing this season. Sky's Martin Brundle wanted the regulations gone as quickly as possible after Silverstone and Spa — the two venues that punished the energy deficit hardest. The volume dropped at the Hungaroring, a circuit that asks far less of the power unit, which rather supports Coulthard's argument about predictability.
Stefano Domenicali maintains the fans are enjoying this Formula 1. Mohammed Ben Sulayem has committed to V8 engines by 2031 at the latest. The 50/50 split becomes 60/40 in 2028 regardless.
