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Carlos Sainz says Formula 1 “needs to have a hard look at themselves” after a software bug in the sport’s new power units left eight cars stranded on the formation lap and delayed the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia by roughly 90 minutes.
The Williams driver and Grand Prix Drivers’ Association director was speaking after a race at Sepang International Circuit that Max Verstappen eventually won — his 72nd grand prix victory and Red Bull’s first with its in-house powertrain — ahead of Kimi Antonelli and Lewis Hamilton. But the result was overshadowed by the first time in F1 history that a race start has been abandoned because of a coding error.
“It is clear the regs are extremely complicated for the drivers, for the teams, for the PUs, for the manufacturers. It is too complicated,” Sainz said. “But clearly what was decided four or five years ago was wrong. We need to learn as a sport not to make those mistakes again.”
A ‘perfect storm’ nobody had tested
The cause was narrow and specific. Under the 2026 regulations, a wet-weather engine map cuts the electrical component of the power unit from 350kW to 250kW to limit wheelspin in low-grip conditions. That setting had never been activated in anger all season — there had been no wet running in testing or in any race weekend before Sepang.
When it was finally triggered on a saturated formation lap, the combination of the reduced energy limit, Sepang’s sector layout and crawling formation-lap speeds dropped turbo revs low enough to push the power units into failsafe. The FIA described it as a “perfect storm”.
Verstappen reported “a lack of acceleration” first before recovering. Hamilton crawled off the grid and stopped altogether, later calling it “like the LEGO race”. Liam Lawson, Gabriel Bortoleto and Valtteri Bottas also ground to a halt. In total, eight to nine cars across seven teams lost power — both Audis, both Haas, both Cadillacs, an Alpine, a Racing Bull and Hamilton’s Ferrari — and race control had no option but to red-flag the start.
The FIA wrote a patch removing the energy-limit constraint in the affected sectors and distributed it to all eleven teams. Creating, validating and installing it took about 20 minutes; the full delay, on top of a 40-minute hold for torrential rain, pushed the race back around an hour and a half. Cars were reset to their original grid positions after streaming into the pit lane.
Why the warning was missed
Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s single-seater director, was direct about the gap. “We didn’t manage to test the software as extensively as we would have liked because there has been very little wet running this year,” he said. The governing body has since launched a full review.
That is the uncomfortable part for F1. The 2026 rules represent the largest technical reset since the hybrid era began in 2014 — a 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical power, fully sustainable fuels, active aerodynamics and new manufacturers in Audi and Cadillac. Bahrain in Malaysia was simply the first time any of it ran in genuine race-wet conditions, and the first real test found a failure mode that simulation had not.
Sainz was not alone. Lando Norris called the day “horrible” and said the complexity of the power units had manufactured a problem that did not need to exist. George Russell described the whole afternoon as “a bit of a faff”. Sergio Perez called it “totally unacceptable for the sport”. Oscar Piastri, more cautiously, noted he had “never seen an F1 race delayed by a bug” but asked for the full explanation before judgement.
What happens next
The sporting consequences were real. Antonelli’s second place extended his drivers’ championship lead to 84 points, while Russell’s title hopes took another hit when he stopped late in the race behind the safety car. Charles Leclerc finished fourth, Isack Hadjar fifth, with Oscar Piastri sixth and Norris only ninth.
The wider questions are harder. The patch fixes this specific edge case; it does not address what Red Bull team principal Laurent Mekies framed as the central risk — ensuring “complexity doesn’t get out of hand” and building protections against software states nobody has driven. Expect the FIA review to focus on three things:
- Mandating wet-condition validation for engine maps that have never been run in anger, including dedicated wet test days
- Failsafe logic that degrades performance rather than cutting drive entirely
- Clearer protocols for distributing emergency patches mid-event, now that a precedent exists
Sainz’s point lands harder because of his GPDA role: the drivers are not asking for the new rules to be torn up ten races in. They are asking why a sport that spends hundreds of millions on simulation needed a wet Sunday in Malaysia to discover a setting it wrote into its own regulations.
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Sources: [Yahoo Sports](https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/f1-needs-hard-look-itself-115944601.html), [The Race](https://www.the-race.com/formula-1/f1-drivers-blast-horrible-malaysia-formation-lap/)
Sports journalist and editor at SportsPortal.net. Covers cricket, football, Formula 1, tennis, and basketball with a focus on how global sports connect with Pakistani audiences. Follows the PSL, Pakistan national cricket team, Premier League, and major international tournaments. Has reported on sports for digital audiences since 2021.
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