- F1 drivers’ WhatsApp group hits peak activity as 2026 regs fury hits boiling point.
- Bearman’s 50G Suzuka crash proves what drivers warned the FIA would happen.
- FIA has five weeks to act before racing resumes at the Miami Grand Prix in May.
Three races into the 2026 F1 season, Alexander Wurz has hinted at a problem. The Grand Prix Drivers’ Association (GPDA) President says the drivers are not being heard. And he has the chat logs to prove it.
Wurz, a former F1 driver who founded the GPDA’s now-famous WhatsApp group a decade ago, says the group has never been this active. The drivers are frustrated. They are organised. And after a frightening crash at Suzuka, they are running out of patience.
“The chat basically explodes,” Wurz said, speaking while filming for the Lift and Roast podcast. “The chat is more active than ever; I have rarely seen it that active.”
He added that the conversation goes well beyond frustration. “The drivers express emotions, different solutions, technical solutions,” he said. “We discuss how to convince all the people that the drivers should be heard, have to be heard.“
What is driving the frustration
The anger traces back to F1’s radical new technical rules for 2026. The regulations introduced a near 50-50 split between internal combustion and electric power. Battery harvesting now plays a much larger role in how cars are raced.
The result is something many drivers find deeply uncomfortable. Cars in a harvesting phase can slow significantly on straights. Cars that are not harvesting close in fast. The gap between the two can be enormous, and on a racing circuit, enormous speed differences are dangerous.
Drivers had flagged this before the season began. The sport pushed on regardless.
The crash that made it real
The warnings stopped being theoretical on 29 March 2026, at the Japanese Grand Prix in Suzuka.
Haas driver Ollie Bearman was travelling at around 190 miles per hour when he came upon the Alpine of Franco Colapinto heading into the Spoon Curve.
Colapinto’s car was in a harvesting phase and had slowed sharply. Bearman was not harvesting. The closing speed was later estimated at around 31 miles per hour faster than his own.
Bearman had nowhere to go. He was forced onto the grass, lost control, and hit the barrier hard. The impact was registered 50G. He was fortunate to have walked away from that crash without any major injury.
The young Briton did not mince words afterwards. “We’ve, as a group, warned the FIA what can happen,” Bearman said via Planet F1, “and this has been a really unfortunate result of a massive delta speed that we’ve never seen before in Formula 1 until these new regulations.”
Carlos Sainz, who serves as a GPDA director alongside Wurz, was equally pointed in his assessment. He reminded people that Suzuka has generous run-off areas. Not every circuit does.
“Imagine going to Baku or Singapore, or Las Vegas and having these kinds of closing speeds,” Sainz said after the race. “As the GPDA, we have warned the FIA these accidents will happen a lot with this set of regulations, and we need to change something soon if we don’t want it to happen.”
Sainz also pushed back at how prior conversations with the FIA had been framed. He said he was surprised to hear that only qualifying would be addressed when drivers had been clear that the problem extended to race conditions.
His conclusion was blunt. “I hope it serves as an example and the teams listen to the drivers and not so much to the teams and some people that said ‘the racing is OK’, because the racing is not OK.”
The FIA responds
Following the crash, the FIA released a statement acknowledging that closing speeds played a role in the Bearman incident. The governing body confirmed a series of meetings would take place in April to assess the regulations.
It said safety would remain central to its work.
FIA single-seater director Nicolas Tombazis told drivers at Suzuka that changes would come before the next round in Miami in early May.
The five-week gap between Japan and Miami gives the FIA, the teams and the power unit manufacturers time to look at the data and decide what to adjust.
Many insiders now consider changes to energy management and deployment parameters close to certain. Sainz has called for reductions in the electric motor’s role, including trimming what is known as superclipping and reducing the significance of the energy boost.
He has argued that a small loss of lap time is worth the trade-off in safety and racing quality.
The drivers, meanwhile, are not sitting still. Wurz made clear they are organised, sharing technical ideas and working out how to make their voices count. Whether the FIA and F1 act decisively is the question that remains to be answered.
