- Albon says defending has turned “awkward” & dangerous under F1’s new regs.
- Bearman’s 50G crash at Suzuka highlighted what drivers had already warned FIA.
- Meetings are scheduled for April as F1 races to fix the closing-speed problem.
Three races into Formula 1’s new era, and drivers are already afraid to race each other. Williams driver Alex Albon has clearly said what others are only whispering. The 2026 technical regulations have made the act of defending a racing position genuinely dangerous.
The concern has now reached official drivers’ briefings at the FIA and spread across private group chats. It came to a head at the Japanese Grand Prix at Suzuka, where a crash involving Haas driver Oliver Bearman put the numbers behind the fear into brutal focus.
A new era, an unexpected problem
The 2026 season came with the most radical regulatory changes F1 has seen in years.
New power units split their energy almost equally between electrical and combustion sources, representing almost a 300% increase in electrical output.
The cars themselves were made smaller and lighter. The drag reduction system was scrapped and replaced by an active aerodynamic setup with two wing modes: one for corners and one for straights.
The idea was to produce more natural, unpredictable racing. What nobody fully expected was how dramatically this would change the way speed is shared, or not shared, between two cars running close together.
The problem lies with the energy management. Under the new rules, one car can be pushing hard with full electrical deployment while the car just ahead is quietly harvesting energy for later.
Max Verstappen has estimated the speed gap this creates can reach 50 to 60 kilometres per hour on a straight. That is not a small margin.
That is the difference between a racing move and a collision.
Making it worse, drivers do not always choose when their cars deploy or recover power. Lando Norris admitted after Suzuka that he did not want to pass Lewis Hamilton at the end of the race.
His battery deployed on its own, and he could not override it. The software decided the move for him.
Alex Albon says defending has become “awkward”
Albon sat down with the media after the Japanese Grand Prix and spoke about what the conversations have been like among the drivers.
“We are actually talking about it in the drivers’ briefing, about closing speeds and defending and moving and all these kinds of things,” he told reporters, including RacingNews365. “It just feels really awkward now.”
That word, awkward, is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Racing drivers do not tend to call things awkward when they mean uncomfortable. They say awkward when they mean broken.
Albon went further, explaining what now runs through his head when a car bears down on him. “You want to defend, but you’re sometimes worried that the car is behind and whether they’re in control of their car.”
That is the crux of it. A driver should be thinking about racing lines, tyre wear and track position. Instead, Albon is asking whether the car approaching him will be able to stop if he moves. That line of thinking is what separates a technical inconvenience from a major safety concern.
A fix hiding in the past
Albon did not just raise the problem. He suggested a direction for a solution, and he reached back to the system the new regulations were designed to replace.
“Maybe we just need to make the SLM a bit more stable, or less powerful, or something like that,” he said. “More like regular DRS that you can control quite easily.”
It is a telling comparison. DRS had its critics. It produced overtaking that many fans found artificial, predictable and too easy.
But it was predictable. Both the attacking driver and the defending driver knew exactly when the flap would open, how much speed it would add, and when it would close.
Everyone worked with the same information.
The current straight-line mode carries none of that shared clarity. Its effect varies with each car’s energy state at that precise moment, and no driver can read another car’s battery from the cockpit.
The crash that made it real
Albon’s concerns came not long after the incident involving Haas driver Oliver Bearman during the Japanese Grand Prix itself.
Bearman was travelling at nearly 310km/h during the Japanese Grand Prix when his Haas suddenly closed on Franco Colapinto’s Alpine ahead of him. The energy states of the two cars were quite different.
There was no warning light. There was no time. Bearman lost control of his car and hit the barrier with a force of 50G.
Afterwards, Bearman described the incident and what that moment felt like for him.
“It was a massive overspeed, 50kph, which is a part of these new regulations that I guess we have to get used to,” he said. “I think as a group we warned the FIA what can happen, and this has been a really unfortunate result of a massive delta speed we’ve not seen before in F1 until these new regulations.”
Oscar Piastri noted that Colapinto’s warning lights were not active in the seconds before the impact. This ruled out the known phenomenon called superclipping, where cars slow sharply while harvesting maximum energy.
The gap in speed came from something that is harder to spot: a simple difference in where each car sat in its energy cycle. Nothing visible. Nothing the driver behind could read or react to in time.
It was not the first close call. In Melbourne, Colapinto had narrowly avoided Liam Lawson’s car after it stuttered from the line because of unpredictable power behaviour. The pattern was already forming. A crash like Bearman’s was a matter of when, not if.
What the FIA does next
The FIA released a statement after Bearman’s crash confirming it will hold meetings in April to review the 2026 regulations and decide whether changes are needed.
The governing body acknowledged that the rules were deliberately built with adjustable parameters around energy management.
Haas team principal Ayao Komatsu urged caution about rushing to fix everything at once.
He pointed to a qualifying adjustment at Suzuka, which reduced the amount of energy cars could recover and allowed drivers to brake later into corners, as proof that careful, targeted changes can work without making massive changes.
The five-week gap between the Japanese Grand Prix and the Miami Grand Prix gives F1 time to act. Miami brings fast, flat sections of track where closing speed differences will be felt sharply.
Alex Albon acknowledged that Williams would use the break to work through their own technical issues after he finished last among classified runners at Suzuka.
But the conversation has long since grown bigger than any one team’s troubles.
What the drivers have built, through briefings, private messages and public statements, is a collective case.
When a driver can no longer move to defend a position without wondering whether the car behind can safely respond, something at the core of racing has shifted.
The question now is whether the people who wrote the rules are willing to adjust them before another major incident happens on the track.
