Mark Hughes: F1's last-minute Suzuka fix hasn't gone far enough

Two days before first qualifying for the Japanese Grand Prix, F1 and the FIA reduced the total permitted energy harvest over the Suzuka lap from 9Mj to 8Mj in an attempt at mitigating the extreme lifting necessary for the ultimate qualifying lap around such an energy-hungry track layout.

With relatively little braking and lots of flowing high-speed corners, the potential around Suzuka for energy recovery from braking alone (as opposed to lift-and-coast and super-clipping) is only around 3.5Mj (only around 0.2Mj greater than Melbourne). Around Shanghai, with its greater number of braking zones, that number was around 6.1Mj and so the problem was not as acute.

So the new 8Mj limit reduces the energy deficit of the track from 5.5Mj to 4.5 (but in the process reducing how much power can be deployed over the lap). The smaller deficit from the latest tweak means there’s less time to be made up on the straights than there would have been and therefore the amount of energy saving needed in the key energy corners is reduced. But not by enough to make qualifying flat-out throughout the lap – there is still going to be a lot of energy saving through Spoon and 130R in particular.

So, why not reduce the energy limit down to how much can be reclaimed by the brakes – ie right down to 3.5Mj in the case of Suzuka? Because with so little energy stored, for much of the lap the cars would have to run on the internal combustion engine alone and so the power unit would be minus around 470 of its circa 1,000 horsepower.

As the track grip ramps up through the weekend, the problem will become more acute

The braking demands are only one half of the equation. There’s also deployment. How energy-hungry is the layout in terms of percentage of full throttle running? Shanghai and Monaco make a good comparison because they are very similar in how much braking energy can be recovered (about 6.1Mj), but Monaco is way less greedy of full-throttle running (38% vs around 60% for Shanghai).

In the mismatch between energy harvested and energy used, Suzuka is almost as bad as Melbourne, with only Jeddah (not being used this year, of course, for reasons to do with Israel and Trump) worse.

As the track grip ramps up through the weekend, the problem will become more acute. The greater the grip level, the more energy will be used up in the corners so even turns which are initially full-attack corners may become energy-saver corners.

This is the bind F1 has got itself into with these regulations, and on such energy-hungry tracks as Melbourne and Suzuka it becomes very visible. It’s not likely to be anything like as acute at most of the next few races and as things stand the next real energy-hungry track is set to be Qatar (though again, for reasons to do with Israel and Trump we might need an asterisk alongside that event) late in the season.

What we are talking about here are specifically the problems the new regulations are creating for qualifying. The race day issues tend to be different and centre around where, relative to the braking zones, batteries are emptying. That was a race day problem in Melbourne but not really in Shanghai. We await to see what the race day implications are around Suzuka.

In the meantime, the implications of how this is all playing out are – as has been pretty obvious all along – there needs to be a greater contribution of power from the internal combustion engine. Upping the fuel flow to something more like it was before this year would help with that, but would be impractical on race day as the cars will have been designed around fuel tanks big enough only for the lower fuel flow stipulation.

Increase the fuel flow for qualifying only? Not ideal in that the engines have been designed around the lower flow. But as a ’26-only stop-gap?