What F1's regulation meetings can, can't, and probably won't do

After Oliver Bearman‘s frightening near-miss at Suzuka, Formula 1’s governing bodies and all 11 teams meet today to discuss possible changes to the 2026 ruleset.

The meeting, the first of three over the coming weeks, has been a long time coming.

Three races into the 2026 season, Formula 1 finds itself facing a problem it created: a set of technical regulations that has produced racing some inside and many outside the paddock consider fundamentally broken.

On Thursday, representatives of the FIA, Formula 1 management and all 11 constructors sit down to agree emergency changes.

There is, by all accounts, a broad consensus that something must be done. The question is what.

The two problems

Stripping away the technical complexity, there are essentially two issues on the table.

The first is closing speed differentials.

The 2026 regulations create wildly different power states between cars at any given moment on track: a car in full electrical deployment can be travelling substantially faster than one that is harvesting or conserving.

The risks this creates were brought into sharp focus at Suzuka, when Bearman hit the wall in a 50g impact after finding Franco Colapinto‘s much slower Alpine when approaching the hairpin.

The incident served as a demonstration of what drivers and teams had been warning about for months.

The second item on the table is qualifying.

Under the current energy management framework, drivers are being forced to lift and compromise their cornering in ways that cut directly against what qualifying is supposed to be: a pure expression of driver and car at the limit.

The algorithms that govern energy deployment are based on what a driver has already done in a session; there is no room for the kind of improvisation and escalating commitment that has historically defined great qualifying laps.

Charles Leclerc, one of the best single-lap drivers of this generation, has brought in his own team of software engineers to model the permutations in an attempt to work around the problem.

That a driver of his like Leclerc needs to do this at all tells its own story.

The options

The fundamental aim is to find a way to make driving safer while bringing back the qualifying show that has disappeared under the new regulations.

The direction of travel appears clear even before the meeting starts. Those in the meeting will be looking at harvesting rates and deployment limits.

The most straightforward tweak would be to raise the power available during super-clipping — harvesting energy while still on full throttle — from its current 250kW limit to 350kW, matching what is available during lift and coast.

If super-clipping becomes as efficient as lifting, drivers will naturally prefer it, reducing the prevalence of the more dangerous lift-and-coast behaviour that creates the large closing speed differentials.

Reducing the maximum MGU-K deployment is also an option, as it would cut the current 350kW maximum deployment limit, although that would inevitably make the cars several seconds a lap slower.

Perhaps the most powerful lever available is cutting how much energy can be recovered per lap. The current qualifying limit is 9MJ, already reduced at Suzuka to 8MJ as a one-off measure.

A bigger reduction would make the recharge limit easier to hit, drivers no longer needing to lift and coast aggressively to reach it. The trade-off, however, is also slower lap times.