Liam Lawson puts ball in FIA court over F1 2026 safety fears

Liam Lawson said it is over to the FIA to act or hold station, as he raised safety concerns over the new F1 2026 regulations.

Reflecting on his near-miss with Franco Colapinto at the start in Melbourne, and experiences that weekend of being around other cars of varying energy status, Lawson said that drivers will continue to raise concerns, and the FIA will respond how it sees fit.

Liam Lawson raises F1 2026 starts and SLM concerns

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Only two rounds deep into the new era of Formula 1 competition, the sport, teams and drivers, are all getting to grips with how these regulations manifest into on-track competition.

One area which the sport’s governing body, the FIA, was quick to address was race starts. The new system sees drivers receive a blue flashing light, informing them that the start procedure is about to begin.

These new engines take longer to get into the right configuration for launch, and it is a start procedure change which was well received.

Still, drivers have had varying degrees of success in regards to getting away well off the line. Lawson had a particularly close shave in Melbourne, as Franco Colapinto showed some razor sharp evasive action to miss Lawson’s slow starting Racing Bulls car.

“It’s just very complicated,” Lawson said of F1 2026 race starts, as he spoke ahead of the Chinese Grand Prix. “You see us sitting there for sort of 10 seconds, trying to start our pre-start procedure, and the starts are very inconsistent.

“And it’s a new car, but still, it’s very tricky at the moment.

“We’ll talk about it more anyway. There’s a lot of things that we’re probably talking about now anyway, that haven’t been amazing about the cars. But that’s something that will obviously keep improving.”

Lawson was asked if anything can be done off the back of such conversations. He was told that several drivers have claimed a big shunt is only a matter of time.

Sainz claimed that the sport was “extremely lucky” that nothing happened between Lawson and Colapinto in Melbourne, and feared that there would be “one of those big crashes” if nothing changed.

But, Jonathan Wheatley, the now former Audi F1 team boss, said in China that the FIA was still looking at the start procedure, and had made some small tweaks for that race.

The Australia start was rather unique due to a quirk in the rules, which meant that drivers had different battery levels for the start, depending on whether they launched from beyond or before the timing line.

“If it keeps going on like this, yes,” said Lawson in confirmation of fearing a future incident at race starts.  “What happened to me, it’s so easy to happen. If Franco hadn’t done a very good job at avoiding it, that would have been a really, really big crash.

“At the moment, it is quite dangerous.

“But, in terms of the decision making, obviously we’re not part of that. We’ll give our opinions on what we’re feeling inside the car, but it’s up to the FIA. If they want to change something, then they will.”

On his start issue in Melbourne, he added: “Sometimes we have to have these things happen, to learn from them, to know what it is.

“We had quite good pre-starts and good starts during pre-season. The issue we had, we hadn’t really experienced too much. We’d had it once or twice before, but didn’t expect it and didn’t see it coming at the start of the race.

“It’s something that we understand now, fully, and it’s about trying to apply a fix so that it doesn’t happen again.

“But from my side, there’s not a lot I can do in the car, to be honest.”

Lawson admitted that it is “not straightforward” when it comes to potential alterations, with the engines needing that pre-start opportunity to prepare the turbos.

Though Lawson believes the safety topic stretches beyond just starts.

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In addition to the race starts, there is also the matter of boost and overtake modes from the batteries, lift-and-coast, super-clipping and Straight-Line Mode, where the front and rear wings open to dump drag. All of this influences closing speeds for a car following another.

Sainz has been particularly critical of the new rules on this front. After the Chinese GP, he called SLM “a plaster on top of a plaster”, and suggested that “sooner rather than later, there’s going to be a big crash at very high speeds”, pointing to tracks like Melbourne or Jeddah, which feature high-speed sections with kinks.

“There’s a lot of things that we’re dealing with during the race,” Lawson acknowledged. “The SLM in the high-speed zones where we’re turning, is one thing as well. Trying to race like that can be quite sketchy.

“The difference in speed at the end of the straight, when cars are charging, cars are not charging, with overtake, there’s a lot of stuff that we’re learning, and a lot of things that it’s not a simple fix, so it’s something that we’re all dealing with at the moment.”

Important is Lawson’s use of the word ‘learning’. It is still very early days in the understanding of this very different formula.

Lawson was asked whether he foresees a point during the season where drivers deploy and save energy at the same points in a lap.

“At the moment, it’s very inconsistent,” he said. “We make our own decisions on when we charge and deploy, and it’s quite different between teams and engines.

“It depends on what the FIA decide to do. But right now, there’s a lot of differences that we have to be quite careful of, because you can be having quite a good run on a car, and all of a sudden, they start charging, and you’re right behind them with SLM open. There’s not a lot you can do to avoid them.”

F1 2026 resumes this week with the Japanese Grand Prix.

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