McLaren boss warns of ‘problem’ in ‘appeal’ to F1 bosses over starts

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella has made an appeal to F1 rulemakers to take a further look at race starts, warning it is dangerous in the current state.

There was an unusual process to the first start of the 2026 season with the drivers initially given a period to allow the turbo to get up to full speed and then a number of drivers crawled off the line as their various battery levels failed to produce.

Andrea Stella raises issue with F1 starts

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The likes of Liam Lawson looked stranded as more-charged cars overtook around him and Stella has pointed to race starts as one of his three areas for concern with the new rule changes.

“For me personally, I had three points of view that I wanted to double check, let’s say, in terms of qualifying, and now, having had the first race,” Stella said.

“The first case was the start and I think the concern remains today, the start was a bit of a near miss. There were huge speed differentials on the grid.

“We can hope for the best, or we can just do something further to make sure that we reduce this speed differential.

“This is a very technical matter. I don’t think we should go too far into ‘we should do this, or we should do that.’ My appeal, in a way, my call, is to say we should do more, keep attention on the start, because at some stage that will become a problem.”

As for Stella’s other issues, those focused on overtaking which he believed had become “artificial” given it was a case of which driver had more battery than the other.

“The second perspective was to do with the cars following and the fact that there may be large speed differentials on track between cars. Today, in my view, this was mainly a point of concern in the first lap.

“Lando, in particular, made the point that it’s quite tricky when you have cars very close to you that may have still deployment ongoing or not, to create this differential. This becomes quite unpredictable.

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“And even from this point of view, I think Lando said that in his previous comments, we should not be happy because nothing happened. We should always be on the front foot when it has to do with safety.

“So that was the second point, and the third point was overtaking. It was definitely exciting at the start of the race when we had the overtaking, in particular, between Mercedes and Ferrari.

“For me, this still looks like a little bit of an artificial overtaking which has to do with how we are using the battery.

“Actually, when the pace settles and everyone is on the same pattern from a deployment schedule point of view, then I think the overtaking becomes difficult. So I think even from an overtaking point of view, this is something that we need to keep reviewing.

“So the three points of attention, I think they still stand, and the first race confirmed that that’s the case.”

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