F1 Cars Crawling Like Toys on the Formation Lap: A Software Bug Exposes the Cracks of the New Power Unit Era

Inside the commentary booth, I heard the rain hammering the roof, then the sound of engines dropping to a near-death idle. No familiar roar, no tyres clawing at the asphalt, just a sputtering, broken sound. That was the sound of the formation lap at a race in the 2026 Formula 1 season, when a string of the planet's most advanced racing cars suddenly crawled across a flooded track instead of surging forward.

Max Verstappen, who went on to win the race and take his first victory of the year, described the scene in a line I will remember for a long time: eight other cars were crawling like that, while he saw the field five-wide on a straight. Lewis Hamilton, who finished third, said he had to stop the car entirely, switch the engine off and restart it, something he had never had to do in his career. George Russell, who retired with an engine failure, said only one short thing: this race did not feel like F1 at all.

“I can hear the grass growing at night, because there is no one left in the stands to drown it out.” I once wrote that line about football, but here it holds in a different sense: when the engines can no longer drown out the rain, people finally hear that the machine has a problem.

Context before the verdict

This is the first season under the new hybrid power unit regulations, with energy split almost evenly between the internal combustion engine and the electrical side. The cars are structurally energy-starved, unable to deploy full combined power at all times. To compensate, teams layered on a mass of complex energy-management solutions, patched together piece by piece.

A tropical downpour forced the race to be delayed by about an hour. When the field went out for the formation lap behind the safety car, a software bug in the electrical energy deployment logic was triggered, by exactly the combination of low engine speed, low grip and the circuit's layout characteristics. The cars could not move, and the running order was jumbled.

The essence of the failure lies in the software and control-logic layer, not in aerodynamics or mechanics. The regulation governing how electrical energy is deployed was written for dry conditions, and when the rain arrived it collided with an edge case that had never been tested.

The gap is in an empty square

The FIA's Nikos Tombazis admitted the software had been tested, but not in these exact conditions, because teams have run so little in the wet all year. That is the classic test-coverage gap of any complex control system: not a wrong design direction, just a missing square in the scenario matrix. In other words, the problem is not that the software is bad, but that the software had never met this exact situation.

What is more notable is that the phenomenon did not occur with only one power unit supplier. Verstappen said eight other cars were crawling too. If that number is right, the issue lies in a common element of the regulations or in shared software, not in one team getting it wrong. This is the core difference between one team in trouble and an entire system in trouble.

One detail deserves to be set apart: Russell's engine failure. That is a Mercedes hardware reliability issue, not necessarily related to the software bug. Merging the two into one would be an analytical mistake.

The organisers had to handle a gap in the rules: one reading of the text would have forced a reshuffle of the starting order, but in the end they reverted to the original order, on the grounds that the situation had never occurred before and was beyond any team's control. Mercedes called it a way for millions of viewers to understand the story. It was a decision to protect the audience, but also a decision that put the show ahead of the strictness of the rules.

The memorable label and the trap behind it

Be careful with the label now spreading. “Lego race”, the phrase the drivers themselves launched, is memorable, shareable and easily overstated. This bug was triggered by rain, tied to a specific circuit's characteristics, and the FIA claims it can lock that particular problem away. A single incident does not make a rule.

But this is where I want to linger. Tombazis himself said he can guarantee this specific problem will not recur, but cannot guarantee there will be no other problem. That is a rare admission that the regulator does not fully control the technology it governs. And that is a systemic risk, not the risk of one race.

“Strategy is not a mummy, don't wrap it in museum glass.” The rulebook is the same. When the rules are changed in their very first year, with the energy split set to change next season, that is a sign the regulatory design has partly failed. All year, the off-track conversation has been dominated by this issue, drowning out pure racing talk.

The reaction from the teams also deserves attention. Andrea Stella said F1 has done an excellent job, and if there are occasional glitches, they must be accepted, because they are glitches for everyone. Read closely, this is a collective defence of the rulebook by the team principals, while the overall tone of the story is fairly harsh.

What bothers me most is not the car crawling on the track, but the fact that code was rewritten while the race was running. The FIA rewrote code as fast as possible. No one assessed the risk of a real-time technical intervention like that, the risk of spawning a second fault right there on the track.

Behind the track

The biggest damage from this incident is to the image, not the points. It happened at the most-watched moment, the start, and produced cars that looked abnormal on screen. For sponsors, that is the worst thing that can happen.

At 54, I have learned that emotion is also a rare form of data. And the emotion here is bewilderment mixed with disappointment, coming from the people inside the sport, not from the press. When drivers and team principals alike use harsh language, the reassurance that there is nothing to see loses all its weight.

Technically, this fault looks bounded. But in terms of trust, it opens a bigger question: a sport that positions itself as the pinnacle of technology is patching up its own rulebook in the very first year of its application. The Lego comparison is an exaggeration, but it forces people to look straight at the fact that speed has been traded for complexity.

What to watch

“Fans don't remember the scoreboard, they remember the breathing of the match.” They will remember the moment the most expensive cars on the planet could not move on the formation lap.

The problem for F1 in the new power unit era is not a software bug. The problem is that the sport is layering more complexity onto a rulebook it has itself acknowledged is problematic, and admits it cannot guarantee it will not happen again. In the coming weeks, the FIA's technical documents will show whether it locks the fault away, or simply sticks another piece of tape onto a system already full of joints. And at the next wet race, I will once again listen to the engines before I see the cars.