Formula One’s 2026 season has kicked off with a bang—and not all of it welcome. Three races in, the new regulations have sparked driver grumbles and safety alarms, none louder than after Oliver Bearman’s terrifying 190mph shunt at Suzuka. At the center of the storm stands Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s single-seater director, who insists the sport isn’t in crisis mode. “It’s not like we’re discussing a complete rewrite,” Tombazis says. “We believe the patient is not in intensive care; the patient needs to just eat a couple of apples per day, not to have an open-heart surgery.”
The Greek engineer, a veteran of Ferrari, McLaren, and Benetton before joining the FIA in 2018, is steering F1 through its first major regulatory overhaul since 2022. He acknowledges the noise but pushes back against doom-mongering. “There are topics from both the drivability and the safety point of view that we need to address,” Tombazis notes. “I don’t like to be going around saying: ‘Everything is fine, we don’t need to do anything,’ because clearly things do need to be done. Equally, I don’t like to say on the other extreme: ‘It’s all a mess.’ We have fans happy with the show, we’ve got an accident that was caused by specific aspects we need to solve and we’ve got some drivers who feel that some things can be improved.”
Driver feedback has split the grid. George Russell at Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton at Ferrari—both running near the front—have largely embraced the new formula, which leans harder on electrical energy management. But others are revolting. Lando Norris has voiced distaste, while reigning champion Max Verstappen has threatened to quit over his disillusionment. Tombazis takes it in stride. “I don’t know if there’s ever much of a case when you are the headmaster or the referee when you get a pat on the back all the time,” he quips. “They usually get criticised, and we are big enough to know that.”
The flashpoint, though, is safety. Bearman’s crash, triggered by drastic closing speeds between cars, has forced the issue onto the agenda. “Every accident at high speed is always a little bit of a shock,” Tombazis admits. “To say it was expected would be wrong but the closing speeds had been identified as a risk. There have been talks about it but there was not easily the ability to act on it before we had a bit of time to analyse a few of the parameters.” He warns against rash moves. “When we’ve introduced changes in a much more hurried way, the risk is that we make things worse or we cause all sorts of other issues, so that’s why we need to have a bit of time to analyse. Clearly safety is the number one priority.”
Action is coming, though. A series of high-stakes meetings this month will shape F1’s immediate future. A preliminary technical huddle kicks off on Thursday, April 10, to dissect data from the opening trio of races. Another follows a week later, with driver input slated. Then, on April 20, the big guns convene: team principals, CEOs, power-unit manufacturers, and F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali. Their goal? To hammer out rule tweaks in time for ratification by the world motorsport council and implementation at the Miami Grand Prix on May 3.
Tombazis stresses that fixes won’t require hardware overhauls. Instead, expect software and setting adjustments to energy recovery and deployment—the core of the new formula’s complexity. “These rules are what we collectively refer to as energy management rules that won’t require changes to hardware but may require some settings to change and some software,” he explains. “Changes that are fundamentally possible to introduce very soon and go to the core of addressing closing speeds or driver satisfaction.” He leaves the door open for phased updates, adding, “We may decide that we want to have a phase one and a phase two and maybe give phase two a bit more time for some tweaks to be done by the manufacturers.”
The FIA always planned for a learning curve. With roughly 200 engineers per team scrambling for performance, Tombazis likens it to mastering an instrument. “You can learn theoretically how to play the violin but until you play the violin you don’t necessarily understand what it involves,” he observes. Fan reception, he claims, has been positive, but driver gripes and safety scares have upped the ante.
As the clock ticks toward Miami, Tombazis is banking on consensus. “Everyone is extremely passionate about this sport – drivers, fans – and when things are not perfect, they will be quite passionate about it. We’re not expecting people to sugarcoat their comments,” he says. “But I’m now hoping for broad consensus, that teams will be also supportive and we won’t be in a position where we have to argue too much.” The 2026 rules might not please everyone, but for now, F1’s referee is calling for calm—and a few apples, not surgery.
