Bearman’s Japanese GP crash has forced F1’s hand over safety

Since at least the 1980s Formula 1 has been as much a business as it is a sport. In recent years you could well argue that the tawdry and grasping demands of late capitalism have actually achieved pre-eminence over the humble matter of on-track competition.

This, indubitably, is why we find ourselves in the situation of having to make the best of a fundamentally compromised power unit concept, cooked up to appease and engage the car manufacturers – one of which axed its own powertrain division anyway, while another is now wishing it had stuck to its decision to quit while it was ahead.

Indeed, one wonders if, at any point during the high-level discussions surrounding the 50/50 split of electrical to internal combustion power, those present actually engaged in any second-order due diligence about the practical sporting consequences of this decision.

More likely this was kicked down the road in favour of mutual self-congratulation, and a rush to compose some godawful self-aggrandising LinkedIn post about the deal’s historical significance.

Anyway, here we are. And despite the technical regulations now resembling a palimpsest, garlanded and scribbled over with a host of mitigations such as active aerodynamics, the drivers uniformly despise the new formula – yes, even the ones who have been put in a headlock by their teams and told to be nice.

Well, they say you should try anything once except palimpsest and Morris dancing.

As early as last year, drivers raised concerns about the safety implications of cars running out of electrical energy on the straights, potentially triggering accidents in which the high closing speeds of cars behind acted as a multiplier for the consequences.

In Melbourne there was a near-miss when Liam Lawson’s Racing Bulls car stuttered away from the line and Franco Colapinto missed him by a matter of millimetres. At the time, this was seemingly disregarded. F1 itself was keen to trumpet the quantity of overtaking manoeuvres on the day, even if fans on social media were quick to disabuse it of the notion that this was a good thing.

Lawson was a slow starter in Melbourne, though he narrowly escaped being shunted into

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Nevertheless the position of the commercial rights holder remained that the new formula was a roaring success, despite what a few noisy ‘reply guys’ might think. Would you rather have an hour and a half of positional stasis in a DRS train while the airwaves are filled with complaints about tyre degradation, eh?

In parallel, at senior management level most of the teams remained against immediate change, based on the increased engineering workload this would entail. And, dare we say it, the disruptive effect on various competitive advantages certain teams were eager to guard.

When the FIA responded to drivers’ safety concerns in Melbourne, in this case the sketchiness of the cars into Turn 9 as they transitioned out of straightline mode, it acted quickly to delete that straightline zone. Almost immediately it was pressed to reverse that decision by the teams, who pointed out that this would make the data gathered through all the track sessions thus far irrelevant, and have unforeseen second-order effects on car performance for the rest of the weekend.

The perils of having machine-learning algorithms dictating speed rather than the driver’s right foot was amply demonstrated at the Spoon corners on Sunday afternoon when Oliver Bearman nearly drove into the back of Franco Colapinto

In terms of the bigger picture, though, the FIA’s position has been that it needs more data before it adjusts the energy-management rules, because this improves the quality of the decision-making process.

But while the matter of rule changes is a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’, a consensus seems to have emerged among the stakeholders that the priority is to ‘fix’ qualifying, since the exigencies of energy management mean the cars can’t go flat out through the lap. The lower the energy-harvesting potential of the circuit, the more ridiculous it gets: at Suzuka, drivers complained that the harder they pushed in corners, the more speed they lost on the straights as the power unit software responded by going into harvesting mode earlier.

The perils of having machine-learning algorithms dictating speed rather than the driver’s right foot was amply demonstrated at the Spoon corners on Sunday afternoon when Oliver Bearman nearly drove into the back of Franco Colapinto at a speed reported by the Haas team to be 308km/h. Quite rightly this has returned safety to the top of the agenda.

Bearman was reportedly travelling at 191mph when he caught up with Colapinto and lost control

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

Comparison of the onboard footage with F1 TV graphics overlaid indicates Colapinto was travelling at 170km/h in fourth gear just before the 100-metre board while the Haas, two car lengths behind, was at an indicated 262km/h in seventh gear.

However, this must be viewed with the caveat that F1’s telemetry stream has been all over the place this weekend, even more so than it was in China – even Autosport’s regular source of GPS and telemetry was unusable to analyse the accident, giving data on Bearman’s car which bore no relation to reality on both that lap and those immediately prior.

Colapinto’s estimate was that the closing speed was “more than 50km/h”, and it’s understood that the Alpine wasn’t actively harvesting energy at that point – certainly the warning lights on his car weren’t illuminated as they had been earlier on the straight.

It has been said by some figures within the commentariat that Colapinto caused the accident by moving over to block Bearman from passing. Those expressing this opinion ought to review those onboards, which reveal Colapinto did nothing of the sort.

In taking evasive action Bearman went skating sideways over the grass on the inside, back over the track and through the run-off, where his movement was finally arrested by the barrier with an impact speed measured at 50G.

“That’s what you get with these things,” said Max Verstappen afterwards. “I mean, one guy is completely stuck with no power basically, and then the other one uses the mushroom mode and it can be 50km/h, 60km/h difference. It’s really, really big.”

Verstappen has been a vocal critic of F1’s 2026 rules

Photo by: Marcel van Dorst / EYE4images / NurPhoto via Getty Images

“We’ve been warning them [F1 and the FIA] about this happening,” said Carlos Sainz, a GPDA director.

“These kinds of closing speeds and these kinds of accidents were always going to happen, and I’m not very happy with what we’ve had up until now. Hopefully we come up with a better solution that doesn’t create these massive closing speeds, and a safer way of going racing.”

There are pressing questions, too, about how much control the drivers are exercising over when their cars have boost and when they don’t. Later in the race, at the end of lap 47, Lando Norris and Lewis Hamilton were disputing fifth place when Lando passed him into the chicane, only for the Ferrari to boost past again on the pit straight – and Norris said he didn’t even want to overtake at that point, but was effectively forced into it by the software.

“There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s just not enough control for a driver, and that’s why you’re just too much at the mercy of what’s behind you. That’s just not how it should be” Lando Norris

“Honestly some of the racing, I didn’t even want to overtake Lewis,” he said afterwards. “It’s just that my battery deploys, I don’t want it to deploy, but I can’t control it. So I overtake him, and then I have no battery left, so he just flies past. This is not racing, this is yo-yoing. Even though he [Hamilton] says it’s not, it is yo-yoing.

“You’re just at the mercy of whatever the power unit delivers. The driver should be in control of it at least, and we’re not. The problem is, it deploys into 130R. I have to lift, otherwise I’ll drive into him, and then I’m not allowed to go back on throttle.

“If I go on throttle, my battery deploys, and I don’t want it to deploy because it should have cut. But because you lift and you have to go back on [throttle], it redeploys. There’s nothing I can do about it. There’s just not enough control for a driver, and that’s why you’re just too much at the mercy of what’s behind you. That’s just not how it should be.”

Norris would like to be in full control of his power unit – but laments he’s not

Photo by: Clive Mason / Getty Images

The FIA responded to the post-race angst with a statement highlighting its commitment to making such changes as can be made in a rigorously data-driven way.

“Any potential adjustments,” it said, “particularly those related to energy management, require careful simulation and detailed analysis. The FIA will continue to work in close and constructive collaboration with all stakeholders to ensure the best possible outcome for the sport and safety will always remain a core element of the FIA’s mission.”

This is true, but it doesn’t change the fact that too many people in the higher echelons of F1 have been declaring this new technical formula a win when it remains, at best, a half-cooked product.

“That’s why I was so surprised when they [the stakeholders] said, ‘No, we will sort out qualifying and leave the racing alone because it’s exciting,’” said Sainz. “As drivers, we’ve been extremely vocal that the problem is not only qualifying, it’s also racing and we’ve been warning that this kind of accident was always going to happen.

“Here we were lucky there was an escape road, now imagine going to Baku or going to Singapore or going to Vegas and having these kind of closing speeds and crashes next to the walls. I hope it serves as an example and the teams listen to the drivers, and not so much to the teams and people that said the racing was OK – because the racing is not OK.”

F1 now has a five-week break to start sorting things out

Photo by: Lars Baron / LAT Images via Getty Images

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