It was the moment the paddock had been quietly dreading. When Ollie Bearman’s Haas went airborne at Spoon, the conversation about the 2026 rules changed forever.
Nobody wanted to be right about this one.
For weeks, drivers had been raising concerns in private and in press conferences about one particular danger lurking inside the new 2026 rulebook: the speed differential between cars in different energy modes. One driver harvesting energy, another deploying it, and suddenly you have two cars on the same piece of track traveling at wildly different speeds, with almost no warning.
At the Japanese Grand Prix, it stopped being theoretical. Running through Suzuka’s iconic Spoon corner at close to 300km/h, Ollie Bearman encountered Franco Colapinto’s Alpine doing something closer to 250km/h. Colapinto was in a harvesting phase, recharging his battery on the racing line. Bearman, in deployment mode, had no time to react. He swerved onto the grass, and the resulting crash registered at 50G.
For context: Carlos Sainz’s infamous 2021 accident in Russia, the one people still wince at, was 46G. Bearman walked away, but he walked away from the medical centre rather than the car. The Haas was destroyed.
Sainz, now driving for Williams, didn’t mince words afterwards. He pointed out that the drivers had been flagging this precise risk to the FIA well before the season began. His concern isn’t Spoon; it’s Baku. It’s Singapore. It’s Vegas. Tracks lined with concrete walls where there’s no escape road and no margin for a 30-plus mph closing speed surprise. If this happens there, someone is getting seriously hurt.
It wasn’t even the only near-miss at Suzuka. Later in the race, George Russell and Charles Leclerc came within a whisker of a similar incident, only managing to avoid contact through a combination of skill and luck.
The FIA responded swiftly with a public statement committing to a formal review, with meetings scheduled across April. The governing body was careful to frame this as a planned process rather than panic, and they’d always intended to review the rules after the opening rounds, they said. Technically true. But the tone of urgency that followed Bearman’s crash was unmistakable.
The underlying problem is the same one driving all the other 2026 complaints: cars in different power modes can behave very differently, and that unpredictability is hardest to manage at the highest speeds. Until the energy deployment rules are refined, every high-speed circuit on the calendar carries an elevated risk.
The sport built something ambitious this year. But ambition has to come with accountability, and right now the drivers are asking loudly to be heard. After Suzuka, it’s very hard to argue they don’t have a point.
