Nate Saunders Oct 4, 2026, 03:00 PM ET SEPANG, Malaysia -- The Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia already had a farcical name. Formula 1's unnecessarily complicated hybrid engines ensured the race will be remembered as one of the biggest farces in the sport's recent history. F1's current engines, which feature a near 50-50 split between internal combustion energy and electrical battery elements, are already considered the biggest mistake the sport has made in recent times. Whenever they are consigned to the scrapheap, the foremost memories will be of Sunday's two formation laps in the rain.
"LOL, look at this," was all a laughing Max Verstappen could say over the radio as his Red Bull approached a handful of cars whose engines had simply shut down. His car had already done the same at the front of the pack a couple of minutes earlier. "Horrible," said reigning world champion Lando Norris after the race. "It just proves that we shouldn't have any of that stuff on the electronic side". George Russell, who also dealt with a heartbreaking late engine failure which has all but handed Mercedes teammate Kimi Antonelli the 2026 championship, said, "The whole day was a bit of a faff. It didn't feel very F1 today". Carlos Sainz summed up the situation best of all: "I think F1 needs to have a hard look at themselves and see how we ended up in this situation."
The first attempt at starting the race -- already delayed 40 minutes, because these F1 cars cannot race in extremely wet conditions -- was aborted, with another wait to allow the 11 teams to download and implement a software update from the governing FIA. Several corners into the first formation lap, cars encountered a software bug in the algorithms dictating F1's new complicated engines. During rain, engine modes run at a maximum deployment of 250 kilowatts in certain sectors, down from 350kW in dry conditions. Once Verstappen dropped below 50 km/h, the algorithms had problems: the MGU-K no longer kicked in to feed power into his low-revving engine.
Source: ESPN General · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing