Racing
© Jonathan Borba
Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur says the FIA’s pre-season safety change to Formula 1’s 2026 start procedure unfairly cut into an advantage Ferrari had deliberately engineered into its power unit.
In an exclusive interview with The Race, Vasseur said Ferrari made a conscious trade-off when it developed its 2026 package, choosing a smaller turbo that would spool more quickly off the line after the removal of the MGU-H’s turbo-assisting electrical support. The cost was some top-end performance, but Ferrari judged the gain at lights-out to be more valuable. “The start is by far the biggest,” Vasseur said. “The trade-off is do we want to make one tenth of a second [in lap time] or do we want to lose five positions at the start? If you ask the engineers they say, okay, let’s have a good start.”
That choice gave Ferrari a clear edge when pre-season running exposed how difficult 2026 launches could be for much of the field. But after winter testing, the FIA introduced an extended pre-start procedure that added a five-second blue-light phase to give drivers extra time to spool their turbos before lights-out. Vasseur said Ferrari remained the best starter on the grid, but the intervention significantly reduced the scale of its advantage.
What especially frustrates Ferrari is that Vasseur says it had flagged the underlying issue to the FIA a year earlier. He said the concern was discussed in both the Sporting Advisory Committee and the Power Unit Advisory Committee, where the FIA’s position was that teams had to design their cars around the regulations, rather than expect the regulations to be adjusted around the cars.
Vasseur’s argument is that Ferrari did exactly that, then saw rivals push for a change once the competitive impact became obvious. “So then to have half of the grid, 40% of the grid complaining, that it's mega dangerous and so on,” he said. “Politically [it] was well played but not very fair.”
He did not dispute the FIA’s authority to act once safety became the basis for the change. “It was a decision based on safety grounds,” Vasseur said. “It's up to them. Even if everybody is against, they can decide.” But he still called the outcome “also a bit unfair on us,” because Ferrari had accepted a performance compromise specifically to be stronger in the launch phase.
The safety concern was not theoretical. Early 2026 starts had already shown how vulnerable some cars could be once the lights went out, and the Australian Grand Prix provided the clearest example when Liam Lawson was effectively stationary on the grid and Franco Colapinto’s Alpine missed him by only centimeters. Vasseur said the extra procedure was plainly helping avoid worse incidents, adding: “Imagine without the blue light, some cars would be still on the grid in China.”
That leaves Ferrari in an awkward position: still the benchmark when the lights go out, but no longer enjoying the full reward for a design decision it believes it got right before the rest of the field, and before the FIA stepped in to protect the start phase on safety grounds.