Racing
© Jonathan Borba
The FIA intends to keep Formula 1’s extra five-second pre-start warning through 2027, with single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis saying the measure introduced for 2026 has become an established part of the starting procedure rather than a temporary safety fix.
Tombazis told a select group of media including Autosport that “the five seconds are an established process now” and that he sees no reason for it to change within the current regulation cycle. He said the logic is no longer mainly about safety, but about giving drivers a proper chance to prepare when cars arrive on the grid at slightly different times.
That marks a shift from the measure’s original purpose. The extra five seconds were added after pre-season testing in Bahrain exposed problems with race starts, raising concern about cars being unable to launch cleanly from the grid.
The FIA’s main safety response now sits elsewhere. After Liam Lawson made an extremely slow start in the Melbourne season opener and Franco Colapinto had to take heavy avoiding action to miss him, the governing body developed a low-power start detection system that automatically deploys the MGU-K if a car accelerates abnormally slowly. The aim is to guarantee a minimum level of acceleration and reduce the risk of a rear-end collision or a stalled car on the grid.
Tombazis said that electrical intervention is the part of the process that is truly safety-related. He added that it is deliberately limited in what it can do: it can turn “a disastrous start” into “a bad one, but not a good one.”
The FIA has been working on that emergency recovery measure since discussions around the Miami package in late April, according to Tombazis, as part of a broader push to improve start-line safety after the Melbourne incident.
The result is that F1 is set to carry both systems into 2027: the five-second pre-start warning as the standard preparation step before the lights sequence, and the automatic MGU-K assistance as a backstop against dangerously slow launches.