How F1 let a golden opportunity slip at Sepang

For much of this season, the subject of a wet race has been something of a running gag in the Formula 1 paddock, owing to one journalist taking every possible opportunity to ask questions about the likelihood of rain, even when the forecast is set fair.

Imagine their delight as the heavens finally opened above the Sepang circuit on race day, only for this glorious vindication to turn to ash as circumstances contrived to delay the start until long after the rain had begun to abate.

For years now, wet weather has been problematic for grand prix racing given the offset in performance between the intermediate and full-wet tyres. Indeed, you're more likely to encounter Lord Lucan riding Shergar down your local high street than you are to witness the blue-sidewalled wets being fitted to an F1 car. They may be able to displace the equivalent of a bathtub full of water with every revolution, but all that liquid has to go somewhere – in this case, into the faces of the drivers following. So if it's wet enough for full wets, chances are a red flag for poor visibility will follow, so drivers tend to stick it out on the intermediates and wait.

The latest generation of cars have added to the myriad of concerns about the wet, given they have less downforce than their predecessors and have walloping amounts of instantaneous electrical torque available on command – all delivered through narrower wheels than before, around which are wrapped tyres yet to be proven in these conditions. Pirelli hasn't been able to conduct as much testing of the new wet-weather family as it would have liked, and the belief has long been that the intermediate is too hard, hence the decision earlier in the season to turn the wick up on the blankets to 70C.

All of the above was proved academic in Malaysia when, after 40 minutes of faffing around waiting for the thunderstorm to pass, the cars took to the track for a formation lap behind the safety car and computer said no. Max Verstappen, followed by Lewis Hamilton and several others, found they had no power at all when they applied foot to throttle.

The confusion caused several drivers to inadvertently overtake one another while running behind the safety car – there's one overtaking statistic the commercial rights holder won't be broadcasting on its social channels – and for Hamilton and Liam Lawson to in effect go a lap down before the race had begun. It emerged that this farrago was initiated by a combination of low engine speeds and the wet-weather management settings baked into the cars' software, which had hitherto gone untested in real-world conditions.

Hamilton was unable to put the power down because of a software bug

Photo by: Joe Portlock / Getty Images

It was another unforeseen consequence of the fundamentally misconceived 2026 Formula 1 regulations, and the absurd layers of technical complexity required to prevent the cars running out of electrical power suddenly. Each track is in effect divided into sections where the electrical motor's output is capped for safety reasons. In the wet, the cars are limited to 250 kilowatts of electrical deployment, rather than the standard maximum of 350kW.

What appears to have happened is that through a combination of circumstances, including the slow engine speeds, as the cars went through Turn 9 a bug in the software caused their electrical motors to enter the 60-second lockout mode known as "continuous offset". With no electrical power available to offset the turbo lag inherent in these current cars, the drivers were left applying the throttle to no avail.

Fixing the bug led to another delay, of nearly an hour, as a patched version of the software was shared with the teams. 

"Testing stuff better avoids errors. That's obviously what people try to do. Sometimes things fall through the net and people learn, and you do a better job next time" Nikolas Tombazis

"The software was tested," insisted FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis after the race. "It just wasn't tested in those specific conditions. What caught us out was the fact that cars went in that very, very low speed which was not normally contemplated. 

"Now, when problems happen, people learn. Everything you do from the phone you're holding, everything is based on learning things and improving. So, of course, I'm not saying that no error happened. A bug is, by definition, an error. 

"Testing stuff better avoids errors. That's obviously what people try to do. Sometimes things fall through the net and people learn, and you do a better job next time."

Fair enough, but F1 2026 has proved a wearying reflection of the way modern life seems to exist in a state of permanent beta. I must tread delicately here, because any suggestion on Autosport's part that this year hasn't been the greatest-ever season of grand prix racing inevitably results in a tetchy missive from the commercial rights holder citing overtaking statistics, and fan satisfaction surveys with a small sample size from a self-selecting demographic. 

Fans, both at home and at the track, were denied a better spectacle

Photo by: Srinivasa Krishnan

And yet here we are, in October, still having to apply fresh sticking-plaster solutions to a concept that should have been laughed out of the room when first mooted. Still – overtaking is overtaking, and George Lucas says nobody cares how the drivers are driving. Got that? Good.

All this needless stupidity overshadowed an intriguing race, albeit one not held in properly wet conditions. When Sepang arrived on the F1 calendar in 1999 it was widely derided as the epitome of blandness, pointlessly wide and featuring too many slow corners. Now it's being hailed as a marvellous exemplar of "old school" racing.

Draw your own conclusions, perhaps both with and without the rose-tinted spectacles. Certainly the abrasive track surface played a part in generating some strategic variety which served up plenty of points of interest, although much of the top 10 still ended up in pace order. 

Back when this track hosted the Malaysian GP, ticket prices unaffordable for most locals made this one of the more poorly attended rounds. F1's global profile has changed since then and, given a different promoter – the Bahraini government – this and lower ticket prices brought more people through the gates than the authorities could handle when they tried to go home again at the end of the day.

In some ways that's a nice problem to have. So it was a welcome cameo for Sepang, one we would happily repeat – but with cars that actually function in the wet, please.

F1 can ask Verstappen for ideas on how to make things better...

Photo by: Liam Fabre