The enforced break in the Formula One schedule, due to the war in the Middle East, was an opportunity for the FIA to act decisively and at least paper over some of the cracks the all-new 50/50 hybrid engines have created.

There have been several meetings since the Japanese Grand Prix with a variety of expertise present to discuss how to fix the farce fans are watching on track. A persistent critique of the new rules for racing this season is that it’s too much like Mario Kart and a far cry from the raw, mechanical challenge that defines the pinnacle of motorsport.

Yet in Mario Kart, when a car under the super electrical mushroom boost flies past another and into the barrier, there’s little penalty to pay. The driver doesn’t “die,” and even if he does in the world of video games, he simply respawns, ready for the next lap of racing chaos.

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Fans are furious with those governing of the sport for allowing qualifying to become some laboratory-style energy management exercise rather than the push-to-the-very-limit track session it has been for over 75 years.

A small effort was made for the Japanese Grand Prix to mitigate this by reducing the total amount of energy available to the drivers; a reduction from 9 MJ to 8 MJ was thought to fix the problem. But it didn’t.

World champion Lando Norris remarkably revealed his car decided to overtake a rival without his permission. The incident highlighted huge issues with new, “self-learning” power units that operate independently of the driver, causing “yo-yo” racing where cars automatically pass and are then instantly re-passed.

What crisis? In the same event, Ollie Bearman suffered a horrifying crash due to the new rules which allow one driver to be on maximum boost while another has run out of electrical energy. The Haas driver was flat out on the boost on the right-hander approaching the Spoon Curve, only to happen upon the dawdling Alpine which loomed in the foreground like a stationary object, a victim of its own depleted cells. Franco Colapinto had run out of electrical power.

This forced the British driver to take evasive action, which ended with a massive 50g impact and a wrecked F1 car in the barrier. Fortunately, despite limping away from the scene of the smash, Bearman suffered no broken bones.

Despite calls for radical changes to the new engines, where the power output is split 50/50 between the electrical component and the internal combustion engine, the FIA is choosing to bury its collective head in the sand.

In an interview with The Guardian this week, the organisation’s chief of day-to-day affairs, Nikolas Tombazis, described the state of affairs as follows: “We are not discussing a complete rewrite of the rules. We believe that the patient is not in intensive care. The patient only needs a couple of apples a day, not to undergo open-heart surgery.”

So that’s the fix for Ollie and the Haas team: ‘Eat more fruit, lads and lasses.’ This is clearly the solution to prevent Lando Norris’ car taking control from its driver—maybe some “super fruit” blueberries would help. The FIA has no idea of the rising anger among F1 fans at the fact their sport is in ruins.

TV viewing numbers have collapsed in a number of European heartlands, with Spain and France losing around 50% of their viewers year-on-year for the Japanese Grand Prix.

Alarm bells should be resounding around the Place de la Concorde, luxury Paris home of the FIA, that daily, fans are posting comments such as: “I think I will sit the Miami weekend out. I’m kind of curious to see Monaco since it’s the type of Formula E track that the 2026 cars are much better suited for. But this awful generation of cars has made me realize what I like about F1: drivers fighting machines on the edge of adhesion. I have been watching F1 for 20 years—and I think I’m about to quit!” said Matt Growcoot.

Challenged with huge decisions, it now appears the FIA will drip out a series of rule tweaks—presumably nutrition-based—for the coming races. Reflecting the complacent institutional F1 attitudes, Alan Permane, the boss of Racing Bulls, believes changes should be small and incremental.

“I think that we will have a particularly tough time going to Miami with it being a sprint, because there’s really little time to test anything. So it may well be that we try some of the ones that are, let’s say, a little bit simpler and less risky in Miami, and then we try some more in Montreal,” said the British team boss.

But…. hang on a sec…. Montreal after Miami is also a Sprint weekend? So changes can’t be introduced there either can they?  Further, like Albert Park, it is a circuit which is energy deficient. In simple terms, that means there are not enough braking points to fully recharge the battery. So along the straights, the internal combustion engine will divert some of its power to becoming an electrical generator.

The cars will visibly slow way before the end of the back straight, and the difficult chicane before the start-finish line, with its fearsome ‘Wall of Champions,’ will become a piece of cake for drivers whose cars have lost 50% of their power. More Mario Kart racing incoming.

While the F1 independent news publishers have been calling out this farce since pre-season testing, the official media have been toeing the line set out by Stefano Domenicali, which is “give it time, it’ll be all right on the night.” Well, it isn’t, and it won’t be alright without drastic surgery, to use Tombazis’s metaphor.

After the Canadian Grand Prix, we then travel to Monaco, where any changes would be fairly invisible due to the super-slow nature of the tight and twisty street circuit. So before we trail any serious fixes for the unconscious patient, it will be mid-June at the Circuit de Catalunya. Really?

By then, fans may well have switched off for the season, bar the Italians who are all rooting for Kimi Antonelli to beat his experienced teammate, George Russell, in the Mercedes race to see who becomes world champion in 2026.

Alan Permane, the Racing Bulls boss, seems to have been fully assimilated into the FIA’s philosophy of incrementalism. He speaks of ‘striking a balance’ as if the sport isn’t currently teetering on a precipice. By suggesting that reducing the electrical ‘overtake boost’ might harm the spectacle, he misses the forest for the trees: fans don’t want a ‘spectacle’ manufactured by a CPU; they want the visceral uncertainty of a human being battling to remain in control of a racing machine.

“We need to be careful when we do that, that we are not taking away too much of the spectacle,” he explained. “One way to reduce closing speeds is, of course, to remove things like the boost, the overtake boost, and reduce things like the extra energy that’s available to the drivers when they’re within a second of the car in front. That will no doubt reduce those closing speeds, but it will also likely reduce overtaking as well. So we just need to be careful that we strike the right balance there.”

Overtaking has been reduced to a synthetic byproduct of software algorithms rather than a feat of racecraft. Fans do not want to watch the world champion battling at high speed with Lewis Hamilton and his car take the decision to make the pass on the Ferrari driver. This is not proper racing. So be it—let’s lose some overtakes.

Permane also questions the consequences of giving full control back to the drivers and the loss of the current high-speed spectacle. “I know people don’t like lift-and-coast, and don’t want to see any straight harvesting,” he said. “But the way to eliminate that is to give us much less energy, which will make the cars slower.”

He then added: “I don’t think we want to make the cars significantly slower. We certainly don’t want to make corners that are now high-speed corners—and are really challenging and on the edge—too easy. So I think we need to be careful on that. And I know they [the FIA] are being careful on that.”

What convoluted nonsense. 99.9% of the fans watch F1 on TV. They cannot tell whether the cars are doing 220 kph or 200 kph; what they can discern is whether the racing is aggressive and tough. Millions of people watch club racing week in and week out at speeds far slower than F1, but it’s the challenge for the drivers they enjoy.

F1 and the FIA need to get their house in order and quickly. Doing little or nothing until mid-June is just not acceptable. Maybe if the mainstream media start to reflect the voice of the fans, something will change. Yet for now, F1 lives in its self-deluded bubble, arguing it will all work out in the end.