2026's scariest crash and Antonelli's win - Our verdict on F1's Japanese GP

Formula 1 2026's first scary crash, another Kimi Antonelli victory, Oscar Piastri's potential lost victory and George Russell's frustration.

Here's what our team thinks of F1's Japanese Grand Prix...

F1 must listen to its 2026 critics

Ben Anderson

F1 should start listening a bit more to what the likes of Fernando Alonso and Andrea Stella have been saying about these new regulations.

I realise Alonso comes off as a bit of a grumpy old man when he calls it “the battery world championship”, but he’s generally right in what he says. This overpowers the aerodynamics and creates conditions for cars to follow closely and overtake, but it also has unintended consequences.

One of these is something McLaren’s Stella has been warning about since pre-season: excessive closing speeds that could lead to a massive accident. 

Lando Norris also said this was an accident waiting to happen back in Melbourne, and it’s only taken three races for Ollie Bearman to have a massive crash (50G impact according to Haas) - primarily as a result of dangerous closing speeds caused by the car ahead suddenly running out of electrical energy.

This is one of the reasons I think we’re seeing so many overtakes go uncontested in 2026. It’s not only because clipping leaves you powerless because of the way deployment and harvesting works - TV broadcasters, stop telling me these moves are ‘brave’ and ‘committed’, they are not! - I think it’s also because accurately judging how to defend safely when the speed differentials are often so massive is quite difficult.

Franco Colapinto’s mistake, if he made one (and the stewards felt not), was making the sort of defensive move through the kink that would have worked fine in pre-2026 versions of F1. 

But in this new Mario Kart F1, as Esteban Ocon said pre-season, you have to forget everything you learned since karting and begin again.

The FIA must act swiftly

Gary Anderson

Bearman’s accident just shows what can happen when a car suddenly slows in front of you because of a problem or in this case, probably super clipping.

Up to now, we have been lucky with exciting - sorry 'entertaining' - racing, but this must be a lesson for the powers to be that we are in a potentially difficult place.

There is time before the next race to put all the wrongs right, so I urge the FIA to react and issue whatever changes they are going to implement quickly to give the teams time to get their heads around it all before Miami.

The tit for tat overtakes into the final chicane and then down the front straight also highlights that this is not racing as such, it’s simply about being on the right place with enough battery power when the car you are racing with hasn’t got equivalent power. The action through Turn 1 into Turn 2 was excellent, but a touch of wheels at that speed and we will have an aeroplane accident.

In reality, Kimi Antonelli dominated the weekend, pole position, fastest lap and the win shows he was on it from the get-go. Yes, a poor start compromised his early part of the race when he fell to sixth, but the timing of the safety car for Bearman’s accident rectified that.

I don’t thing Russell can complain to much, overall at Suzuka he was the second driver at Mercedes.

As for Piastri, it’s his first 2026 grand prix and more importantly, grand prix start of 2026 so making the most of the start against the start domination of both Ferraris so far this year must have felt good. Could he have won the race? Possibly, but then again, as he says, McLaren still isn't a match for Mercedes.

Flawed rules further exposed

Jack Benyon

In good news for the neutral, Suzuka showed Mercedes isn’t going to win every race this year, or at least, its advantage isn’t as big as the first two races and testing might have told us.

In bad news, these rules are trash and Suzuka proved it even further.

The race was only really interesting because of a safety car that was just a result of fortune for improving the spectacle. 

Everything else in this race tortured my soul, to paraphrase Norris.

The overtakes we saw were almost entirely created by varying levels of battery deployment and big differences in top speed. “Artificial” overtakes, as Colapinto called them. Or because people deployed in different places and took back positions they had lost and vice versa. Some of F1's best corners were reduced to power banks recharging these energy-thirsty monsters.

It’s basically just spreadsheet racing with the talents of the world’s best drivers and teams wasted on the pursuit of a flawed system that never should have been allowed to happen. 

Antonelli was lucky but well deserving

Edd Straw

Antonelli's Chinese Grand Prix win, well-executed as it was, had an element of good fortune thanks to Russell's problem in Q3. But in Japan, it was unequivocal - he was the faster Mercedes driver. 

Yes, Russell made a set-up error in qualifying, but throughout practice, Antonelli had the edge. Partly, that seemed to be down to being better tuned-in to how to optimise his driving style for deployment benefit, which is something Russell had previously had the advantage in. Other than his bad start, which he admitted after the race he needs to work on, Antonelli drove superbly. Yes, the safety car handed him track position over Piastri, but even before the safety car intervened, he was in third and closing on Russell.

This might well prove to be the weekend when Antonelli proved he will be a big title threat to Russell, which he will emphatically be if he continues to operate at this level. 

Safety car spoiled good test of 2026's merits

Scott Mitchell-Malm

It's the first time F1 2026 has given me a feeling of old - I found myself cursing the timing of a safety car spoiling an interesting race. 

I suppose there's something comforting about that kind of familiarity. But it's a real shame we couldn't see how the straight fight between Piastri, Russell and a recovering Antonelli would play out.

That could have been the moment to judge F1 2026 more properly on its merits or flaws - however it went. Instead, I don't really think the engine rules were particularly problematic in terms of the pure spectacle offered – apart from some of the pointless overtakes back-and-forth, which don't move me at all, and need to mean something more. 

It wasn't a great race – the front order was fairly condensed, overtaking was difficult – and nobody really wanted to overtake because doing so in the easiest place, 130R into the chicane, was murder on the battery and would leave a driver a sitting duck on the start-finish straight. 

Last year's Japanese GP was a very stagnant affair too. This was just a different flavour – replace DRS trains with battery conservation trains. Of course, that doesn't mean anyone's obliged to like it. 

There are clearly flaws still with the racing in these cars (that's before we even get to the safety aspect), even if they can follow more closely and run wheel-to-wheel a bit more. 

But if the race that was evolving in the first stint got to play out in full, I think I could have quite enjoyed it. 

A five-week gap is a gift F1 must use

Josh Suttill

F1's unavoidably going to lose a chunk of revenue from zero racing in the next five weeks, but what it's losing there, it can gain in having some proper time to fix 2026's biggest flaws.

There have to be two key weaknesses at the top of the list for change - the complete erosion of the challenge of on-edge qualifying and the dangerous closing speeds that were already an accident waiting to happen (which has now predictably happened).

F1 must do everything necessary to fix those, even if that means briefly relaxing testing rules to help F1 teams trial solutions. This is a highly unusual gift of a gap to negate the flaws of what, I genuinely believe, can be a really exciting product in 2026.

I refuse to believe this formula is doomed when there have been such promising glimmers among the flaws.

Russell is feeling the heat

Eden Hannigan

Suzuka provided a very strange race from start to finish. There were some highlights and also the lowlights - with Bearman’s crash providing damning evidence of what everyone expected to happen after pre-season testing.

However, the thing that struck me the most from the whole race was the slightly uncharacteristic demeanour of Russell in the Mercedes.  

Of course, Russell was undeniably unlucky with the safety car, but from his irritation over the radio, you’d have thought he was the only one. Piastri arguably lost a race victory, and even Leclerc’s podium chances were thrown into doubt, so he was definitely not the biggest loser - even if he was by far the most vocal about it. 

To me, this wasn’t necessarily just about the safety car though. Instead, I think it could be that Russell is feeling the pressure coming from Antonelli’s two successive victories.

He was never happy to play second fiddle to Lewis Hamilton, so he’d be even less enthused with losing to a 19-year-old, no matter how fast or talented he is. And losing the championship lead is sure to sting, especially now that Antonelli is delivering on all those expectations from his sensational junior career.