F1 explosion can’t be ignored in big rules verdict; why not to panic over Piastri — Talking Pts

WATCH: Drivers terrified as shocking Aus GP near-miss you didn’t see exposes clear F1 problem

RUSSELL’S STARS FINALLY ALIGN

George Russell experienced none of those Mercedes glory years first-hand. After an extended Williams apprenticeship, he moved up to Mercedes in 2022, at the beginning of the ground-effect era, and was at the coalface of four campaigns of struggle.

The Mercedes he knew was one that could never wrap its head around the regulation.

In 2026, though, he’s getting the comeback tour.

He was able to take pole position easily, with teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli locking out the front row despite a very scrappy weekend.

Victory was likewise ultimately straightforward — and Antonelli again backed him despite dropping down the order off the line.

The British and German national anthems played in succession on the podium. Certainly that’s a familiar feeling to anyone in Formula 1 with a memory spanning beyond the turn of the decade.

“Thank you so much of the whole team, because it’s been a long time coming to have this car beneath us,” Russell enthused.

The car, at its first outing, rocketed him to top spot in the drivers championship for the first time in his career.

It’s the position Russell has long felt he deserves. After having honed his craft as a victory outsider and having executed arguably the least error-prone season of any driver last year, the Briton is undeniably of championship calibre.

He now has the car to prove it — and perhaps to prove it emphatically.

Russell, though, is determined to keep a lid on expectations after the first round of a long campaign.

“We’re all here now to fight for a world championship, and that’s what we’ve been working so hard towards,” he said. “If we want to do that, we still need to raise our game, because there were a lot of areas today that we underachieved, mainly around the race start, having the battery in the right place, and we were lucky not to come worse off.”

But his post-race team radio certainly made his feelings clear.

“I like this car,” he said. “I like this engine.”

FERRARI IS BACK. THAT’S GOOD AND BAD

Leclerc’s incredulity at being told by Russell that, actually, the Ferrari car isn’t slow tells us plenty about how Ferrari reflects on its first weekend of the season.

For the positive takeaways from the race — and there genuinely a good few — the 0.8-second qualifying deficit can’t be ignored.

That said, with the additional evidence of the grand prix, we can make some more informed conclusions.

Ferrari, like McLaren, failed to make a step in Q3 that would have reduced qualifying deficit to a more respectable figure, likely because of the cooling track temperature.

Given gaps tend to shrink in race conditions, Ferrari’s competitiveness in the first stint in particular appears to back up the idea that even if the Scuderia isn’t Mercedes’s equal, it’s in the ballpark at this circuit.

It’s for that reason the race is heartening.

All the hype around Ferrari’s starts was delivered upon. Leclerc was sublime off the line and threaded himself perfectly between Russell and Isack Hadjar to take the lead into the first turn. Lewis Hamilton almost followed him but for a slightly wide moment at turn 1, but he was ably through to third on the tail of the lead battle by the end of the opening lap.

From there the crowd was treated to a demonstration of racing under the new rules, with Leclerc and Russell attempting to outwit each other with their use of the boost button — the give-it-everything switch that send all 750 kilowatts to the rear axle at once.

The lead changed hands seven times in the opening nine laps — remarkable at one of the circuits where overtaking is traditionally difficult.

‘Very pleased’ are maybe big words, but I am positively surprised for sure,” Leclerc said. “We are still very, very far off the Mercedes in qualifying; in the race, though, we seem to be closer.”

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Leclerc was the winner of the skirmish, but all hope of a shock victory evaporated when Isack Hadjar’s Red Bull Racing car came to a smoking stop on lap 11.

Both Mercedes drivers pitted on the following lap. Ferrari stayed out and had to stop later, under green-flag conditions, putting them out of contention.

“I definitely thought, when I saw two Mercedes going, one ahead of me, one behind me, we should have come in or at least one of us should have come in and covered,” Hamilton said. “We’ll have a look and see what we’ve got there.”

Ferrari argued that it thought it was too early to pit and stick to the faster one-stop strategy.

“I don’t regret it,” Leclerc said. “It was a wanted choice, a wanted and conscious choice.

“We knew that there were very high chances that this was not going to be the only VSC of the race, and so we thought that it was better for us to maybe wait for another one.

“That’s always a gamble of course.”

It was lineball whether Hamilton was in position to capitalise on Valtteri Bottas’s virtual safety car on lap 18 before race control closed the pit lane, abut that stands as a second potentially missed opportunity.

Both drivers insisted that Mercedes had unmatchable pace once in clear air and that third and fourth was therefore the best possible result — after all, a driver saves five seconds pitting behind a virtual safety car, and Leclerc finished 15 seconds behind Russell and 12 seconds behind Antonelli.

But Ferrari had been successfully denying Mercedes that clear air in the first stint. A more astute strategy — more bravery, like Mercedes demonstrated by double-stacking Russell and Antonelli immediately — could have put at least second place on the table.

The competitive picture could change, and Ferrari could develop its way into a stronger position in terms of pace, but it’ll mean little if it doesn’t execute.

AUSTRALIA CURSE STRIKES AGAIN FOR PIASTRI HOME HEARTBREAK

The sound of 137,869 hearts breaking is virtually indistinguishable from the sound of a Formula 1 car crunching against the cement barriers at the exit of turn 4.

The air around Albert Park seemingly evaporated in an instant, the crowd stunned into silence, as the realisation dawned that Oscar Piastri was out of the race before it had even begun.

The home hero had got throttle-happy on the kerbs, spinning across the road and into the barriers. He accepted responsibility, albeit with the caveat that the car had behaved unexpectedly when he put his foot down.

“The first thing I want to stress is there is certainly a big element of it that was me,” he said.

“At the same time, I had about 100 kilowatts extra power that I didn’t expect, which is not insignificant.

“I think the difficult part to take with that is everything was working normally. It’s just a function of how the engines have to work with the rules.”

The result was the first Australian Grand Prix since 2001 without a local driver on the grid, the 2025 championship becoming just another heartbroken spectator as the lights went out.

“I’m just very sorry for everyone that came out and wanted to support me,” he said. “It’s clearly not the way I wanted to start the year either. I can only apologise for it.”

It guaranteed Piastri a 25-point handicap in the championship race, though Lando Norris’s muted fifth place means the Australian lost only 10 points to his teammate.

The upside is that the scenario isn’t much different to the one he faced this time last year, when a spin off the road in the wet and a brief recovery put him 23 points adrift of Norris in the championship fight.

He rebounded mightily, however, to seize the title lead by round 5, the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

“It’s definitely a tough moment for him in front of the Australian crowd,” team boss Andrea Stella said. “But Oscar is a very tough guy mentally. He will use all this to get even more concentrated and determined starting from China.

“We will make sure that we all face this in a united way. We are a team in any situation that may involve anybody of our team.”

Of course the circumstances are different — McLaren was the undisputed number one last year, whereas in Melbourne the team was a distant third at best — but there’s no reason to doubt Piastri is any less tough just because of his repeated affliction by the dreaded Australian Grand Prix home curse.

MIXED REVIEWS ON NEW FORMULA AFTER FIRST RACE

A record 483,985 people shuffled through the Albert Park gates to see the first weekend of Formula 1’s new era.

Certainly the Sunday crowd was treated to plenty of action, particularly in the first half of the race. Formula 1 reported 120 overtakes of the race, up from 45 last year.

But reviews were mixed among the drivers, many of whom felt the push-to-pass battery-generated overtakes were artificial and random.

“I do care about it, I do love racing, and I want it to be better than this,” said Verstappen who said he was at times two seconds a lap faster than cars just because of different states of charge or energy management. “We can only take so much.”

Norris said on Saturday that F1 has gone from the “best cars ever made” to “probably the worst”, and he doubled down on that position after the race.

“Even worse,” said the reigning world champion. “It’s just not as fun as last year.

“It’s very artificial depending on what the power unit decides to do and randomly does at times.

“You just get overtaken by five cars or you can just do nothing about it sometimes. It’s not for me.”

Carlos Sainz described the straight-line mode — the active aerodynamics that reduce drag on the straights — was dangerous in race conditions but lamented that power units wouldn’t have enough energy without it, describing it as a flawed formula.

Leclerc was more cautious in his perspective.

“It will definitely change the way we go about racing and overtaking,” he said. “Before, it was more about who is the bravest at braking the latest. Maybe now there’s a bit more of a strategic mind behind every move.

“It’s a different way to go about racing for sure.”

Russell has been a lone voice of approval this weekend — perhaps not surprising given he won the race from pole — but he urged some perspective among his peers.

“Everyone’s very quick to criticise things,” he said. “When we’ve had the ‘best’ cars and the least tyre degradation and when we’ve been happiest, everyone moans the racing is rubbish.

“Now drivers aren’t perfectly happy and everyone said it was an amazing race.

“You can’t have it all, and I think we should just give it a chance and see after a few more races.”

Mercedes boss Wolff, though, cut through the noise by offering a different perspective.

“The boost and the overtake modes made it actually quite interesting to watch — and on a track that is particularly difficult for energy,” he said.

“I didn’t hear any one of the drivers speaking particularly good of the last cars, saying they were the best car. We tend to be very nostalgic looking at past events.

“One perspective is the view of the drivers, which is an important perspective.

“But Stefano [Demonicali, F1 CEO] would say that the single matrix that matters to him is whether the fans like it. That is what we need to look at.”

We haven’t heard the end of this story.

For now, though, it’s over to you.