FIA signs off 2026 F1 shake-up with sprint fix and rare rule reprieve

Under the harsh white lights of a conference hall in Tashkent, while mechanics back at the factories ran 2026 mule cars late into the night, Formula 1’s next era quietly wrote another chapter. The FIA’s World Motor Sport Council has pushed through a final round of tweaks to the 2026 rulebook, aimed squarely at two long-running pain points: sprint weekends that leave teams blind, and strict operational limits that risked choking the debut of radically new cars.

BBC Sport has already called the incoming package “the biggest change in F1 for years - if not ever,” with lighter, narrower cars and near 50-50 hybrid power reshaping how drivers race. Now the governing body has tuned the sporting side of the equation to match the technical revolution.

The headline move is a long-awaited sprint fix. From 2026, the race director will be able to extend the sole free practice session on sprint weekends if a red flag chews up too much time. The FIA’s summary of the World Motor Sport Council decisions put it bluntly:

"An allowance has been made for FP1 at a sprint event to be extended following a red flag, to ensure that competitors are afforded relevant practice time."

— FIA statement, via World Motor Sport Council report

Motorsport.com reports that the extension will apply when a stoppage hits before the 45-minute mark, allowing the session to run long so teams still get a full hour of running. After the red-flag-disrupted FP1s at Miami and Austin in 2025, when cars sat silent in the pit lane while the clock ticked down, this is the FIA’s answer to a common paddock complaint: drivers were being hurled into parc fermé and a sprint race with barely any chance to feel the car.

Tyre rules around the sprint are also being tightened. Since 2024, Sprint Qualifying has mandated dry-tyre choices – mediums for SQ1 and SQ2, softs for SQ3. The FIA has now confirmed that those “dry tyre limitations will no longer be removed when a period of Sprint Qualifying is declared wet,” meaning teams will no longer gain extra freedom on compound choice simply because the session briefly flips to “wet” status. The aim is consistency and to close off another route to gaming the system.

Running these new-generation cars is going to be hard enough. To “ensure teams can operate the new generation of cars effectively,” as the FIA put it in wording reported by RaceFans, the operational personnel limit at the circuit will rise from 58 to 60 for 2026. It’s a tiny number on paper, but in a cost-cap era where every extra set of hands on the timing wall or in the garage matters, it’s a rare loosening of F1’s increasingly tight belt – and explicitly a one-season reprieve.

The same goes for winter testing. Recent seasons have given teams just a single pre-season test; in 2026 they’ll get three separate outings with their all-new machinery. According to RaceFans and GPblog, the schedule will feature a behind-closed-doors test at Barcelona in late January, followed by two three-day tests in Bahrain in February. From 2027, the FIA and teams have already agreed to snap back to a single test, a clear signal that this extra mileage is a transitional concession, not a permanent reset.

There are quieter, but important, housekeeping changes too. The FIA has simplified race suspension and restart procedures, responding to the confusion that sometimes swirled around red-flag restarts. Rules for out-of-competition tyre testing have been updated so that Pirelli and the teams can work with 2026-spec cars, and driver-adjustable bodywork – the new straight-line and cornering modes that will replace traditional DRS – has had its usage more tightly defined to match the technical regulations.

All of this now sits inside a restructured rulebook. The 2026 F1 regulations are split into six sections – from a new general Section A to separate sporting, technical, financial and operational books – designed, in the FIA’s words, to “avoid duplications or contradictions.” It is bureaucratic, but it matters: teams live in the grey areas, and the governing body is trying to switch on a brighter light.

"The new technical regulations we have discussed and approved within this Council will deliver safe, sustainable, and thrilling racing."

— Mohammed Ben Sulayem, speaking to FIA.com

The question hanging in the air, like the tang of hot brakes over a packed grandstand, is whether these sporting tweaks will be enough to keep the racing pure amid upheaval. Six sprint weekends in 2026 – at venues including Shanghai, Miami, Montreal, Zandvoort, Silverstone and Singapore – mean the new rules will be stress-tested in wildly different conditions.

For engineers, the extra staff and testing days are a sliver of breathing space in the most complex reset they have ever faced. For drivers, the prospect of a full, uninterrupted hour of practice before plunging into a sprint should make those first laps a little less like stepping into the unknown. And for fans, the hope is simple: that when the lights go out on the first 2026 sprint, what we see is less about loopholes and more about raw, hard racing in F1’s new age.