Sainz’s remarks are a reference to the wider debate about this year’s new engine regulations, which have a near 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical power.
The engines are fundamentally energy starved, which has led to drivers feeling the cars behave in a counter-intuitive way, and have reduced the impact of driver skill.
The engines have about 1,000bhp on full power, but only 540bhp when the batteries run out.
Because of the way the regulations have been arranged, the batteries are fully deploying and recharging several times a lap. And a series of highly complex restrictions have been introduced relating to the operations of the engine to try to alleviate some of the issues that have arisen.
One of those is what triggered the problem in Malaysia – the total electrical power is reduced from 350kW (470bhp) to 250kW (335bhp) in the wet.
One of the idiosyncrasies of the rules is that the cars slow down at the end of straights to recharge batteries, and many challenging fast corners have been neutered because they are being used as what two-time champion Fernando Alonso has described as “charging stations for the car”.
The 50-50 split was decided upon five or six years ago, at a time when road-car manufacturers were pushing electrification.
The rules succeeded in attracting Audi and Ford into F1, and persuading Honda to reverse a plan to quit.
But teams have been warning the FIA since at least 2023 that issues with energy management would arise in the context of the way the rules have been formulated.
The 50-50-split in itself is not the key issue – it’s the lack of means to recover sufficient energy to have the engines running at full power for longer.
But the 50-50 split was not addressed in the context of the current energy recovery restrictions until just before the start of this year, when it became apparent how significant the impact of the engines would be.
Since the cars began to run this year, a series of rule changes have been introduced to address the issues.
This year, the total amount of recovery allowed is altered depending on how energy starved a circuit is.
The energy split will become 60-40 in favour of internal combustion in two steps by 2028.
And F1 bosses and engine suppliers are already working on finalising a new engine formula that will introduce power units that are never energy starved.
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem initially pushed for naturally aspirated V8s with no hybrid at all.
But the current likeliest solution is a V8 turbo with somewhere in the region of 15-25% electrical power, which will mostly be used as a simple push-to-pass system.
