FIA Admits Human Error Gave Some Cars Extra Power in Singapore Sprint Qualifying

For the second weekend in a row, Formula 1’s systems failed in public, and this time the governing body has put its own hands up. The FIA admitted after Singapore sprint qualifying on Friday that a human error in Race Control meant Overtake Mode was wrongly unavailable after the SQ1 red flag, then switched on for 27 seconds before being turned off again, GrandPrix247 reports. Some cars ran the decisive segment with extra electric power and some did not, and the session was allowed to stand.

What did Race Control actually do wrong?

Two separate things went wrong in one session, and the FIA’s statement deals with the more serious one. After Sergio Perez crashed his Cadillac and brought out the red flag with a little over six minutes of SQ1 left, PlanetF1 reports, Overtake Mode was not available when the session restarted. When that was noticed, it was activated, left on for a period of 27 seconds, and deactivated again, the FIA said.

The consequence is built into the timing. Twenty-seven seconds is long enough for a car in the right part of Marina Bay to run a sector, or reach a deployment zone, with the extra energy, and far too short for the whole field to share it. The FIA accepted that the error affected the performance of certain cars depending on the timing of their run and their position around the lap, and stressed that SQ2 and SQ3 were unaffected. It did not name the winners or the losers of its own mistake.

How much power are we actually talking about?

Enough to decide an elimination. Overtake Mode is the 2026 regulations’ additional electrical deployment, worth a further 0.5 megajoules of energy over a lap, PlanetF1 reports, a system related to but broader than the old DRS overtaking aid because it changes the car’s power delivery rather than its drag. Sainz put a number on the split from the receiving end: about half the cars, by his estimate, did the lap with an engine roughly half a second quicker than the other half.

His own lap is the case study. Sainz was slowest in SQ1, fighting brake trouble that had already forced a change after practice, and said the lap was run with less power than any other lap of his weekend, PlanetF1 reports. Whether the missing deployment alone explains last place is not provable from outside, and Sainz did not claim it was. His argument is that nobody should have to prove it: a qualifying segment in which the cars were not running the same specification is not a contest that can be audited afterwards.

Why is the Malaysia comparison the heart of the row?

Because the FIA has already shown it will intervene when its systems distort a session, and a week ago it did. The previous round in Malaysia was stopped on the formation lap by a power-unit software failure, an episode this desk covered when the FIA published its Sepang review, and the handling of that weekend’s restart order turned on sporting fairness. Sainz’s complaint, reported by PlanetF1 and MotorBiscuit, is that the principle was applied there and not here, and that the difference looks like it depends on who was eliminated.

The Singapore weekend now has three separate systems stories running at once: the timing fault in the same SQ1 session, in which lap times briefly stopped registering and SQ2 was delayed, Crash.net reports; this Overtake Mode error; and the stewards’ yellow-flag verdict that let Max Verstappen keep the sprint pole he won in that same qualifying hour. Verstappen’s pole itself is not tainted by the power error, since SQ3 was unaffected, but the grid behind him was partly written in a segment the FIA now says was unequal.

What can actually be done about it now?

Very little that is clean, which is the point Sainz is making. PlanetF1 reports the FIA conceded fault and expects protests. But SQ1’s eliminated drivers cannot be given their laps back at equal power, and promoting them would punish drivers who advanced in a segment the FIA also says produced correct timings once its other fault was fixed. Every available remedy is a fresh judgment layered on top of the error.

That leaves the sprint on Saturday starting from a grid whose first cut was made under unequal power, with George Russell’s separate engine penalty already reshaping Sunday’s race behind it. The longer damage is institutional: two consecutive weekends of admitted systems failure, one software and one human, in the first season of a complicated new power formula. The FIA fixed Malaysia’s configuration question in a published review. Singapore’s question is harder, because it is not about a setting. It is about whether a result produced by an admitted error should count simply because correcting it is inconvenient.

What happens next?

The sprint runs on Saturday and the Grand Prix on Sunday, and any protest will have to be lodged and heard inside that timetable. Watch for Williams or another eliminated team to formalise Sainz’s complaint, for the FIA to publish which cars held the mode during the 27 seconds, if it can, and for Race Control’s procedures around red-flag restarts to be rewritten in public, as they were after Sepang. A championship being decided by hundredths chased across a season cannot afford a stopwatch, or a power switch, that only works for half the field at a time.