“Matter of time” warning issued as F1 drivers fear major start shunt

It is just a “matter of time” before a “massive shunt” happens due to Formula 1’s new race starting procedure, Sergio Perez has warned.

Concerns about race starts were a hot topic even before Franco Colapinto miraculously managed to narrowly-avoid hitting Liam Lawson at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix.

Last weekend’s F1 2026 season-opener only further highlighted fears expressed by drivers, with Lawson slow to leave the grid due to having no battery power in his Racing Bulls.

Lightning-fast reactions from Colapinto avoided a serious crash, but Perez reckons F1 is playing with fire.

“It's a shame that I say, but it's just a matter of time before a massive shunt happens,” the Cadillac driver told media including Crash.net.

“These power units are very difficult to start. You can have a good start or you can have a bad start, by so many different factors.

“You can get anti-stalled, like what happened to Lawson, and then that can be very, very dangerous, because the speeds that you end up doing within two to three seconds are extremes.

“So it's a difficult one, because I don't know what you can do in that regard. It's just these new engines are very difficult to start.”

Lawson was full of praise for Colapinto, saying it was “very impressive from his side to avoid it”.

"He had very good reactions and I was very lucky,” Lawson added. “I honestly at that point had braced already in the car because I was looking in my mirror and I saw his car on my left when he was close to me and I was sure he was going to hit me and then all of a sudden he came by me on the right.

"He did a very good job to avoid that and obviously we need to do everything we can to make sure we don't have the same issues off the start because it cost us the race.

"If it keeps going on like this, yeah, what happened on the weekend is so easy to happen. If Franco hadn't done a very good job of avoiding it, that would have been a really big crash.

"At the moment it is quite dangerous, but in terms of the decision-making, we're not part of that, so we'll obviously give our opinions on what we're feeling inside the car but it's up to the FIA. If they want to change something, then they will.”

Explaining the near-miss from his side, Alpine’s Colapinto said: “When I started to see the onboards after the race, it was even closer than what I thought, even more sketchy.

“Generally it's things that we were expecting that would happen and things that we knew that were there and issues that everyone was getting, every team.

“We talked in many different situations that these things were going to be a thing to look at and possible dangerous situations. It happened. Luckily I could manage to escape from it and manage to do the whole race.”

With drivers growing increasingly worried about safety, there have been calls for F1’s governing body the FIA to make rule changes.