Fallout from first race since biggest rule changes - F1 Q&A

Mercedes secured a one-two at the Australian Grand Prix to usher in the new era of Formula 1.

George Russell took victory from pole ahead of team-mate Kimi Antonelli, with the Ferrari of Charles Leclerc completing the podium in third place.

It was the first race since the sport's biggest rule change, which means engines now have a near 50-50 split between internal combustion and electrical power.

World champion Lando Norris, who was fifth, called racing in 2026 "chaos", adding a "big accident" could happen because drivers are having to adapt to the new cars.

BBC F1 correspondent Andrew Benson answers your questions after the season opener in Melbourne.

It looked a pretty sobering weekend for McLaren to be so far off the pace after being the best car the last couple of years. Is it realistic to hope they can compete this year or is being best of the rest, as Lando Norris was in Melbourne, the best they will be able to do? - Tom

The fastest McLaren in Australia qualified more than 0.8 seconds slower than George Russell's pole time, and Norris finished the race 51 seconds behind Russell.

McLaren - world champions for the past two years - admitted their car was not quite on the level of the Mercedes. As team principal Andrea Stella put it: "When we look at the GPS overlays, we see that Mercedes is faster in some of the corners."

But the vast majority of McLaren's deficit was down to usage of the power unit and the energy recovery system.

It's clear the works team has more knowledge of how to get the most out of the engine, and it's equally clear that, with software systems so complex, more information and knowledge translates into a significant advantage on track.

In Melbourne, the Mercedes cars were able to deploy a significant amount more energy on the long run from Turn Six to Turn Nine, where much of the lap time was being lost by McLaren.

F1 rules dictate that manufacturers must supply engines of exactly the same specification to all their teams - works or customer. However, they don't say they have to share all the information about how to exploit them fully.

After the race, Stella came quite close to expressing frustration with the lack of information McLaren had from Mercedes and their engine company HPP.

"We remain a little puzzled by the difference we see in the data between the speed of our car and the speed of other cars using the same power unit," Stella said.

"The discussion with HPP about having more information has been going on for weeks because even in testing, we were pretty much going on track, run the car, look at the data, 'oh, that's what we have', good, now we react to what we have.

"That's not how you work in Formula 1. In F1, what happens on track, you simulate [beforehand]. You know what is happening. You know what you are programming. You know how the car is going to behave.

"You also have your plans as to how you evolve it that you have figured out before because you know what you are expecting from the car.

"This is the first time since we have been a customer team that we feel we are on the back foot even when it comes to the ability to predict how the car will behave and to anticipate how we can improve the car."

Mercedes' argument would be that, as a customer, McLaren can't expect as close a relationship with the engine department as the works team has.

McLaren would probably counter that they accept that, but they feel they should be a lot better informed than they are.

The McLaren car is believed to be a little overweight, so there is lap time to be gained there - even without aerodynamic upgrades, which are in the pipeline.

In theory, the knowledge of how to exploit the engine will come.

The key questions are how long it will take to learn it, and whether starting with extra knowledge is an advantage that keeps on giving.

The systems in the cars keep learning and improving. It's yet to be seen whether this is a virtuous circle that never stops, or whether Mercedes will reach diminishing returns and McLaren can catch up.

What is the prospect of Aston Martin getting a different engine, either this year or next? - Tim

The Aston Martin-Honda partnership has, without question, got off to a terrible start.

Team principal Adrian Newey has admitted the car is not where they want it to be, but said in Australia he believed in chassis terms it was just about a top-10 car, and the performance gap to the front could be closed this season.

The car's gearbox - Aston's first in-house design for more than a decade - is too heavy.

But the biggest issue is the Honda engine, which is significantly down on power and has vibrations that are creating shocking reliability.

Team owner Lawrence Stroll looked on the verge of tears during the final pre-season test in Bahrain, and Newey left nobody in any doubt about Honda's plight over the course of the Australian Grand Prix.

The fear is that, just as when it entered F1 with McLaren in 2015, Honda will take years to get anywhere close to competitiveness.

That certainly does not align with the timeline of their 44-year-old lead driver Fernando Alonso, but neither will it with those of Stroll and Newey.

Alonso has been here before, having spent three years in uncompetitive McLaren-Hondas from 2015-17, and will almost certainly be sceptical of Honda's ability to sort its engine out.

As he put it in Australia: "I have 100% faith that Honda will fix the problems because they did it already in the past. The thing is probably the time that is required, and it's not matching with my time in my career. That's something that remains to be seen."

Stroll will have considered dropping Honda and getting a different engine. But that would be a bad look for F1 and terrible for Honda. For now, the focus is on helping Honda get on track.

Former F1 driver Karun Chandhok made what I feel is a good suggestion - three separate categories of racing: Formula E with electric, Formula 1 with ICE [internal combustion engines] with sustainable fuels, and endurance racing with hybrids. Surely this solution makes the most sense and retains the purity of the sport, far more than this new era of confusing Mario Kart action? - Andy

The new engine regulations have certainly proved controversial, so - in the context of this question - it's worth going back in time and looking at how they have come to fruition.

Back at the start of this decade, F1 wanted a new set of rules that would attract new manufacturers into the sport. Particularly the VW Group - at the time Audi and Porsche.

At the time, the direction of travel of the road-car market seemed to be heading firmly in the direction of battery and - to a lesser extent - hybrid.

Audi wanted F1 to remove the MGU-H - the device that recovered energy from the turbo shaft - fearing it was too complex and they would never catch up if it was kept. And everyone wanted more electrification.

Hence the decision to go for a nominal 50-50 split between electric and internal combustion power and an engine with no MGU-H and a much more powerful MGU-K, recovering from the rear axle only.

This has succeeded in attracting not only Audi, but also Ford and General Motors, and it persuaded Honda to U-turn on its decision to quit. So the new rules were a massive success from that point of view.

But it became clear the new engines would leave the cars energy-starved. An obvious solution to that was to recover from the front axle as well as the rear.

But that was rejected by existing manufacturers, partly on the basis it might give Audi an advantage as they were doing that in the World Endurance Championship at the time.

To try to square this circle, a series of what are effectively band-aids were applied to the rules to try to make the cars work. The result is divisive, to say the least.

These rules will be in place until at least 2030, so it's not long before the sport will need to think of the next ones.

Perhaps people will come to accept these rules, although there is significant disquiet about them within F1 as a result of how far they have moved away from the purity of race-driving.

Meanwhile, the road-car market has changed.

The take-up of electrification has not been as strong as the manufacturers - and governments - hoped.

Car companies are reversing out of their plans to go fully electric. National infrastructures in many cases are not able to sustain mass-market electrification.

And carbon-neutral sustainable fuels, such as those used in F1 now, are an interesting potential future solution to CO2 emissions if they can be made affordable for the mass market.

As things stand, it would be no surprise if the next F1 engine was a hybrid with a more powerful internal combustion engine and a reduced electrical element - maybe 30%, say - and be run on sustainable fuels, as now.

But the formula still needs to be attractive to manufacturers, and most performance road cars these days have turbos. Some manufacturers definitely want turbos to stay, others are more ambivalent.

In terms of efficiency, a turbo engine would make a lot more sense than a naturally aspirated one.

There is also the question of noise. It's debatable, to say the least, that going back to engines so loud as to be painfully intrusive and uncomfortable would be welcomed by many fans. I know many in F1 would be unhappy about it.

With the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix possibly in jeopardy, is it likely the FIA will allow a month of assessment and redevelopment of the cars in that window, and one assumes there's no space to reschedule those races at other times in this calendar, because of the summer temperatures in the Middle East? - Charles

The US-Israeli war with Iran has put the two Middle East races in April in serious doubt.

F1 has a bit of time to make a decision, but - for various logistical reasons - it will need to commit not long after this weekend's Chinese Grand Prix.

If they are cancelled, as looks likely, senior insiders tell me they will not be replaced. There will simply be a gap in the calendar in April.

It will also be difficult to reschedule them. They can't be held in the northern hemisphere summer because it would be too hot in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. And later in the year the calendar is very congested.

The teams would not be happy if, for example, F1 tried to shoe-horn in one or both at the end of the season next to Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

If there is a gap, there would be no on-track testing allowed. The teams would be working on improving their cars anyway - that's what they do all year.