Well, it’s safe to say no Bahrain Grand Prix has been affected by torrential rain quite like the 2026 race. For one thing, it was held several thousand miles from Bahrain itself. The ongoing war with Iran ruled such things out, so the Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia stepped in to fill its spot. One of the best examples of a late-’90s “Tilke track”—named for its designer, Herman Tilke—it’s characterized by a couple of long straights and the always-brutal tropical weather that provides one of the toughest physical challenges on the calendar. And this weekend was no exception.
Heavy rain arrived about half an hour before the start time, delaying things significantly. Although the sport has two different kinds of treaded tires for use in the rain, the full wet tire generates so much spray, and such slow lap times, that it’s essentially only useful for circulating behind the safety car. If it’s wet enough to need it, it will be too wet to see where you’re going. The intermediate tire, by contrast, has much shallower grooves and is good for racing on damp but not soaked tracks, although it quickly overheats and degrades as the track dries.
Chaos ensues. The organizers decided on two formation laps behind the safety car; circulating at lower speed would allow the drivers to get an idea of the track conditions and let their intermediate tires pump some water off the track surface, the idea went. But that didn’t take into account a bug lurking in the cars’ software. Driving slowly behind the safety car with reduced hybrid power in some parts of the track due to the extremely wet conditions convinced several of the cars that they were being tricked into breaking a hard-coded rule meant to prevent cheating, triggering an automatic 60-second shutdown of their electric motors that caused chaos as car after car slowed for the one in front, then took varying lengths of time to reboot their systems.
The race did eventually get underway, but the drama of the day was clearly the technical issues rather than the racing itself. As for the future, it might be worth checking the weather forecast before scheduling your next big event.
