F1 Bahrain Grand Prix 2026: Ranking every mad thing that happened in Malaysia on Sunday

red bull, malaysia, verstappen, 2026 — Photo: © IMAGO

Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia

Ranking every mad thing that happened at the F1 Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia

The anatomy of a truly bonkers weekend in Sepang

Chris Deeley Editor

Experienced sports writer covering F1 and other motorsports since 2023

Monday 5 October 2026 18:44

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Sunday's Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia was absolutely wild, and we rank the craziest moments from a truly bonkers afternoon in Sepang.

‘So’, as the most irritatingly millennial person in your life might say. ‘That just happened’.

Any F1 fans who remember Malaysia’s first stint on the calendar were looking forward to Sepang’s temporary return, with fond memories of wheel-to-wheel racing and sudden downpours of rain.

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What we hadn’t banked on was, just as the rough tarmac surface retained Sunday’s rain better than anyone expected, the whole circuit has been filling a reservoir of nonsense and shenanigans since 2017, just waiting for F1’s return. And boy, did it empty out.

This was the kind of weekend they dedicate entire episodes of Drive to Survive to (I assume, I’ve only watched a couple of episodes at a mate’s house before we went to a wedding). Every single stupid thing that was on the table happened, as did a few that nobody even had the imagination to dream up.

You’ve read the title, so you know what we’re doing here. Let’s run through the litany of weird and sometimes wonderful things that happened in Sepang, in something like reverse order.

F1 HEADLINES: Verstappen victim of awkward blunder as FIA release Bahrain GP statement

Huh, that’s weird

This section’s for the things that made people go ‘huh, that’s weird’. Not headline-makers, but something.

An Aston Martin finished eighth.

An Aston Martin held off Lando Norris at the end of the race.

Kimi Antonelli didn’t know what grid position he was starting in after qualifying.

Remember in FP2 when the weather nerds said there was a 90% chance of rain in the session, and then it just didn’t happen? That was weird.

George Russell’s power unit conked out while behind the safety car. Don’t see that every day.

After the rain held off all weekend, the heavens opened barely half an hour from the race start.

The Bahrain national anthem was played on the grid in absolutely torrential rain, and it looked really funny.

Hang on, what? Explain that

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Max Verstappen, Kimi Antonelli and Lewis Hamilton stood on the podium ready for the anthems, and... crickets. Just absolute silence from the PA system, while the crowd valiantly gave it a ‘do do do do, Max Verstappen’ into the awkward silence. They did, eventually, find the right CD (or whatever the problem was).

Valtteri Bottas left the track and is cycling to Singapore for this weekend’s race?

I mean, it was the Bahrain Grand Prix and it was being held in Malaysia. The fact that this isn’t particularly close to topping the list speaks volumes. Everyone ready for the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix in Italy?

You will never see this happen at an F1 race again in your life

The start of Lap 50, as a whole. Russell’s engine packed in after a few laps behind the safety car - already unusual. About five seconds later, eagle-eyed viewers spotted Lando Norris’ name also tumbling down the timing tower. Panic stations.
Was something happening to the Mercedes power units? Was The Incident happening again? Was Antonelli’s second place safe? It turned out that Norris, completely unrelated to Russell’s issues, came steaming down into the corner, nearly ran into his team-mate Oscar Piastri, locked up and went miles off track. For no clear reason.
With the race neutralised behind the safety car. While Russell, coincidentally, was parked up on the inside of the track. Weird.

'I have maybe 12 hours to find a way to blame Franco Colapinto for this'

This is worthy of tearing the whole sport down to the studs and starting again

A bunch of cars stopped on track during a delayed formation lap designed to figure out if the track was dry enough to race on after the start was pushed back.

Like 75% of the grid just lost power and started crawling around, and some of them - Lewis Hamilton and Sergio Perez included - stopped entirely while their teams rebooted their power unit software from afar.

Everyone got back to the pits (eventually), some of them ahead of the safety car, so the safety car was just stuck in a crowd of F1 cars, which is Not Where The Safety Car Is Supposed To Be.

Drivers jumped out of their cars and everyone just... waited? No explanation or planned restart time, just waiting.

That wait, about 45 minutes in total, was because the FIA were sending all the teams software patches to upload into the cars. There was some faulty software which just hit the kill-switch on everyone’s power unit, because it was raining and they were going slowly. An F1 race was delayed for a software patch. It’s so, so, so stupid.

F1 execs like to talk about crossover - making the sport accessible to a generalist audience, making it easy to understand, and not leaving anyone behind.

Well, here’s something that even people who aren’t lifelong fans can grasp pretty easily: F1 couldn’t start a race for 45 minutes because they needed the equivalent of that Windows update that you keep clicking ‘remind me later’ on.

You know, the one that’s really helpful as an excuse when you’re working from home but you’re a bit hungover and you want a power nap, so you text your boss ‘argh, laptop’s forcing a Windows update, I’ll be back when it’s done’.

(Not that anyone would do that)

Because F1 has, for a while now, been moving away from being a car racing series and toward being a semi-autonomous computerised piece of visual spectacle, in which drivers are sometimes permitted to participate in the action.

Just a week previous in Baku, Bottas crashed in an unusual place. Driver error? Nope! The little computer in his car got confused about where he was on the track and basically just drove him into the wall.

Imagine telling an F1 fan any of this even five years ago. This season has thrown up a few weekends which have made it possible to forget just how disastrous the current computerisation and engine setup systems are, and then something like Sepang happens.

It is fundamentally humiliating to have to delay the start of a global sporting event because you have to install a software patch on every single car on the grid.

Does the F in F1 stand for ‘farce’ at this point? There are changes promised for 2027. They can’t possibly be enough.