f1-agws · Regulation Update

What changed in the 2026 F1 Sporting Regulations: Issue 05 to Issue 06

Regulation Update · Published 2026-05-01 · 9 min read

On 28 April 2026 the FIA World Motor Sport Council approved Issue 06 of the 2026 Formula 1 Sporting Regulations, superseding Issue 05 of 27 February 2026. The update lands two months into the season and rewrites several procedural mechanisms across Article B1 through Article B11 of Section B.

Why a mid-season update matters

Section B of the FIA F1 Regulations is the rulebook that governs how a Grand Prix weekend is run: officials, parc fermé, qualifying format, starts, Safety Car procedures, tyre allocation, Power Unit penalties, testing. It is normally republished once or twice a year. A revision approved on 28 April, after four Grands Prix have already taken place, is unusual and signals that the FIA wanted some of these changes locked in for the European leg of the calendar rather than waiting for the next standard cycle.

Issue 06 is the first major iteration since the new 2026 Power Unit and chassis package came into force, and it is the first chance to fix things that were either poorly worded in Issue 05, broken when stress-tested by real Race Direction in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Japan, or simply incompatible with how teams operate in 2026 reality. The bulk of Issue 06 is exactly that: tightening, clarifying, and replacing one-off references (Monaco, Sprint, Insurance) with universal procedures.

A handful of changes go further than housekeeping and introduce genuinely new mechanisms. Those are the ones that will affect how a session looks on television and on a live timing screen.

B1.5 — Low Grip Conditions become a formal regime

Issue 05 referenced low grip only obliquely, scattered across the Driver Adjustable Bodywork and Overtake provisions. Issue 06 promotes Low Grip Conditions to a first-class regulatory state in a new Article B1.5.12: the Race Director can declare "Low Grip Conditions" at any time, the message "LOW GRIP CONDITIONS" is sent to all Competitors, and a separate declaration of "Normal Grip Conditions" is required to lift it.

The mechanism is asymmetric. A Low Grip declaration can be issued at any moment. Normal Grip can only be declared during Sprint Qualifying or Qualifying when more than five (5) minutes remain in the relevant period — preventing late-session toggles that would scramble the order of fast laps. While Low Grip is in force, the Driver Adjustable Bodywork only operates in partial-activation mode and the Overtake system can be capped via new ERS-K power maps reserved for that condition.

The previous safety-driven, ad-hoc Race Director discretion is now codified. Expect "LOW GRIP CONDITIONS" as a standardised Race Control message in Race Director's Notes from Imola onwards.

B1.5.10 — Heat Hazard messaging removed

A small but telling change. In Issue 05, once a Heat Hazard was declared, "All Competitors will be notified via the official messaging system." Issue 06 strikes that sentence. The declaration mechanism, the 31.0 °C Heat Index trigger, the 24-hour-prior window, and the obligations on Driver Cooling System fitment are unchanged.

Read together with the new B1.5.12, this looks like a generalisation: all such declarations will go through the OMS by default — Heat Hazard, Rain Hazard and Low Grip are now treated as parallel regulatory states with the same broadcast plumbing rather than each rule re-declaring it.

B1.6 — Designated Pit Stop Position and the Pit Stop Camera

Issue 05 simply referred to a Competitor's "pit stop position." Issue 06 introduces a defined term — "Designated Pit Stop Position" — and replaces every loose reference throughout Section B. This is editorial in most places, but it carries a hardware obligation.

A new sentence in B1.6.1 mandates one "Pit Stop Camera" per Competitor, installed directly above the Designated Pit Stop Position with a view of the whole car when stationary. The camera must remain uncovered and operational throughout any TTCS (qualifying-style or race-style track session), and its installation, field of view, connectivity and operational requirements are governed by FIA-F1-DOC-079.

In combination with the new Parc Fermé Camera (B3.5.6 below), the FIA gains a continuous overhead view of every car at the two moments that matter most for parc fermé policing: in the garage between sessions, and at the pit box during a stop. Expect this footage to be used to support technical scrutineering decisions where today the FIA relies on after-the-fact mechanic statements and timing transponder data.

B1.4 — Insurance article deleted

Article B1.4 in Issue 05 was titled "Insurance" and contained four provisions making the Promoter responsible for third-party insurance covering Competitors, personnel and drivers. The whole article is removed in Issue 06; B1.4 is now "Official Meetings" and the former B1.4.1–B1.4.3 insurance text is gone.

The text has not been moved elsewhere in Section B. Either the obligation has migrated to Section A (general regulations) where it logically belongs, or it has been delegated to the Promoter Agreement and the ASN. Either way, Section B is no longer the place a team lawyer will look for it.

B2.1.2 — FP1 can now be extended to 90 minutes

A new sub-clause B2.1.2a.i allows Free Practice 1 to be increased from one hour to one and a half hours, but only if three conditions are met no later than seven days before the Competition: agreement of the FIA, agreement of the Commercial Rights Holder (CRH), and agreement of a simple majority of Competitors.

This is a structural concession to the format experimentation everyone has been talking about since the 2026 cars went on track. A 90-minute FP1 changes how a weekend can be programmed — for example to allow rookie running plus a full team programme on the same Friday — and the triple-key agreement model means it cannot be unilaterally imposed. It will be unusual rather than routine.

B2.4.2 — Q3 timing changes

Issue 05: an eight (8) minute break between Q2 and Q3, then a twelve (12) minute Q3. Issue 06: a seven (7) minute break, then a thirteen (13) minute Q3. Net Qualifying clock time is unchanged but a minute is shifted from the break into the session.

The practical effect is small but not invisible: drivers get one extra minute of green-flag track time in the most televised window of the session, and one fewer minute to discuss a strategy change in the garage. Pit lane tempo at the start of Q3 will slightly tighten.

B3.5 — Parc Fermé tightened, with a new Parc Fermé Camera

Three meaningful changes here. First, B3.5.3 explicitly states that "no changes to the setup or configuration of the car may be made" while in parc fermé, beyond the work listed in Appendix B2 or specifically approved by the Technical Delegate. Issue 05 said the same thing implicitly through the Appendix B2 cross-reference; Issue 06 puts the prohibition into the regulation text itself, making it harder to argue around.

Second, the consequences of a parc fermé breach are now spelled out within B3.5.3: at a Standard Format Competition the relevant driver starts the Race from the Pit Lane; at an Alternative Format Competition the consequence depends on whether the breach was before the start of the Sprint (Sprint pit-lane start) or after Qualifying (Race pit-lane start). Issue 05 had this language scattered between B3.5.7 and elsewhere; Issue 06 consolidates it under the rule it actually governs.

Third, B3.5.6 now requires a "Parc Fermé Camera" per car, installed in the Designated Garage Area above the car with a view of the whole vehicle, uncovered and operational throughout the Competition. Same FIA-F1-DOC-079 governs the spec. Combined with the Pit Stop Camera in B1.6, the FIA now has a documented two-camera coverage requirement for every car for the entirety of the regulated phase of the weekend.

B4.3.3 — AOT requirement deleted

A short, easy-to-miss deletion. Issue 05 contained B4.3.3: "An AOT, as defined in the Technical Regulations, must be empty during the complete Sprint Qualifying and Qualifying sessions." The whole article is gone in Issue 06.

Either the AOT (Auxiliary Oil Tank) has ceased to exist as a defined Technical Regulations object for 2026 hardware, or the empty-tank constraint has been moved into the Technical Regulations themselves where it logically lives. The matching Issue 06 deletion of B5.1.8's "mass of oil contained in each oil tank, with the exception of the main oil tank, must be declared to the FIA" supports the second reading: oil-tank policing has been pulled out of Section B entirely.

B6 — Monaco-specific tyre rules eliminated

Issue 05 carried a Monaco exception in B6 tyre allocation: three sets of wet-weather tyres instead of two, and at least three sets of any specification used during the race. The whole exception is wiped out in Issue 06. Monaco is now under the same allocation table as every other Standard Format Competition: 2 hard, 3 medium, 8 soft, 5 intermediate, 2 wet — with a maximum of 13 dry sets used.

The penalty rule is also normalised: the special Monaco "additional thirty seconds for using only one set of any specification" provision in a suspended-and-not-restarted race is gone. There is now one rule for every Race: at least two specifications of dry-weather tyre must be used during the Race, otherwise the driver is disqualified, or thirty seconds are added if the race was suspended and cannot be restarted.

B6.3.3 now allows mixing of any specification of tyre after Qualifying, not just dry-weather. B6.5 and B6.6 — Specific Provisions for ICTE (In-Competition Tyre Evaluation) and ICTT (In-Competition Tyre Testing) — get formal section structure, replacing the previous compressed table layout.

B7 — Overtake mode rebranded, Low Grip ERS-K maps added

Issue 05 referred consistently to "Overtake Override Mode." Issue 06 strips "Override Mode" everywhere — the system is simply called "Overtake." This is purely cosmetic but it is the cleanest indication that the Issue 05 nomenclature was a placeholder.

More substantively, B7.2.1 adds new ERS-K power-map line items: items xiv and xv define adjustments of the maximum electrical DC power available to propel an F1 Car in Low Grip Conditions, separately for when Overtake is and is not active. Combined with B1.5.12 these create a coherent "Low Grip" calibration: when the Race Director declares Low Grip, a different ERS-K curve and a partial-only Driver Adjustable Bodywork are used together.

The cap on circuits where the lap-time-related ERS-K Recharge boost (Article C5.2.10ii) may apply is raised from a maximum of 8 per Championship to a maximum of 12. That is a fifty per cent increase in a budget that directly affects how much energy a driver can deploy on a single lap, and it gives the FIA more circuits where it can engineer the field rather than relying on chassis aero alone.

B11 — Track Running outside a Competition: TMC formalised

Article B11 in Issue 05 already covered TCC (Team Component Testing), TPC (Testing of Previous Cars), THC, PE and DE. Issue 06 promotes TMC — Team Mule-Car testing — to the same level as a peer category, with its own subsection B11.4. The previous Issue 05 implicit treatment relied on cross-references and shared B11.3 provisions; Issue 06 gives TMC its own scope, eligibility, and component-restriction wording.

Operational changes for the test categories are minor but consistent: the maximum continuous running window of nine hours within 09:00–19:00 is now applied identically across TCC, TPC and TMC; numeric cross-references between B11.x sub-articles are corrected; the "current Formula One car" phrasing is normalised to "F1 Car." Appendix B3 (Procedures for Regulatory Submissions) is removed and the appendices are renumbered: B4 becomes B3, B5 becomes B4, B6 becomes B5.

What did NOT change

Despite the volume of edits, several major article groups are untouched in substance. The Sprint Qualifying format in B2.2 is identical: same SQ1 / SQ2 / SQ3 structure, same elimination thresholds. The Safety Car (B5.13) and Virtual Safety Car (B5.12) procedural backbone is unchanged — the only edits there are wording cleanups ("pass another F1 Car" replaced by the more precise "overtake another F1 Car"). The points scoring tables, the Power Unit pool sizing in B8, and the personnel curfew architecture in B9 are all carried over verbatim.

The 22-car-baseline elimination math in Qualifying (5 cars eliminated if 20 entries, 7 if 24) is unchanged. The Power Unit penalty grid logic is unchanged. The driver-eligibility and Super Licence wording in B1.7 is unchanged in substance.

Implications

Read as a whole, Issue 06 is dominated by two patterns. The first is hardening: the Designated Pit Stop Position term, the Pit Stop Camera, the Parc Fermé Camera, the consolidation of parc fermé breach consequences, and the removal of dispersed cross-references to "ISC Code" and "Sporting Regulations" are all defensive moves. They make it harder for a Competitor to argue ambiguity in front of the Stewards.

The second is normalisation: deleting the Insurance article, deleting the Monaco tyre carve-out, deleting the AOT-empty rule, removing the Overtake Override Mode placeholder name, formalising Low Grip Conditions, and giving TMC its own subsection all push Section B toward a single coherent rulebook with one rule per situation rather than per-event exceptions.

There is no obvious safety response in Issue 06. Nothing here looks like a reaction to a specific incident from the first four rounds. That fits with the WMSC approval window — issued 28 April, almost a week after Saudi Arabia, before the first European round at Imola — and with the absence of any new flag, marshalling, or driver-medical procedure. This is regulatory plumbing, not a post-crash patch. Expect Issue 07 to be the one that responds to events on track.

How the diff was produced

The FIA marks regulatory deltas in its PDFs using "Pink Text," but the colour information is lost when the document is converted to Markdown for archiving. The analysis above is built from a textual diff between the Issue 05 and Issue 06 Markdown files, then filtered for substantive content — page headers and footers, Unicode mangling artefacts (apostrophe characters interpreted as backticks, "ffi" ligatures, "ffl" ligatures), structural reformatting of bullet indentation, and table-to-list reflows are noise and have been ignored. Roughly two-thirds of the raw diff is noise of that kind. The changes called out above are the substantive remainder.

Frequently asked questions

What changed in the 2026 F1 Sporting Regulations Issue 06?

Issue 06 formalises Low Grip Conditions, adds mandatory Pit Stop and Parc Fermé cameras, shifts a minute from the Q2-Q3 break into Q3, removes the Monaco tyre exception and deletes the Insurance and AOT articles.

When did the 2026 F1 Sporting Regulations Issue 06 take effect?

The FIA World Motor Sport Council approved Issue 06 on 28 April 2026, superseding Issue 05 of 27 February 2026.

References

Related F1 guides

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