Lewis Hamilton blames F1 rules for Baku near-miss: ‘Not the drivers’ fault'

Lewis Hamilton has blamed Formula 1’s 2026 engine regulations for his near-miss with Liam Lawson during second practice at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. 

The Ferrari driver was harvesting energy through the final sector in Baku during an out-lap, while Racing Bulls’ Liam Lawson was on a hot lap when he encountered a slow-moving Hamilton through the flat-out left and right handers leading onto the main straight. 

Lawson was forced to take evasive action and was quick to vent his fury at Hamilton over team radio, saying: “Oh my god, that is so dangerous”. The incident is currently under investigation, with Lawson and Hamilton both summoned to see the stewards. 

Explaining his view on the incident, Hamilton insisted there was little he could have done to avoid it. 

“Naturally, it’s never an intention from any driver to get in the way,” the seven-time world champion said. 

“Basically with the way the rules are set, when you do an out-lap and when you come round the last corner to start your lap you have no K, so you have no battery deployment. You just have the ICE, so it’s something like 500bhp less.

“There’s no guidelines also on how big a gap you have to understand the closing speed that you are going to have with a guy that’s on a lap. I was four seconds ahead, I thought there was enough. 

“I was like ‘this looks big enough’, got on the power and once I got into [Turn] 18 the speed deficit was huge and there was nowhere I could go at that point. So unfortunate, but it gives us good guidelines as to what to potentially change tomorrow.” 

Hamilton stressed the near-miss is a direct consequence of F1’s new engine rules introduced for the 2026 season and hopes a solution can be found. 

“That’s not the drivers’ fault. That’s what the FIA did with the decisions at the beginning of the year and we’re trying to manage the best we can as drivers on track in finding the right gaps and not getting in the way of people,” he added. 

“When you go to the stewards, they have a set of rules that they have to go with, but it’s like interrogation. You sit in a room with like six people and they are like ‘so, give us your views’. It’s a really unpleasant experience. 

“They have a job to do and I have respect for them for the job they are trying to do and always being fair. But it is practice, it’s Friday [sic, Thursday] and it’s a day that we learn about these things.

“We go to the drivers’ briefing now and we’ll talk about this scenario. One of the proposals was that when you are on the lap and you come round the last corner, you have max power all the way through 18 and 19 and then it resets out of 19, the battery power.

“There are tracks where you are not allowed to go slower in a certain section and they should give us power through that section, so even if you are on a slow lap, you have to go full gas and you have maximum power and you’ll never be in anyone’s way.

“So we’ll talk about it in the drivers’ briefing and hopefully we will come to some sort of conclusion. We are going to have an interesting discussion if there’s a penalty from this, because it’s Friday and it’s not changed anybody’s weekend. Hopefully they’ve understood and we’ll work together to make sure this doesn’t happen [again].”