Williams F1 driver Carlos Sainz wants the FIA and Formula One Management to keep an open mind about the new regulations. He points out that, after some real-world running, there’s a chance they’ll need to tweak a few things.

With pre-season testing in Bahrain wrapped up, every team’s attention is on the first race in Australia, set for March 6-8. The new rules are a big deal this year; they call for a nearly 50:50 split between internal combustion and electric power, along with a pile of other changes. Sainz spoke to Motorsport.com about how tough energy harvesting could get at the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne.

“Yeah, Melbourne’s going to be tougher, no doubt,” he said in Bahrain. “But honestly, I can’t say exactly how tough, because I haven’t run the simulator with the new calibrations for Melbourne yet.”

He went on, “My message to FOM and the FIA is pretty simple: at the start of the year, let’s stay open to making changes if it turns out these new rules are a bit over the top when it comes to energy harvesting or deployment during a lap. Some tracks might be fine, maybe even Bahrain, though I’m not fully convinced based on what we’ve seen so far.

“But tracks like Melbourne or Jeddah, where energy demands are higher, we might have to rethink things a bit.

“Honestly, it’s a huge shift for everyone. Nobody really knew how much drag or downforce these new cars would have, or what kind of deployment levels teams could manage. So all I’m asking is that we stay flexible, just in case we need to fine-tune things to keep the racing exciting.

“That’s really my only point. We should stay flexible, not lock ourselves into a set approach to energy management.”

Alan Jones probably wondered if his record as the last Australian Formula 1 world champion was finally under threat when Oscar Piastri took the win at Zandvoort last year. Suddenly, McLaren had a star on their hands. With nine races to go, Piastri pulled 34 points clear of Lando Norris after Norris’s car broke down at the Dutch Grand Prix. Max Verstappen was still hanging back, not looking like much of a threat, at least not yet. Almost no one thought Verstappen would end up ahead of Piastri by the time they got to Abu Dhabi.

Everyone’s been talking about McLaren’s choices between their two drivers and whether Piastri struggles more on low-grip tracks on those weekends where he lost most of his points. But if you look back, Alan Jones had a totally different mindset from the drivers you see on the grid today.

For Piastri to finally close out a title, maybe he needs to steal a page from Jones’s book. When Jones took the championship in 1980, he did things his own way.

Jones once said being a “loner” was his secret in F1. In the Drivers on Drivers book, he got pretty honest about how he kept his distance from everyone else. “I used to keep everyone at arm’s length. I never went out of my way to be mates with any of them,” he said. “I was very much a loner. I don’t know if it was out of fear or giving something away; I don’t know what it was. I’d never go down and lounge around the pool with the others in South Africa, Brazil, or Argentina. I’d just stay in my room. I was self-centred. I was there to do a job, and that was it.”

He even hated staying in the same hotel as the guys he was racing. Sometimes, he’d even change flights if there were too many other drivers on his plane. He just didn’t want to reveal anything, not even a glimpse of his personality. “I wasn’t racing against them as people; I was racing against them as things, as objects,” he said. “You’d spot a black Lotus or a red Ferrari and know who was in it, but it didn’t matter. It was just an object you had to pass.”

Now, Piastri’s situation is pretty different. These days, you can’t really hide from the world if you’re an F1 driver. Even though Piastri’s not the loudest guy on the grid, he’s built a big fanbase with his dry sense of humour; people even compare him to Kimi Raikkonen. Still, the social media era means he can’t be as private as Jones was back in the day. He’s often seen travelling to races with other drivers like George Russell and Alex Albon.

Piastri admitted recently that he’s not sure exactly what he needs to do to become a world champion. Maybe Jones’s old-school advice is the key to helping him make that final step, turning him from a contender into a champion.