Nikolas Tombazis insists the FIA isn’t trying to spring a mid-season trap on anyone with its latest 2026 power unit intervention. If anything, the single-seater director’s message from Bahrain was that the governing body is attempting to de-escalate a row that has gathered far more heat than the engineering behind it ever warranted.
The FIA confirmed this week it has opened an e-vote within the Power Unit Advisory Committee (PUAC) on whether to amend the rules around how geometric compression ratio is measured. At the centre is a grey area: the existing protocol is based on measurements taken at ambient temperature, and the suspicion — not of illegality, Tombazis stressed repeatedly — is that the wording leaves room for outcomes that drift away from the original intent of keeping compression ratio capped at 16:1.
The proposed fix is straightforward on paper: formalise a new measurement protocol taken at hot, operational temperatures. Politically, it’s anything but. The PUAC structure means the five power unit manufacturers, plus the FIA and Formula One Management, vote on the change. It needs a supermajority — six of seven — to pass, after which it goes to the World Motor Sport Council for ratification. Members have a 10-day window to cast their vote, with the outcome expected ahead of the March 1 power unit homologation deadline.
What has kept the story bubbling is less the rulebook mechanics and more the paddock’s habit of reading between the lines. Senior sources suggest all five manufacturers are believed capable of passing either test, ambient or hot, but the chatter has kept circling Mercedes High Performance Powertrains — and that’s where the governance argument has turned into something more personal.
Toto Wolff’s tone in Thursday’s press conference was telling. He made clear he “philosophically disagreed” with a process that, in his view, has left Mercedes isolated and seemingly set to lose out if the rest of the room aligns against it. Red Bull, through Laurent Mekies, has pushed back on the suggestion this is just background noise, arguing the sport needs clarity on what’s permissible so nobody is rewarded for exploiting ambiguity.
Tombazis, though, was at pains to separate opportunistic engineering from wrongdoing — and to explain why the FIA has landed on a compromise timetable rather than forcing an immediate rewrite before Melbourne.
“There are a lot of nuances,” Tombazis said. The 16:1 limit, he noted, was a core objective when the regulations were agreed with manufacturers back in 2022. But it became “obvious” the way the regulation was written could allow methods that effectively deliver a higher ratio. That doesn’t amount to cheating; it means the text might not fully deliver the intention.
That distinction matters because it frames the FIA’s justification for both acting and not acting too aggressively. In Tombazis’ view, new regulations inevitably create these gaps: the FIA has a relatively small technical group policing a landscape in which each team and manufacturer deploys hundreds of performance-focused engineers whose job is to find interpretation, tolerance, and advantage.
That’s why the FIA has gone down the route of an e-vote rather than a unilateral technical directive dressed up as “clarification”. Tombazis presented it as an attempt to “close this topic” with a solution backed by the manufacturers themselves. If there’s an edge in his comments, it’s directed at the level of emotion that has accompanied the debate rather than at any one company’s engineering.
He even offered a disarming comparison: competitive backgammon at home. In F1, he suggested, multiply that mindset by a thousand and it’s easy to see how a minor-seeming technical discussion turns into months of suspicion and lobbying.
The horsepower claims have added to the theatre. Wolff has played down any potential gain as negligible — “two to three horsepower” — while Max Verstappen dismissed that and suggested it could be ten times bigger. Tombazis didn’t buy the wilder numbers and described the whole storm as out of proportion to the underlying issue. Important, yes. Worth the noise for months? “Frankly, no.”
The timing is the real tell. The proposed regulation change would come into force on August 1, after the Hungarian Grand Prix — a deliberate buffer in a season already defined by a new technical era. Tombazis’ explanation was blunt: because the FIA isn’t alleging anyone is illegal today, it wouldn’t be fair to demand redesigns for the season start. But nor, in the FIA’s view, should a loophole be left open indefinitely if it undermines the rules’ stated objective.
If the vote passes and the WMSC signs off, any manufacturer that finds its early-season solution no longer compliant would be allowed to make the necessary changes even after homologation. Tombazis pointed to existing processes within the homologation appendix for adapting to regulatory amendments — and insisted the FIA would not back teams into a corner where they’re unable to modify and then punished for it.
Yes, those changes would land under the newly introduced power unit manufacturers’ budget cap, but Tombazis expects the practical work — if it’s needed at all — to be modest. He argued the physical differences involved are “extremely small numbers” when translated into millimetres, and that adjusting an engine from one setting to a slightly different one is not a case of “throwing everything away”.
That’s the crux of the FIA’s posture: treat the compression ratio debate as a housekeeping job in a brand-new regulatory cycle, not as a scandal. Whether the paddock follows that lead depends on how the vote falls — and, more pointedly, on whether any manufacturer feels the sport has just legislated away good engineering under the guise of “intent”.
Either way, the next fortnight will decide whether this becomes a footnote in the early months of 2026, or the first full-blooded political fight of F1’s new power unit era.
