Red Bull aren’t exactly hiding their enthusiasm for the FIA’s renewed push to bring V8s back to Formula 1 — and, for once, the politics might line up neatly with the branding.
FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has doubled down on his public timeline for a return to V8 engines no later than 2031, while making it clear he’d prefer to pull the trigger a year earlier. The key part isn’t the nostalgia, or even the noise. It’s the power balance: Ben Sulayem has said the next formula would feature “very, very minor electrification”, with the internal combustion engine once again doing the heavy lifting.
That’s precisely the kind of direction that immediately drags manufacturers into the spotlight. Not just because they’re the ones paying for it, but because F1 has spent more than a decade selling its hybrid credentials as central to the sport’s relevance. The moment you start talking about “minimal” battery contribution, you’re no longer discussing soundtracks — you’re negotiating what the championship wants to be.
Ben Sulayem, though, is framing it as inevitable. He’s stated that from 2031 the FIA can enforce the change without requiring a vote from the power unit manufacturers, leaning on the regulatory structure that would allow the governing body to set the rules. “It’s coming,” he said, insisting the manufacturers actually “want it to happen” — while also warning that even if they didn’t, the shift would still arrive a year later.
Over at Red Bull, the response has been notably upbeat. Team principal Laurent Mekies has openly welcomed the prospect, and you don’t need to squint too hard to see why. Red Bull Powertrains is still new in relative terms, and 2026 is the first season it’s racing an in-house-built engine, developed in conjunction with Ford. A rules reset — particularly one that emphasises the combustion side — is the sort of strategic upheaval that can be an opportunity rather than a threat, especially for a project that isn’t weighed down by decades of internal road-car alignment.
“As Red Bull Powertrains, we are pretty cool with it,” Mekies said in Miami. He pointed out that the programme effectively started from scratch, adding that while Red Bull still feels it’s down on Mercedes in outright power unit performance, the early baseline is “decent” and the group has already done “a phenomenal job to put us in a fight”.
That admission is doing a lot of work. It’s candid, and it’s also useful: it quietly underlines why Red Bull might not be wedded to the current concept long-term. If you’re still chasing the benchmark, you’re less inclined to defend the status quo — and more inclined to welcome a new test that reshuffles the competitive order.
Then there’s the Ford angle, which Mekies leaned into with a smile. He referenced the V8 in the Ford Mustang he drives daily around Milton Keynes, adding: “So we may have an early start.” It’s a throwaway line on the surface, but it lands because everyone knows what a V8 represents in Ford mythology — and how easily that story can be sold to fans who’ve never really fallen in love with the modern era’s sound.
Of course, sound is only part of why this conversation won’t go away. The sport’s move from V10s to V8s in 2007, and then to turbo hybrid V6s in 2014, fundamentally changed the atmosphere at a grand prix weekend. Plenty of people inside the paddock still talk about that shift in sensory terms: the way the cars hit you in the chest, the way the track felt alive. Complaints about volume and character never completely disappeared, and they’ve sharpened again with the latest power split.
There’s also a proof-of-concept element that makes the V8 argument harder to dismiss. Sebastian Vettel’s 2023 demo runs — including taking a modified Red Bull RB7 around the Nürburgring on sustainable fuel — showed you can combine a traditional layout with e-fuel and still deliver the theatre many fans crave. He also ran the 1993 McLaren MP4/8 on sustainable fuel at Goodwood that year. Those moments didn’t set policy, but they did take away one easy objection: that F1 can’t have that noise and still be serious about fuel direction.
But the moment Ben Sulayem talks about winding electrification right back, you can almost hear the counter-briefings being drafted. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has already been blunt that a swing towards near-total combustion would look out of step with “today’s world” and the broader push to be eco-friendly. His point is less about marketing and more about legitimacy: F1 doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and it can’t afford to appear like it’s running away from the technology it’s spent years championing.
Wolff’s alternative is telling. Rather than rejecting a “mega-engine” concept outright, he argued for keeping meaningful electric contribution so the sport doesn’t “lose connection to the real world”. In his view, the solution is not to erase the hybrid element, but to simplify and rebalance — even if that means big numbers on both sides of the equation. He floated the idea of extracting around 800 horsepower from the ICE and adding a further 400 via electrical energy, making it clear Mercedes would be open to that kind of ambition.
So this isn’t shaping up as a simple fight between “old” and “new”. It’s a tug-of-war over what the next decade of F1 should prioritise: spectacle, cost and simplicity on one hand; technical relevance and manufacturer buy-in on the other.
For Red Bull, though, the immediate calculus is obvious. A fresh formula could level out the pecking order just as its Ford-backed programme beds in, and a V8 narrative fits neatly into a partnership that wants to resonate beyond the pitlane. If the FIA is serious about forcing the issue by 2031 regardless, teams may as well start positioning themselves now — and Red Bull have already planted their flag.
