There’s a certain weariness creeping into the 2026 rule debate already, and you can hear it in the way senior team figures are starting to push back against the “this is broken” narrative.
In Miami, Audi’s Mattia Binotto was the latest to put his hand up and ask for a bit of perspective. With the paddock still split on the new power unit balance and the way races are being shaped by battery deployment, Binotto argued F1 shouldn’t talk itself into a crisis when, on the evidence so far, the racing has largely delivered.
“Everyone needs to adapt to the changes,” Binotto said. “But overall, I think if you look and you watch the races, for the fans it has been a great show as well. Overtaking since the very first race, close fights… So, I think the format is a great format.”
It’s a telling choice of words: “format”, not “regulations”. Binotto isn’t pretending the shift hasn’t been profound — drivers have been vocal that the 2026 cars can demand a very different approach — but he’s also clearly wary of the sport undermining the very product it’s trying to sell. If you’re Audi, arriving into Formula 1 with a big narrative around technology and efficiency, it’s hardly helpful for the championship to spend its first season of a new era describing itself as a problem in need of rescue.
Binotto’s argument is essentially that the spectacle is the point, and right now the spectacle is holding up. Close fights and plenty of overtaking, despite what he described as the “big discrepancy in the regulations”, have given him enough ammunition to say F1 should “also somehow… be positive on what we can see”.
That positivity sits against a backdrop of constant tweaking. The FIA confirmed a series of changes ahead of the Miami Grand Prix aimed at encouraging more flat-out qualifying and addressing safety concerns. Drivers largely greeted those as baby steps — welcome, but not transformative — which is why the political temperature hasn’t really cooled.
And then there’s the bigger signal from the FIA: it has already announced an agreement to tweak the electric-versus-internal-combustion split for 2027. That alone tells you two things. First, the governing body accepts the current balance isn’t perfect. Second, the sport is willing to adjust quickly rather than stubbornly “let it play out” for years — a very different posture to some previous regulation cycles.
As if that wasn’t enough, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has now said he wants V8 engines back, with minimal electric, targeting 2030 and no later than 2031. Red Bull, Ford and General Motors would be open to that, and even Toto Wolff isn’t against the concept — though he’s warned against walking away from electrification.
Binotto, though, was careful not to be dragged into making 2026 sound like an awkward stepping stone to something else.
“So, what will be the future? I think it’s too early to say,” he said. “Certainly, we have started discussing it with the FIA… But I will not be so negative on the current format.”
That’s more than simple messaging discipline; it’s Audi staking out its identity. Binotto pointed out the brand’s long-standing focus on “high-efficiency engines” and framed F1 as “a platform for innovation at the edge of the technology”. In other words: don’t forget why manufacturers signed up to this in the first place, and don’t let nostalgia drive the conversation off a cliff.
Ferrari team principal Fred Vasseur struck a similar tone, but from a different angle — one aimed squarely at the complaint you hear most often from the grandstands and online: that 2026 racing can feel “artificial” because energy management has become such a defining competitive lever.
Vasseur’s rebuttal was simple: if you want to talk artificial, start with the DRS era.
“Honestly, we had good races, a lot of overtaking,” Vasseur said. “You can say that perhaps you have the feeling that it’s a bit artificial, but for me, it’s much less artificial than the DRS. DRS was just to push on the button. Today, it’s energy management and it’s coming from the drivers or from the team. It’s not artificial at all.”
It’s a line that will resonate with plenty inside the paddock. DRS was always a slightly uneasy compromise: effective at creating passing, but often too binary, too pre-packaged. Vasseur’s point is that the new dynamic — however frustrating it can be to watch on TV when someone “backs up” for deployment windows — is at least rooted in decisions, trade-offs, and execution. It’s messy in a more sporting way.
That doesn’t mean he’s pretending everything is nailed down. Like Binotto, he acknowledged the need to “fine-tune” and “adapt”, and he praised the FIA-led habit of reviewing the system after each event to look for improvements — even if, as he noted, doing meaningful change in-season is never straightforward.
Where Vasseur really planted a flag was on cost. While the V8 talk is grabbing headlines, the more immediate pressure point for manufacturers and customers alike is the “crazy budget of the engine”, as he put it — and reducing that sits right at the top of Ferrari’s thinking as future options are discussed.
“I think that now we can discuss about all the opportunities,” Vasseur said. “We’ll have time to do it soon.”
Read between the lines and the message from both camps is the same: yes, 2026 needs refinement, and yes, 2027 is already on the drawing board — but the sport shouldn’t let the noise convince everyone that the current era is a failure. If anything, Miami underlined the real tension inside F1 right now: not whether change is needed, but how to change without throwing away the parts that are already producing the close racing everyone claims to want.
