Fernando Alonso has never been one to dress up a technical gripe as something it isn’t, and his latest critique of Formula 1’s hybrid direction lands with the bluntness of someone who’s spent long enough in the sport to recognise when incentives are pointing the wrong way.
With the FIA now openly exploring ways to dial back the championship’s growing dependence on electrical energy, Alonso argues the sport has spent the best part of a decade rewarding behaviours that feel fundamentally at odds with racing. The headline issue, as drivers have been increasingly vocal about in 2026, is that the current power unit philosophy can push them towards managing energy in ways that look — and, by their accounts, feel — unnatural: more lifting and coasting into braking zones, deliberately staying below the tyre’s grip threshold through corners, and an on-board system that can “superclip”, diverting combustion power into recharging rather than driving the rear wheels.
That cocktail has been central to the criticism surrounding the troubled start to the new power unit era this season. The FIA has already nudged the rules in response. Changes voted through in April came in for the Miami Grand Prix, framed as an evolution rather than a reset, and the most notable lever handed to the governing body was the ability to reduce the maximum harvesting allowed per lap depending on circuit characteristics. Even then, the mood in the paddock has been that it’s hard to call the fix a fix when the core mechanic remains: cars and drivers are still incentivised to behave in ways that don’t always resemble flat-out lap time hunting.
Less than a week after the Canadian Grand Prix, the FIA went further, issuing a statement signalling an intention to overhaul the direction for 2027. The broad strokes were clear: increase fuel flow, reduce electrical power, and shift the combustion-to-electric split away from something approaching 50-50 and towards a more traditional 60-40. Many read it as tacit acknowledgement that the present balance has backed the sport into an awkward corner.
Alonso, though, isn’t convinced that shifting the ratio alone gets to the heart of it.
“The DNA of these power units will be always the same, and it will always reward going slow in the corners,” he said, cutting to what he sees as the underlying problem: when energy management becomes too dominant, it doesn’t just change how a car is powered, it changes what driving “well” looks like. That’s not a small detail. It’s the difference between a driver being rewarded for commitment and precision, and a driver being rewarded for restraint at the wrong point in the lap.
He’s also pointed a finger back to the moment F1 set itself on this path, suggesting the real misstep came with the move to hybrid power in 2014.
“I mean, they always listen,” Alonso said of the FIA’s current responsiveness. “The thing that the world went, or thought, to go into the electrification, and that was thought to be the future… That doesn’t apply to racing.
“Racing is a different animal. Now we go a little bit back to this 60-40 and then in the future to less and less.
“Unfortunately, we have this period from 2014 with the turbo era, and now even more, that we lost a little bit, nearly one decade or even more, of pure racing.”
It’s classic Alonso: a critique that’s as much philosophical as it is technical. He’s not arguing against innovation for the sake of it; he’s arguing that the sport shouldn’t confuse road relevance with competition relevance. There’s a difference between technology that makes an engine clever and technology that makes a race feel compromised.
What happens next is also less straightforward than the FIA statement may have suggested. The 2027 direction is not yet a done deal, and because it isn’t being advanced on safety grounds, it needs to be voted through the Power Unit Advisory Committee, with likely input from the Technical Advisory Committee. That gives teams time — and leverage — to interrogate the consequences, and it means politics and self-interest will inevitably shape the timeline.
There are practical implications too. Moving towards higher fuel flow and a lower electrical contribution isn’t simply a matter of changing numbers in a document. As has already been raised, it could force significant redesigns to accommodate a larger fuel cell, with knock-on effects for weight distribution and packaging. At that point, you’re no longer talking about a neat correction; you’re talking about a re-optimisation exercise with real cost, real performance risk, and real winners and losers.
That’s why Alonso’s “DNA” line resonates. F1 can tweak the split, and it can pull on harvesting limits circuit by circuit, but the bigger question is whether the regulations can be steered back to a place where the fastest way around a lap is also the most convincing to watch — and the most satisfying to drive. For a sport that sells itself on pushing drivers and machines to the limit, it’s a question that isn’t going away just because the percentage ratio changes.
