Andrea Stella isn’t asking Formula 1 for another tidy little regulation tweak. He’s effectively warning that if the sport wants the 2026 power unit era to deliver what it promised — performance you can actually use, not just simulate — then the conversation has to move beyond software and energy-management band-aids and into the uncomfortable territory: changing the hardware.
Speaking in Miami, the McLaren team principal backed the direction of the FIA’s latest adjustments to energy management, but made it clear they’re only treating symptoms. Last month’s changes were designed to reduce the worst excesses of harvesting and “superclipping” that have crept into the new formula’s operating window.
Qualifying will see the maximum permitted recharge reduced from 8MJ to 7MJ, aimed at cutting the incentive to back off and gather energy. And the superclip power level is set to rise from 250kW to 350kW, reducing how long drivers are forced to live in that compromised state.
For the grands prix, boost-mode power is capped at 150kW, while MGU-K deployment is limited to 250kW in some parts of the lap. Drivers have broadly described it as a step in the right direction — but not a solution. Stella’s view is similar: you can’t finesse your way out of a hardware-limited box forever.
“Hardware adjustments to the power unit in order to improve Formula 1 in general, I personally think are required,” Stella said.
His prescription is direct and, in F1 governance terms, awkward: increase fuel flow to bring more internal combustion power back into play, and increase the system’s electrical capacity so the hybrid side stops behaving like a constantly overdrawn current account.
“They will have to do realistically with the fuel flow to increase the power from the internal combustion engine,” he explained.
But the more intriguing part of his argument is what he wants from the electrical side. Stella’s not simply calling for “more battery” in the abstract — he’s pointing to an imbalance between how much time is spent deploying electrical power versus how (and how little) it’s harvested back. His suggestion is to raise harvesting capability beyond today’s 350kW.
“From 350kW, can we go to 400kW, can we go to 450kW?” he said, before adding: “And then I think we just need bigger batteries.”
It’s a rare moment of someone in a top job describing the formula’s core problem in plain, operational terms. The 2026 regulations were always going to be energy-management heavy, but the paddock reality has been a system that’s hypersensitive to conditions and easily pushed into mitigation modes that aren’t exactly what anyone sells on a poster.
Stella’s timeline is equally pointed. He essentially drew a line through 2027 as unrealistic for meaningful hardware intervention, because the lead times for redesign, validation and production — especially around battery size and coping with increased fuel flow — don’t fit the calendar.
“I see this is difficult for 2027,” he said. “The implication for the battery size and the implication for coping with the higher fuel flow… are normally a longer lead time than the time available to go into the 2027 season.”
Instead, he wants the sport to commit now — before the summer break — if it hopes to land changes for 2028. That’s not just a plea for urgency; it’s Stella reminding everyone how quickly “we’ll look at it later” becomes “we missed the window again”.
“I would urge that possibly this conversation needs to be finalised… before the summer break to be in time to do it for 2028,” he said. “We can extract more out of these regulations, but this will need some hardware tweak.”
The political subtext is obvious enough without Stella spelling it out. Any hardware shift requires alignment between the FIA, FOM, the teams and — crucially — power unit manufacturers, who don’t take kindly to late-spec changes that ripple through design philosophies and cost plans. It’s why Stella keeps framing it as “maximising” the formula rather than rewriting it, but the ask is still substantial: higher fuel flow, higher harvesting rates, larger batteries. That’s not a trim around the edges; that’s the sport admitting it needs more room inside the current box.
Until then, Stella thinks everyone in F1 is going to have to get comfortable with an era where the power unit’s behaviour is not just complex, but twitchy — and where the act of optimising it becomes a moving target.
“I think we all will have get used to these sort of comments, which include a level of sensitivity to the behaviour of the power unit that we are not used to, probably never in the history of Formula One,” he said.
His example was telling: a simple change of wind can alter straight-line time enough to kick the optimisation tools into a different operating assumption — and then the engineers are effectively chasing the tool as it chases the conditions.
“With a change of wind, some of our settings started to be affected by the wind, which means the time you spend in a straight,” Stella explained. “And then you have the tool that wants to optimise the power unit, that starts to chase it, and then you chase the tool, chase the conditions.”
That’s the part that should make F1 folk wince, because it describes a sport drifting towards a feedback loop where everyone is working harder and talking more, but not necessarily racing better. Stella stopped short of laying out the full detail — “Sorry for being cryptic, but that’s what we deal with,” he said — yet the implication is clear: the 2026 power unit isn’t simply a question of “where do we deploy?” but a tightly coupled relationship between the electrical system and the ICE, constantly influenced by variables that used to be background noise.
In other words, F1 can keep sanding down the rules and nudging the numbers, but if the objective is to reduce the chronic sensitivity and let the drivers lean on performance more consistently, Stella believes the sport will eventually have to do what it always resists: spend political capital on hardware change.
And he’s not giving it forever.
