Mohammed Ben Sulayem turned up at Silverstone and did what he’s made a habit of doing as FIA president: he lobbed a couple of big ideas into the paddock and let everyone else argue about the fallout.
This time the two headline-grabbers were familiar hot buttons – refuelling and engines – but with a twist that cuts closer to the sport’s internal power balance than the usual “should F1 be louder?” debate.
Ben Sulayem said the FIA is “studying” a return of refuelling, banned since 2010. He was careful not to sell it as imminent policy, framing it as an active line of work rather than a campaign promise.
“The refuelling we are studying as we speak,” he said. “It’s not a concern if you do it in the right way. So we are studying this. Nothing is being done yet.”
Even in a championship that lives for strategic variance, refuelling isn’t just a nostalgia lever. It would fundamentally change how teams design cars, how they race, and how they manage risk. The modern sport is built around tyres, energy harvesting and track position; put fuel flow back into the pitlane and you’re rewiring the whole weekend. Ben Sulayem also tied the idea explicitly to sustainable fuel and electrification – “maybe we look at giving more electrification than 10%” – signalling that, in his mind, this isn’t a retreat from technology so much as a different route through it.
But it was his other proposal that landed with a louder thud inside the team motorhomes: the notion of an “FIA-selected engine” made available to customer teams.
In plain terms, Ben Sulayem is talking about an independent power unit supply that sits outside the existing manufacturer ecosystem – something customer teams could turn to without being politically tethered to the OEMs and works outfits they currently depend on.
“There will be no control over the teams, A-team over the B-team, that’s supplied with their engines,” he said. “If it is affordable, then we will have one engine for the rest of the B-teams, so nobody can leverage them and tell them to ‘vote this way, or we are not going to give you a good engine’.”
That last line is the tell. This isn’t primarily an engineering argument; it’s a governance argument.
F1 in 2026 has a lot of customer relationships in play: Mercedes supplies McLaren, Williams and Alpine; Ferrari supplies Haas and Cadillac; and Red Bull Ford power is used by Racing Bulls. Those deals are about more than hardware. They come with integration support, commercial terms, technical alignment, and – yes – influence, whether anyone admits it or not. Ben Sulayem is effectively suggesting a way to remove the soft power manufacturers can hold over smaller teams when votes are needed on the next set of rules, or when the paddock is negotiating the next compromise.
Whether such leverage is routinely abused is almost beside the point; the dependency exists, and in a sport that decides its future by committee, dependency shapes behaviour.
The practical questions come thick and fast. Who builds this “FIA-selected engine”? How is it funded? How does the FIA square “independent supply” with the competitive reality that the best power unit is a moving target – and that parity is notoriously hard to police, even with tighter rules? And if the FIA is both regulator and, in effect, the gateway to a standardised customer engine, how does it avoid accusations of conflicts of interest when performance gaps inevitably appear?
Ben Sulayem also floated the idea that McLaren and Alpine – both current Mercedes customers – might be open to making their own V8 engines. On that point, Renault CEO Francois Provost poured some cold water, telling Reuters: “Not really. The reference is not to develop by ourselves a new engine.”
That response matters because it underlines the core tension behind Ben Sulayem’s engine rhetoric: he wants affordability and simplicity, but the sport’s manufacturers and big teams have built their identity around being able to do it their way. F1’s current ecosystem is a mix of technical competition and political architecture. Telling one side you’ll reduce complexity and cost is easy; telling them you’ll also reduce their leverage is where the pushback starts.
None of this is happening in a vacuum, either. Ben Sulayem has been talking increasingly openly about the next regulation cycle after the current era, pointing to 2030 or 2031 as a possible window for a reset towards lighter cars and a V8 concept with a smaller electrification component.
He’s even put numbers on it: he wants a “total complete car” under 650kg, with a target of 630kg. He argues that today’s cars are too complex, too expensive, too big – and that mass brings its own safety compromises. It’s a familiar line in the paddock, but it lands differently when the FIA president is saying it out loud with a proposed technical direction attached.
“The V8 has to come,” he said previously, pitching an internal combustion output “maybe 760 horsepower” with “10 per cent” electrification, alongside sustainable fuel. In Ben Sulayem’s framing, it’s a win-win: cheaper R&D, lighter packages, better sound, and a product that reconnects with fans who never fell in love with the current levels of complexity.
What’s interesting is how these strands connect. Refuelling, lower electrification, a simpler engine, an FIA-backed customer supply: they all point to an FIA leadership that’s increasingly willing to challenge the existing political settlement in F1, not just tidy up the sporting rules around the edges. You can read it as an attempt to futureproof the grid against manufacturer mood swings. You can also read it as a direct shot at how much influence the current power unit suppliers wield.
Either way, Silverstone offered a reminder that the next big fight in F1 may not be about who’s fastest, but about who gets to decide what “the future” looks like – and who holds the keys to make it happen.
