Nikolas Tombazis doesn’t usually talk like a man looking to pick a fight, but his message landed with the subtlety of a kerb strike: Formula 1 can’t let its future be dictated by whichever way the car industry’s mood swings next.
With the 2026 power-unit rules only just bedding in, the FIA’s single-seater boss is already framing the next conversation — and, more importantly, who gets to steer it. The last set of regulations, first thrashed out in 2021 and signed off in August 2022, were built on heavy consultation with manufacturers both inside the paddock and circling it. The result was the compromise we’re now living with: the same basic internal combustion architecture, but with a big ramp-up in electrical contribution.
It made sense at the time. F1 wasn’t yet riding the commercial wave it’s now enjoying, teams felt more exposed, and the sport was keen to look like a safe long-term shop window for major OEMs. The automotive narrative in those meetings was blunt, Tombazis recalled: the big players told the FIA they weren’t going to develop another new internal combustion engine and were on a timetable towards full electrification.
“Obviously that hasn’t happened,” he said, careful not to dismiss electrification’s importance but equally clear-eyed about the industry’s changed trajectory. The punchline for F1 is that the political landscape has shifted under its feet — and that opens up the question of whether the sport should keep designing itself around road-car forecasts that can be revised, softened or abandoned entirely.
That’s where Tombazis’ “hostage” line matters. It’s not anti-manufacturer; it’s a warning against dependency.
“In terms of where we want to be in the future, we do need to protect the sport from the world macro-economic situation,” he said. “We cannot be hostage to automotive companies deciding to be part of our sport or not.
“We want them to be part of our sport, absolutely… But we can also not be in a position where, if they decide they don’t want to be, we’re suddenly left vulnerable.”
It’s hard to argue with the principle, because F1’s history is littered with periods where manufacturers have arrived with grand plans and left when boardroom priorities changed. The difference now is what the sport has built in the meantime: the cost cap’s tightened the worst excesses, prize money has been redistributed, and fan growth plus commercial partners have shored up finances across the grid. F1 is not the same fragile ecosystem it was when it was trying to future-proof itself by stacking logos from global brands on the engine cover.
And then there’s fuel — the part of the 2026 package that may end up being the real long-term pivot point.
Alongside the hybrid push, fully sustainable fuels have been introduced from 2026. Tombazis described the appeal in practical terms: it’s a “drop-in solution”, the sort of technology that could have relevance far beyond the small number of new cars sold each year, because the global fleet of combustion-engined vehicles remains huge — around 1.5 billion by the estimate referenced — and many will be on the road for years.
That creates an awkward tension. Sustainable fuel offers F1 a credible environmental story while leaving the door open to more straightforward combustion-based power in future. But it also risks taking the championship somewhere that doesn’t align neatly with what manufacturers want to sell — and that’s precisely the point Tombazis is making. The sport’s job isn’t to become a captive marketing exercise.
There’s also a cold engineering reality behind the politics: the current era of power units is eye-wateringly expensive and complex. No official development-cost number is publicly available, but the suggestion in the paddock has long been that manufacturers are into the hundreds of millions of dollars — a figure around $450m was floated — to produce these systems. Whether or not you buy that exact number, the direction of travel is obvious. It prices out independent powertrain specialists and narrows F1’s options if it ever wants a wider supplier base, or simply a safer fallback if one or two OEMs lose interest.
That’s why the idea of a simpler combustion formula running sustainable fuel keeps popping up, even among people who’ve already spent big on the current path. A lighter, less hybrid-dependent car would follow naturally, and the sport would also reclaim an element it’s never truly replaced since the louder days: theatre. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has previously flagged the concept, and Red Bull team boss Christian Horner — despite his team’s investment in Red Bull Powertrains — endorsed the direction from a “sporting perspective” in early 2025.
“Inadvertently, we’ve ended up with a very, very expensive, very complex engine from ’26 onwards,” Horner said at the time, adding that the “purist” in him would love a responsibly fuelled V10 that brought back the sound and spectacle many fans still miss.
Tombazis didn’t shy away from the sensory argument either, noting that when older cars run in demonstration sessions they still hit a nerve with the crowd — and making the very practical point that it’s far easier to quieten an engine than to create volume where none exists.
None of this means the FIA is about to throw the 2026 rulebook in the bin — that ship has sailed, and too many stakeholders have committed too much for that to be anything other than fantasy. But it does explain why the next engine conversation has started so early, and why the tone is changing.
F1 spent years trying to look attractive to manufacturers. Now it’s wealthy enough, stable enough, and confident enough to ask the harder question: attractive on whose terms?
