Ross Brawn hasn’t been in the day-to-day Formula 1 trenches since stepping away in 2022, but he still talks like someone who’s seen every regulatory storm the paddock can whip up — and, more importantly, knows how teams behave when a new rulebook lands.
The latest flashpoint ahead of 2026 is a familiar one: power unit paranoia, whispered advantage, and a meeting with the FIA’s technical brains to decide whether something is smart engineering or something that needs shutting down.
On Thursday (22 January), the FIA sat down with team technical representatives to discuss the new 2026 power unit and chassis regulations. The chatter that prompted it is centred on piston compression ratios — specifically, allegations that one or two manufacturers may have found a way to effectively exceed the permitted 16:1 limit once the engine is running at temperature.
That number matters because the 2026 regulations cap compression ratio at 16:1, down from 18:1 under the previous ruleset. In other words, the FIA has already moved to put a ceiling on one route to performance. But as ever in F1, a ceiling is only really a ceiling if everyone agrees what “height” means in practice.
The claim doing the rounds is that a manufacturer can meet the 16:1 requirement at ambient conditions — the kind of checks you can do in a controlled environment — while ending up with a higher effective compression ratio on track once heat and thermal expansion come into play. It’s the sort of technical nuance that sounds esoteric until you remember F1 has been built on esoteric nuance for 75 years.
Brawn’s reaction, speaking to Sky Sports News, was less pearl-clutching and more a shrug of recognition.
“As it’s been described to me, it just sounds like a clever interpretation of the regulation,” he said. “I don’t know enough about it anymore, but I think whenever new regulations come in, as we’ve seen in the past, always someone takes a clever interpretation. That’s what’s happened.
“Of course, for the other teams, the best form of defence is attack. That’s what they’re doing.”
If that sounds like Brawn defending the idea of a ‘loophole’, it’s because he’s never been a purist about these things — and his own career provides the context. He was one of the key architects of Ferrari’s early-2000s machine, and his eponymous Brawn GP outfit famously made the most of 2009’s rule changes with its double diffuser solution. Brawn knows the difference between cheating and reading a regulation carefully enough to spot what the writers didn’t anticipate. He also knows the second act is always the same: rivals don’t just complain, they lobby. Hard.
That’s what gives this story its real edge. The engineering itself is only half the battle; the other half is politics wrapped in technical language. When new rules arrive, the first competitive order isn’t set purely by who designed the best parts — it’s also set by who can defend their interpretation once everyone else has seen it.
One manufacturer linked by rumour to the alleged grey area is Red Bull-Ford. Red Bull Powertrains technical director Ben Hodgkinson has already tried to pour cold water on the idea, calling it “a lot of noise about nothing” and insisting Red Bull’s first Ford-linked unit had a compression ratio “way too low” for legality to even be a discussion.
The fact Hodgkinson felt the need to address it at all tells you plenty. Nobody wants to walk into 2026 with questions hanging over their hardware, not when the new power unit formula is supposed to reset the competitive landscape. But nobody wants to publicly concede they’ve found something interesting either — because the moment you do, the paddock’s attention locks on, and the lobbying starts in earnest.
For now, the FIA isn’t giving a running commentary on what was said in Thursday’s room. It confirmed only that the session was technical in nature and framed it as a normal part of bedding in a new regulations cycle.
“As is customary with the introduction of new regulations, discussions on the 2026 iteration covering power unit and chassis are ongoing,” an FIA spokesperson said. “The meeting planned for 22 January is between technical experts.
“As always, the FIA assesses the situation in order to make sure the Regulations are understood and applied in the same manner between all the participants.”
That last line is doing a lot of work. “Understood and applied in the same manner” is the FIA’s diplomatic way of saying two things at once: first, that it expects teams to interpret the rules consistently; and second, that if an interpretation creates a performance swing the rest of the field deems unacceptable, the governing body reserves the right to tighten the language.
Brawn’s point — and it’s one most technical people in the sport would recognise — is that none of this is surprising. A regulation is a document, not a machine. The machine comes later, and by the time it exists, someone will have found a corner case the document didn’t explicitly cover. The paddock then decides whether that corner case becomes part of the new normal, or gets legislated out.
The only unknown is how quickly the FIA chooses to act, and how cleanly it can draw a line without creating a fresh set of unintended consequences. Because in F1, every time you “fix” one interpretation, you tend to open up two more.
