BYD’s flirtation with Formula 1 is starting to look like more than a courtesy call. Stella Li, the company’s vice-president and one of the most influential figures in China’s rapidly expanding EV industry, has confirmed she’s been in direct dialogue with F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali. And, as revealed ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix, she’s also spent time with Christian Horner in the south of France — the sort of meeting that doesn’t happen unless someone is at least sketching out what a serious project could look like.
The intrigue isn’t simply “will BYD enter?” It’s what kind of entry we’re talking about, and how they’d navigate an F1 landscape that’s both commercially ruthless and, politically, never as straightforward as the glossy pitch decks suggest.
There’s been noise around BYD potentially being interested in the 24 percent Alpine stake currently held by Otro Capital, but the sense is their real ambition runs bigger: their own team, their own identity, a front-door arrival rather than a backroom shareholding.
On the practical side, building a team is not the boogeyman it once was — at least not for a company with BYD’s scale. They’re not short on global facilities that could be reshaped into an F1 operation. The twist is geography. BYD has previously poured cold water on establishing UK factories, with its European president Michael Shu citing Brexit-related “instability”. That matters, because the sport still has a gravitational pull towards Britain even as the model slowly loosens: Ferrari remains all-in at Maranello, Audi is splitting its chassis and power unit operations between Switzerland and Germany, and Cadillac’s current UK/US footprint is expected to shift its centre of gravity towards the United States over time.
But bricks and mortar aren’t what decides whether you’re on the grid. The gatekeeping is. Any true new entry would run through an FIA Expression of Interest process — stress tests, viability tests, the whole “prove you won’t embarrass the championship” routine — before the commercial rights holder (FOM) gets its say. And everyone in the paddock has the Cadillac/Andretti saga burned into their memory: the FIA was satisfied, FOM wasn’t, and it took the Cadillac name and the pressure of a US Department of Justice investigation for the project to find oxygen.
BYD, though, arrives with a different kind of leverage. It isn’t a speculative consortium looking for a slot; it’s already one of the world’s biggest carmakers, sitting on a market valuation in the $125 billion range. That’s the sort of figure that tends to concentrate minds when F1 talks about “value”.
There’s also a notable tailwind from the FIA itself. Mohammed Ben Sulayem has previously suggested that a credible Chinese manufacturer proposal would likely be welcomed, arguing the commercial logic is obvious if China comes properly into play. He’s been careful to frame it as “the right team” rather than expansion for expansion’s sake, but his point was clear: if a Chinese entry sustains the business and the longevity of the championship, it becomes hard to pretend the door is bolted shut.
This is where Horner’s presence in the conversation matters. Whatever you think of him, he’s fluent in F1’s internal language: how to assemble an organisation quickly, how to recruit aggressively, and how to work the political circuitry that can make or break a new project. He’s done the “build from scratch” job before, turning Red Bull’s purchase of the old Jaguar operation into something that fit the brand — and, over time, into the grid’s most formidable structure. If BYD wants a guide through the sport’s unwritten rules, there aren’t many with a thicker Rolodex.
Li, for her part, has been publicly upbeat. She’s spoken about liking F1 because it’s “passion and culture” and because “people dream of being in Formula 1,” while also framing an entry as a chance to put BYD’s technology “to the test”. That line is important, because it immediately sharpens the awkward bit: what technology, exactly, would BYD be testing?
This is 2026. F1’s current power units are built on a 50/50 split between combustion and electrification — the compromise that tempted manufacturers back in with the promise of road relevance. Yet the direction of travel is already being argued over in public. The pushback from drivers and fans over the energy-management feel of these cars has forced changes to reduce harvesting demands, and there’s already an agreement “in principle” for 2027 to tilt the balance towards combustion at 60/40. Beyond that, Ben Sulayem has made clear he sees a V8 with a small electrical contribution as a likely destination for 2030/31, with or without full manufacturer harmony.
That sits uncomfortably with BYD’s core identity. The company ended production of pure internal-combustion engines almost five years ago, doubling down on electric and hybrid powertrains. Its advantage in the road-car world is vertical integration — batteries, semiconductors, motors, lighting, powertrains — the ability to build much of the ecosystem inside the BYD tent, rather than shopping for it. In 2025, BYD’s global unit sales climbed to 4.6 million, and it posted net earnings of CNY 32.6 billion ($4.7 billion). This isn’t a firm that needs F1’s prize money; it’s a firm that would want F1 to make strategic sense.
So if BYD is serious, the entry concept has to answer a fundamental question: do they want to be a works outfit in anything other than name?
Customer power would get you racing quickly, and the marketing upside of simply being on the grid would still be massive — especially for a brand that, while dominant at home, is expanding its international profile. But Li’s “technology to the test” language doesn’t quite fit a project where the key performance differentiator is bought in a crate from someone else. Cadillac has accepted the customer route as a staging post while General Motors builds towards its own power unit division. Audi has committed to the full-fat approach by buying Sauber and building a powertrain operation. If BYD wants to be viewed as an engineering force, not just an entrant, it will need a story that goes beyond logos on a sidepod.
That’s why the more interesting paddock chatter is around partnerships — the kind of joint venture that lets BYD claim technical relevance without having to build an entire F1 power unit programme from a standing start. The obvious complication is that the established suppliers, such as Mercedes and Ferrari, are unlikely to rewrite their customer model just to accommodate a newcomer. But the manufacturers supplying only one team — Audi and Honda, for instance — might theoretically have more room to explore something more bespoke if it aligned with their own objectives.
There’s a further angle that keeps popping up in late-night conversations: what happens if the sport moves towards simpler V8 architecture in the next cycle? A less complex engine concept changes the maths. BYD could decide it’s manageable to build something itself even if the direct transfer to its road-car portfolio is limited. Or it could look at a proven specialist supplier arrangement. None of this is close to concrete yet, but that’s the point: BYD’s interest forces F1 to confront how it sells itself in the next regulatory era.
There’s also the alternative route — buying rather than building. Officially, no team is for sale, but minority investments can be a foothold, and F1’s ownership structures remain under scrutiny. Zak Brown has been pushing the FIA to consider rules that would unwind common team ownership models, which inevitably drags Red Bull’s relationship with Racing Bulls into the conversation if regulators ever decide those links represent too much competitive overlap. It’s distant, hypothetical stuff for now, but it’s the kind of regulatory tremor that can suddenly create market openings in F1.
For BYD, the headline is easy: a Chinese automotive giant wants in. The reality is more nuanced. Getting accepted is one battle, building a credible team is another, and aligning the sport’s shifting engine philosophy with a brand built on electrification might be the hardest part of all. The Horner meetings suggest BYD understands that — and understands that in Formula 1, the project doesn’t start with the car. It starts with the politics.
