Lewis Hamilton didn’t need to dress it up after Montreal. The racing, he said, is moving in the right direction; the way the cars can follow and fight is finally starting to look like what the rulemakers promised. The power units, though, are another story — and his description of the “power dying halfway down the straight” landed because it’s the sort of complaint drivers usually keep for the debrief room.
A few days later, the sharpest response didn’t come from a rival team boss or an FIA briefing. It came from his father.
Anthony Hamilton has revived talk of HybridV10 — his proposed single-seater category aimed at a 2028 launch — and his latest update wasn’t subtle about why he thinks there’s space for it. The pitch is a new series with separate V10 and V8 divisions, built around fan feedback, with a stated aim of being more accessible for drivers and personnel. And, as ever with anything that invokes “V10” in modern motorsport, it’s as much about what it’s against as what it’s for.
In an Instagram post, Hamilton Sr confirmed the project has moved beyond the early, dreamy stage and into something more tangible.
“It’s been a while since I’ve posted about HybridV10,” he wrote. “I’ve spent the past few months raising the funds to help get it off the ground. Since December, the project has continued progressing quietly behind the scenes. The initial car design phase is now complete and we have now moved into the first stages of CFD development. The target remains the same: 2028.”
Then the line that made the post feel like more than a routine development update: “Looking at the direction top-tier motorsport is heading, HybridV10 cannot come soon enough.”
That’s a pretty pointed bit of timing, arriving right after Hamilton’s own critique of the 2026 power units in the wake of the Canadian Grand Prix — a race that, by any measure, was a reminder of why the sport is worth watching. Kimi Antonelli took a fourth win in a row after Mercedes team-mate George Russell suffered a battery failure, ending a lead-swapping fight that had been threatening to become an instant Montreal classic. Hamilton, meanwhile, edged Max Verstappen in a tense scrap for second, another chapter in a rivalry that still seems to find oxygen whenever the two end up with the same piece of tarmac to argue over.
Hamilton’s broader point was neatly inconvenient for F1. The chassis side of the 2026 package, in his view, is doing its job — cars can race closer, and you can feel that drivers trust the air a bit more than they have in recent seasons. Yet the energy deployment and the sensation of performance dropping away is, to him, “not what motorsport should be.”
F1 has been in the hybrid era since 2014, but the 2026 regulations leaned harder into electrical power. After the initial backlash from drivers, the FIA introduced tweaks that were generally welcomed, though the paddock mood has largely been that they were incremental, not transformative. There’s also talk of more radical hardware change for 2027 if the support is there — the kind of phrase that tells you the politics are still being negotiated in parallel with the engineering.
That backdrop is exactly why HybridV10 is getting attention rather than being filed away as another nostalgic concept. It isn’t being sold as a direct competitor to F1 in the immediate sense; it’s being sold as a pressure point. An alternative that tries to capture the part of the audience — and, quietly, the part of the industry — that misses the simplicity of performance you can hear and feel, without the sense of a car managing itself down the straight.
The V8 reference is doing work here too. Hamilton Sr’s series would include V8s alongside V10s, and V8s have been floated in F1 circles as a possible future direction, with a target of 2030 mentioned if FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem gets his way. Whether that’s realistic or not is beside the point: it shows the debate is no longer just fans posting old onboard clips. It’s back in official conversation, and projects like HybridV10 try to turn that mood into momentum.
The most interesting line in Hamilton Sr’s update wasn’t the CFD mention — though that’s the bit intended to signal seriousness — it was the framing. “The direction top-tier motorsport is heading” is a complaint that wraps together cost, complexity, drivability, sound, identity, and the constant sensation that engineers are asked to solve contradictions because governance can’t pick one clear philosophy and stick to it.
Hamilton’s comments in Canada cut from the same cloth. He can respect the way the cars race and still feel the power units aren’t giving drivers what they need — not just to go fast, but to attack. And when a seven-time world champion is saying that after finishing second in one of the best races of the season, it’s not a driver having a moan because his day went wrong. It’s someone drawing a line between spectacle and sensation.
HybridV10 remains a long way from a starting grid, of course. Raising funds, completing an initial design phase, and beginning CFD are necessary steps — they’re also the easy parts compared to building a full sporting and commercial ecosystem around a new single-seater championship. But the fact it’s being discussed at all, and discussed now, tells you something about where the sport’s argument has drifted in 2026.
F1 is producing strong racing. Yet it’s still fighting over what it wants to sound like, feel like, and be. And Anthony Hamilton is betting there’s room — maybe even demand — for a series that doesn’t just talk about those old values, but builds its entire identity around them.
