Carlos Sainz doesn’t need much prompting these days to tell you what he thinks Formula 1 should feel like from the cockpit. In Montreal, with the paddock still digesting the post-Miami push to tweak the next-generation power units, he essentially dared the sport’s powerbrokers to do what they say they want to do — and then actually follow it through.
The headline is straightforward enough: a 60/40 split between internal combustion and electrical deployment is now on the table for 2027, moving away from the near 50/50 balance baked into the current direction. It was agreed “in principle” after Miami. That phrase matters. In F1 governance, it’s the difference between a genuine course correction and another nice idea that dies quietly in committee.
And there are plenty of places this can still get messy.
What happens next is the familiar, procedural slog: technical experts within the Technical Advisory Committee will dig into what a 60/40 reality looks like in detail, those proposals then go to the Power Unit Advisory Committee for a formal vote, and only after that can the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council ratify any regulation change. None of it is instantaneous, and none of it is immune to the kind of lobbying that defines modern F1 whenever competitive advantage is even suspected of being on the line.
That’s the part Sainz is really talking about when he calls on the FIA and FOM to be “tough”. He isn’t pretending this is purely a philosophical debate about what’s “right for the sport”. He knows exactly how quickly the conversation shifts when manufacturers and teams look at their dyno curves, their energy recovery maps, and the money already spent.
“Unfortunately, like always in this sport, there will be politics involved and different interests involved across the main manufacturers that will push back and push forward depending on what they’re looking for,” Sainz said. His point was blunt: if the people running the championship believe the direction is wrong, they can’t let the loudest stakeholder win the argument by default.
He’s also careful to frame Miami as a nudge rather than a fix — a “small step forward”, in his words — but one that showed the sport is at least listening. The next step, the one that matters, is whether that listening survives contact with voting structures and vested interests.
Sainz has been one of the more consistent voices arguing that the current cars — with their sensitivity around energy deployment — ask drivers to manage too much and attack too little. Even with a 60/40 split, he’s not claiming nirvana. He’s essentially arguing for a hierarchy: electricity should be an extra tool, not the foundation the whole lap is built on.
“I think, for us drivers, that will never be enough,” he said. “If there is electrical, it should be an add-on rather than a dependency on electrical power as we have now.”
That line is the subtext of this entire debate. A 60/40 split is being sold as a way to make the racing product healthier — less fragile, less constrained, less dictated by whether you’re inside or outside the ideal energy window. But it’s still a compromise between the sport’s performance identity and a manufacturer-heavy formula that has, inevitably, its own set of priorities.
Max Verstappen, unsurprisingly, didn’t bother with the nuance. He has been warning all season that the sport’s direction is testing his patience, and in Canada he pushed it further. If the changes don’t happen, he said, he’s not sure he can stomach it.
“Well, if it stays like this, it’s going to be a long year next year, which I don’t want,” Verstappen said. “I can tell you, if it stays like this, it’s just mentally not doable. There’s a lot of other fun things out there.”
It’s classic Verstappen in tone, but there’s a sharper edge underneath: this isn’t just a driver moaning about a tricky car. It’s a four-time world champion (and the grid’s most influential voice) telling the FIA and FOM that their product risks losing the very people who sell it best.
He also said the quiet part out loud about why this is difficult to push through. If some believe they’re sitting on an advantage under the current shape of the rules, they’ll naturally “try to be difficult”. In other words: don’t expect everyone to treat a 60/40 move as a simple quality-of-show improvement. In F1, every regulation change is interpreted through the lens of who wins and who loses.
Liam Lawson, speaking from Racing Bulls, took a more guarded route — he’s repeatedly swerved the “are these cars fun?” question since pre-season — but even he acknowledged why it matters that drivers are being heard at all.
“You can’t have a series where people don’t want to be racing or don’t want to be racing the cars that are not enjoyable to them,” Lawson said. “So, yeah, I think it’s positive.”
Then there’s Audi, inevitably sitting somewhere near the centre of the speculation storm. The suggestion in the paddock has been that Audi is among those most inclined to protect the status quo, having committed to F1 on the basis of the incoming regulations. Officially, the messaging is more flexible: sources have indicated Audi isn’t tied to a specific ratio, while Mattia Binotto has pointed to a generally upbeat view from the team’s drivers about where the formula is heading.
Nico Hülkenberg, asked in Montreal, sounded unbothered either way — and his comments cut through the noise in a useful way. The change isn’t done, he stressed, despite how loudly it’s been discussed.
“It’s not been decided and signed off yet, from what I understand,” Hülkenberg said. “For me personally, I think it’s fine… it puts a little bit less emphasis, obviously, on energy; it is quite sensitive now and critical, especially in quali.”
That’s the most revealing detail anyone’s offered without getting into proprietary specifics: qualifying is where the current balance can feel most unforgiving. If the aim is to reduce the sense that drivers are tiptoeing around an energy equation rather than extracting lap time in a more natural way, that’s the battleground.
Now the hard part: turning sentiment into regulation.
Mohammed Ben Sulayem has been clear he’d like simpler engines and less of the sport contorting itself around manufacturer wish-lists. But wanting it and getting it are different jobs, and the FIA will have to decide how much resistance it’s willing to absorb to reach 2027 with a meaningful change locked in.
Sainz, at least, has made his position plain. If F1 truly believes 60/40 is where it needs to go, he’s telling the decision-makers not to blink when the politics arrive — because they always do.
