FIA outline new ‘catch up’ rules for 2026 – Formula One is heading towards one of the biggest ever car and power unit regulation overhauls in the history of the sport. Whilst the ‘final’ draught of the new powertrain rules was issued in June 2024, the FIA left itself some wriggle room on how to deal with a situation where one team/manufacturer is clearly dominant.
The memory of Mercedes nailing the new V6 turbo hybrid power unit in 2014 are fresh in most people’s minds and how they won every F1 championship between then and 2020. Of course the parent company of Mercedes High Performance Powertrains spent eye watering sums of money on the R&D for the new technology, some reporting it to be as much as $1bn.
However, Nikolas Tombazis who is the FIA official managing the day to day F1 concerns, is confident fans won’t see a repeat of the Mercedes dominance for a number of reasons. Speaking to motorsport.com he now asserts: “I don’t think that we are going to have a situation where a single manufacturer has such a huge advantage as was the case in 2014.”
The politics behind the 2026 powertrains
The politics behind the formation of the 2026 new powertrain rules has slowly emerged over the past twelve moths and it has become apparent behind the scenes the German automakers had a strong influence in their framing. All the way back in 2017, the FIA set up a working party for both existing and potential new manufacturers to hammer out the future of F1 power.
Porsche, who ultimately failed to get a deal done with Red Bull Racing were keen for F1 to introduce four wheel driver cars, with the front axle driver by an MGU-K unit which by no strange co-incidence mirrored the system developed by Porsche for the 919 Hybrid car. It seems the age old adage credited to Enzo Ferrari remains true today. “Win on Sunday, sell cars on Monday.”
F1’s CEO, Stefano Domenicali, revealed to AMuS last summer: “My personal opinion is that it would be sufficient to use climate-neutral fuel. However, we had to take the manufacturers’ wishes into account,” he revealed. There was a split in the vision of the future amongst the manufactures, with Audi, Porsche and Mercedes believing hybrid was the future direction of road cars. Ferrari, Renault and later Red Bull all petitioned for a return to simpler and less expensive internal combustion engine technologies but using 100% sustainable fuel.
It appears the tug of war was won by the Germans, although the controversial and highly expensive heat regeneration function (MGU-H) has been dropped. The biggest bone of contention has been over the percentage of electrical power in terms of total power output. The Germans wanted to push to the boat increasing electrical output 300% from the current generation of power units, so the balance of power output is split 50/50.
Newey concerned one manufacturer cold dominate
As late as Bahrain this year, the FIA called an emergency meeting concerning the new powertrains, with a proposal that the electrical contribution be dialled down to 40 or even 30 percent. This would have required all but one manufacturer to agree but Mercedes and Audi were having non of it.
Nikolas Tombazis confirms the tension in the F1 engine working party, when he reveals: “The engines are still not as simple as we would have liked. We would have liked to go further, but we had a lot of resistance against simplifying the regulations more. So there are things that we would have liked to be even simpler, but they are still simpler than the current generation of engines. They don’t have the MGU-H, and there are a few things that have tighter limits, so we don’t think the gaps will be as big as in 2014.”
Whilst the perceived wisdom presently is that no single manufacturer is going to dominate like Mercedes, there’s no guarantee this won’t occur. Even F1 car design guru Adrian Newey believes there’s more than a slim chance of one of the power units being dominant next year.
Speaking on his official arrival at Aston Martin, Newey explained: “There has to be a chance that one manufacturer will come out well on top, and it will become a power-unit-dominated regulation, at least to start with. There’s a chance that if it’s on the combustion engine side of it, that somebody comes up with a dominant combustion engine that will last through the length of the formula, because the way the regulations are written, it’s quite difficult for people who are behind to catch up.”
FIA will measure new power units average output
Yet the complete suite of tools the FIA will use to allow teams to ‘catch up’ was not fully known, but now Tombazis opens the curtain a little wider. “We do have newcomers, and it is always a risk at the start of a new cycle that there is some divergence initially,” explains Tombazis. “Additionally, we have a cost gap for the PU manufacturers now.” It means that manufacturers who are behind cannot simply throw unlimited money at their engine projects. To still offer them possibilities to catch up, the FIA has included a new system into the 2026 regulations.”
Embedded in the regulations is a concept called ADUO, which stands for Additional Development and Update Opportunities. Yet it was not defined and in any kind of detail, and has been the subject of a significant amount of work over the past few months. Now Tombazis reveals the FIA will make an assessment of the various internal combustion engines (ICE) over the first five race weekends of 2026.
Each one will then have its average power calculated. The methodology for calculating this can be found in the appendix to the regulations and any unit with more than 3% less power than the highest rated ICE will be grated ADUO (Additional Development and Update Opportunities).
The benefit will accrue across the season and translates into three main categories. Firstly, an additional amount of money will be allowed over and above the cost cap. The there will be an increase in the number of hours this manufacturer wold be allowed to spend testing on dynos. Finally, there will be be the opportunity to re-homologate the power unit with the FIA.
Reliability issues will increase cost cap
The final part of the FIA plans for a ‘safety net’ include: “An additional initiative which addresses the situation where a PU manufacturer has huge reliability issues to start with. Imagine somebody who blows up an engine each race weekend and each engine costs a lot of money. They suddenly find that they are eating their cost cap with blown engines. They have to reduce the development to stay below the cost cap, and you can imagine that would be an awful situation,” argues Tombazis.
“So we’ve got some initiatives, which are going through the same phase of discussion now, and will hopefully be approved quite soon, whereby once you use more than a certain number of engines, you start having a certain cost cap relief.”
This will of course be fine for the teams with larger budgets, but for the likes of Alpine and Williams, a raft of extra engines may see them forced to develop the car less to save money for power units. Yet in the grand scheme of things, the FIA is making a huge effort to ensure we don’t; end up with one constructor winning a record eight consecutive titles as did Mercedes between 2014-2021.
Red Bull A-B team threat following Horner’s departure
The debate around Red Bull owning two Formula One teams is set to surface once again. Christian Horner had been a staunch defender of the Red Bull energy drinks empire’s right to continue as owners of two of the ten F1 teams, but in an ironic twist of fate the Austrian overlords in sacking Horner may have opened the door to a ban on two team ownership.
McLaren’s CEO Zak Brown raised the subject first back in 2023 and come Bahrain the following year, the then Red Bull team principal set out the context of the defence for the energy drinks organisations ownership of two F1 teams.
“One has to take a look back at the history of where this started and why that ownership is as it is now,” said the British boss. “Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley approached Dietrich Mateschitz back in 2005 to acquire what was then the Minardi Formula 1 team which was perennially struggling and on the brink of bankruptcy. Dietrich stepped in, acquired the team, shored it up, and then invested significantly in their Faenza facilities in Italy.”…. READ MORE
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