The FIA wants to sell every customer team the same V8, so no manufacturer can whip a B-team's vote..
Speaking to a small group of reporters at the British Grand Prix, FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem described an engine that does not exist yet and framed it as a fix for a problem that has nothing to do with lap time. He wants the FIA to appoint an independent manufacturer to build a cheap, off-the-shelf V8 that any team without its own engine can buy, so that no carmaker can hold a customer team's vote hostage. His words were blunt: "There will be no control over the teams, A team over the B team, that's supplied with their engines," he told The Race. The refuelling headlines wrote themselves the same weekend, but the customer engine is the idea with teeth.
The leverage a white-label engine is meant to kill
Six of the current eleven teams buy their power units from a rival's works programme, the arrangement the plan targets. Mercedes supplies McLaren, Williams and Alpine; Ferrari supplies Haas and Cadillac; Red Bull Ford supplies Racing Bulls. Every one of those relationships is also a paddock voting relationship, and the fear Ben Sulayem named is that an engine maker can lean on a customer when the sport's rules go to a vote.
Alpine is the sharpest illustration of how tangled that has become. Renault shut its own Formula 1 engine project at the end of 2025 and Alpine now runs a Mercedes customer supply deal, which means a manufacturer-owned team races on a rival manufacturer's power unit. Racing Bulls sits at the other end of the spectrum, a team whose engine, ownership and sister-team politics all trace back to the same Red Bull address. In both cases, who supplies the engine and who controls the vote are not cleanly separable, and that is what the FIA says it wants to break.
The mechanism Ben Sulayem sketched is a single approved unit, built by an independent such as Cosworth, sold at a controlled price to any taker. "If it is affordable, then we will have one engine for the rest of the B-teams, so nobody can leverage them and tell them to vote this way, or we are not going to give you a good engine," he said. He was equally direct about who would hold the leash instead: "It will be an FIA-selected engine that would be allowed to the teams. Then we control the neutrality, we control the power and the money." F1 CEO Stefano Domenicali has spoken favourably about a "white label" engine option for the flexibility it would give the championship, so the idea has support on the commercial side as well as the regulatory one.
Handing the FIA control of engine supply, price and neutrality is not a small governance change, and the plan leaves the hardest cases unresolved. Ben Sulayem did not explain how a neutral supply would apply to closely aligned teams like Red Bull and Racing Bulls, saying only that "we are discussing what is a second team and what is another team. It depends on ownership." The question of what counts as a B-team is precisely the one a white-label engine is supposed to answer, and on the evidence so far the FIA has the ambition sketched before it has the definition.
Why a V8 needs this conversation at all
None of this arises without the decision to kill the current engine. Both the FIA and Formula One Management have concluded that the turbo hybrids are too expensive and too complicated to keep, and Domenicali and Ben Sulayem have converged on returning to a simpler V8, with the 2031 rules drawn on a blank canvas and the engine potentially arriving in 2030 if teams agree. Ben Sulayem's case for the change is cost and appeal in equal measure: "It's a very complex engine, and it's very expensive, and it doesn't sound as good as everybody wants," he said of the V6 turbo hybrid, arguing a cheap V8 could cut engine research budgets by around half.
Weight is the other driver, and it links directly back to the customer-engine idea. A simpler engine can shed the heavy battery packs and energy-recovery hardware of the hybrid era, and the FIA is targeting 100kg off the car, a change Ben Sulayem tied to driver safety rather than performance. The hybrid element would not vanish, but it would shrink dramatically, from the current split of roughly 46 percent electrical deployment to something Ben Sulayem put at "could be 10 percent, it might be 15 percent," a deliberate retreat from the era that has drivers lifting off mid-straight to save battery.
Even the layout is unsettled. Audi has said a turbo is essential to its reading of the rules, while Ben Sulayem has leaned toward letting manufacturers choose between a turbo and a hybrid element rather than carrying both, on the grounds that "a turbo means a lot of weight and a lot of money" and mutes the engine note the V8 is partly meant to restore. The technical specification is still a set of trade-offs rather than a settled formula, which is worth remembering every time the 2031 plan is reported as a done deal.
Refuelling is a weight problem, not a show problem
The refuelling study exists only because of that 100kg target. A naturally aspirated V8 burns more fuel than the efficient V6 turbo hybrid, so completing a race distance would need a bigger tank, and a bigger tank puts back much of the mass the new rules are trying to remove. Ben Sulayem has commissioned an FIA study to weigh whether refuelling should return to keep tank sizes down, and he was explicit that the driver is what the exercise is about, telling The Race: "How much you start with, how much you fill, this is what we are studying right now."
Laid side by side, the fuel numbers are stark. During the V8 refuelling era that ran until 2009, tanks held roughly 90 to 100 litres, about 70kg of fuel; when refuelling was banned for 2010, tank sizes climbed to around 200 litres, roughly 150kg; the turbo hybrids settled the maximum fuel load at 100kg, and the 2026 rules sit near 105kg. A thirstier V8 without refuelling would push that mass back up, which is the specific thing the reset is trying to avoid, so the honest framing of the refuelling debate is fuel-tank weight rather than spectacle.
Cost and safety are the counterweights, and Ben Sulayem played both down without dismissing them. Bringing refuelling back would cost each team an estimated four million dollars a year in equipment and freight, a real number for the smaller entries, and the safety record of the practice is the reason it was dropped in the first place. On that point he was careful: "It's not a concern if you do it in the right way," he said, adding that the study has decided nothing. Refuelling is a candidate, not a plan, and it lives or dies on whether a V8 can be made to finish a race on a tank light enough to keep.
Who wants in, and who has already said no
The engine plan has drawn its first public reactions, and they cut both ways. Ben Sulayem argued that a cheaper unit would tempt big teams to build their own, claiming "McLaren said they will do it, then you have Alpine, they will do their own engine," and predicting the grid could end up with more power-unit makers, not fewer. McLaren CEO Zak Brown has indeed said several times this year that his team would consider its own engine if the economics worked, which is the outcome the FIA would treat as proof the reset had succeeded.
Renault, the manufacturer the plan assumed was tempted, pushed back hardest. Its CEO Francois Provost said at the British Grand Prix that "I support the V8 direction, but it's not because it could be an opportunity for Renault to come back as an engine manufacturer. It's not our strategy," a flat contradiction of the idea that a cheaper formula would pull the Alpine owner back into engine building it walked away from months ago. When the FIA president's own example of an eager new manufacturer says on the record it has no such intention, the gap between the vision and the buy-in is measurable.
That gap is the honest state of the 2031 reset. A cheap V8, an FIA-controlled customer engine and a refuelling return are three proposals at three different stages of maturity, none of them ratified, and all of them dependent on the same manufacturers whose leverage the engine plan is designed to reduce. The nearer signpost is the 60/40 electrical rebalancing already scheduled for 2028, which will test how much appetite the current makers have for retreating from the hybrid before anyone has to vote on abandoning it. Until then, the loudest idea of the British Grand Prix weekend remains a president thinking out loud about who should own the most political component in Formula 1.