Four of five: the voting rule that froze F1's 2026 engine before it turned a wheel.
In the opening weeks of 2026 the FIA tried to cut the new power unit's maximum race deployment to 200kW, down from 350kW, and the proposal was dismissed before it reached the cars. That single rejected number, first reported by The Race last year, opens the question drivers spent the Belgian Grand Prix asking out loud: if everyone could see the 2026 engine would starve cars of energy on long straights, why did nobody stop it?
The answer the FIA gave this month is not that it failed to see the problem. It is that it saw the problem and could not get a vote.
The rule that needed four of five
Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA's single-seater director, laid out the mechanism in an interview published by motorsport.com and expanded on it to The Race. "We did anticipate a lot of these things they have complained about in the two years before the launch of the season, and we did try to make some adjustments," he said. "But we failed with the governance that was in place."
That governance is a specific instrument, not a vague sense of committee drift. Ahead of 2026 the sport set up a Power Unit Advisory Committee that dictated how the engine rules could be changed, and it set the threshold high. For a major change, Tombazis told The Race, the FIA needed the backing of Formula One Management and four of the five manufacturers registered at the time. Miss one vote too many and the rulebook stayed shut.
"For the sort of changes we did, we needed at least four of them to agree," Tombazis said. "Quite simply, four of them did not agree during the years when we discussed adjustments." A four-of-five supermajority sounds like a wide margin until you invert it: any two manufacturers, acting together, could hold the formula exactly where it was. The proposed deployment cut needed a coalition it never assembled.
Why the lock was built on purpose
The instinct is to read the veto as an accident, a piece of bureaucratic over-engineering nobody meant to leave live. It was the opposite. The supermajority was the price of getting Audi, and the reassurance of a level field, into the room in the first place.
An incoming manufacturer that has not yet turned a wheel is exposed in a way an established one is not. It cannot lobby from a position of on-track data, and it has to commit hundreds of millions to a rulebook that could, in principle, be rewritten around it before it arrives. The 2022 framework answered that exposure by binding every registered manufacturer, present or not, to the same financial and operational rules, including a first-ever power-unit cost cap, the same stability Formula 1 later formalised in the 2026 Concorde governance arrangements.
Tombazis used Audi as the worked example. "They still had to be bound by regulations," he told The Race. "They could not come to us and say, well, you know we're not participating, hence we can spend five times the money. That would have been unfair." The committee cut both ways by design: it forced newcomers to accept the cost cap and the operational limits, and in exchange it capped how far the FIA could move the goalposts on its own. The veto that later blocked the deployment fix is the same veto that protected Audi's investment. You do not get one without the other.
What the lock cost on track
The 2026 unit is where the abstraction becomes a straight-line problem. The regulations pair the 1.6-litre V6 with an MGU-K raised to 350kW, nearly triple the 120kW of the outgoing hybrid, and delete the MGU-H entirely. Close to half the car's peak output now comes from the battery, and without the MGU-H there is no exhaust-driven path to keep harvesting once the brakes stop feeding the MGU-K. On a long full-throttle stretch the electrical side empties faster than it can be refilled, and the car deploys, then clips, then coasts.
Spa is where that arithmetic became a spectacle. Drivers lifting on the run to Les Combes to nurse a flat battery is not the picture the sport wants from its fastest classic circuit, and the Grand Prix Drivers' Association said so. "Whoever saw these simulations in 2022, 2023 and didn't look at it and say, how can we even accept that, needs to review what happened there," Carlos Sainz said, quoted by The Race. Lewis Hamilton was blunter: "I don't know who made the decision, but whoever it is, they've still got their job."
Tombazis does not dispute the symptom. His account reframes the accountability the drivers are reaching for. The simulations Sainz points to were run, the concern was raised inside the two-year window before launch, and the correction the FIA wanted, that 200kW deployment cut among them, went to the committee and lost.
The fix that arrives a year late
F1 did eventually move. From the Miami Grand Prix in May the sport introduced a package of energy-management measures to take the worst of the clipping out of races, changes the FIA logged as formal amendments to the 2026 regulations. Miami is the tell, though, not the triumph: it is the point at which the manufacturers who had blocked change finally agreed to it, once the cars were racing and the problem was visible to everyone watching.
Beyond the in-season patch, a longer roadmap now has support. F1 has agreed to shift the unit's nominal 50/50 combustion-to-electric balance toward 60/40 by 2028, tilting the split back toward the engine, part of a set of evolutionary changes agreed in principle for the 2027 and 2028 cars. Tombazis put the cost of the delay plainly. "It's a bit of a shame that we had to wait until then," he said of the May agreement. "I think we could have ideally done that a couple of years before, and then there wouldn't have been all of this discussion."
The committee has kept operating in the meantime, and it still bites. In February 2026 the FIA had to put a compression-ratio clarification to a manufacturer e-vote to close what PlanetF1 described as a loophole in the new engine rules, a reminder that the same voting structure that slowed the big fix also governs the small ones. A supermajority is not a switch you flip once. It is the standing condition of the formula until the framework itself is renegotiated.
Tombazis, for the record, does not accept that the season has been a technical disaster. "Most races have been pretty exciting," he told The Race, noting that even with Mercedes "doing most of the winning" the racing has avoided the processional whitewash that has followed past rule resets. That is a defensible read of the on-track product, and a separate question from the governance one. A season can be watchable and still have been shaped by a rule change its own regulator wanted to make and could not.
The number worth carrying out of all this is not 200kW or 60/40. It is four of five. The 2026 power unit was not frozen by a lack of engineering warning; it was frozen by a decision rule that made two dissenting manufacturers enough to stop a fix the FIA had already drafted. The energy split moves in 2027 and 2028 because, this time, the votes were there. The more interesting test comes with the next power-unit cycle, when the FIA writes the governance clause that decides how easily the one after that can be changed.