Business

Teams & Business

Ownership, manufacturer programmes, budgets, strategy. The cost cap, the Concorde Agreement, factory-team economics, sponsor structures, the billion-dollar business of motorsport written in plain figures.

  1. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of two Formula 1 cars seen from directly behind on a long straight, a Ferrari on the left and a McLaren on the right running side by side with daylight between them, heat haze off the tarmac and the straight converging toward a distant vanishing point under an empty sky.

    Ferrari has spent its second ADUO engine. The rulebook that sets what it cost never uses the word.

    Appendix C5 granted the permission. Article B8.2 of the Sporting Regulations sets what it costs, and the word upgrade appears nowhere in Section B's 98 pages. Ferrari spent the new specification at Monza, which put Leclerc and Hamilton on the fourth and last internal combustion engine either can take without a grid penalty. Vasseur left Monza saying the car is still missing pure power.

  2. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration in close macro of a heavily worn motorcycle knee slider resting on the crown of a brand-new racing slick still carrying its moulding nubs, with Michelin lettering curving into view on the sidewall.

    Three riders crossed between MotoGP and WorldSBK in two days, all toward the tyre they already know. Two of the three announcements say so.

    Pirelli takes MotoGP in 2027 and Michelin takes World Superbike. Jack Miller, Nicolo Bulega and Brad Binder each left a championship for the one adopting the tyre they have been racing on. Yamaha named that as an asset, Ducati named it as an aid, and BMW did not mention tyres at all.

  3. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of a single tall paddock flagpole flying the flag of Bahrain in a humid tropical setting, dense palm fronds behind it and the tented roof of a large grandstand rising beyond the treeline, a row of empty flagpoles alongside.

    The FIA calendar has a way of marking a race called off. It is not using it on Qatar or Abu Dhabi.

    Two days apart in July, the same governing body cancelled its endurance championship rounds in Qatar and Bahrain outright and re-created a Formula 1 Grand Prix at Sepang under Bahrain's name, flag and country code. Both releases quote the same president on safety. Both F1 calendars, read on 11 September, still list the final two rounds with no qualification attached.

  4. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration seen from inside a Formula 1 cockpit under braking for a first chicane, the steering wheel and halo framing the bottom of the view and the rear wing of a second car in the identical Ferrari livery filling the centre with no gap between them, the chicane kerbs curving away to the right.

    Hamilton wants rules of engagement. Formula 1 deleted its own in December 2010 and never wrote another.

    The phrase team orders appears nowhere in the 98 pages of the 2026 Sporting Regulations. What survived the repeal is two general clauses in the International Sporting Code and an entry undertaking that points at other teams. On 7 September McLaren named a test it had applied and Ferrari scheduled a conversation.

  5. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of a single-seater racing car in three-quarter view carrying Fusion branding on its rear wing and sidepod and the number four on its wing endplate, with a head and shoulders portrait of a young driver rising behind the cockpit.

    Formula 3 fixed its grid at ten teams through 2027. Lando Norris's new team did not add an eleventh.

    FIA Formula 3 selected ten teams in October 2024 for the 2025 to 2027 seasons, a thirty-car field settled three years in advance. AIX Racing was one of the ten. On 2 September 2026 LN4 Fusion took that entry over, and Bruno Michel's word for what happens next in Formula 2 was application, not expansion.

  6. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of a raw cast engine block standing on a rotating workshop stand in a small race shop, cast texture across its flanks and bright machined faces on the deck and bearing saddles, a dial gauge on a magnetic base and hand tools on the bench behind it beside a closed parts catalogue.

    The cheap World Rally Car assumes somebody will sell you an engine. Neither new constructor is relying on that.

    The FIA put a 345,000 euro cap on the 2027 rally car and called it a reduction of more than half, on a formula that leans on Rally2 running gear. WRT Rally1 Spain says the manufacturers are not set up to supply independents in the numbers a programme needs. RallyOne is running a Skoda unit and holding its own homologation in reserve, for delivery and for parts.

  7. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of a rally car at speed on a narrow gravel forest stage, sponsor lettering across its bonnet and doors, spectators gathered on a bank beside a wooden cabin with flags raised, dense pine and birch closing in on both sides and still water at the left edge.

    The FIA published its own operating profit in the release announcing rallying's biggest deal. It did not publish the price.

    Cosmobilis and Park Square Capital acquired WRC Promoter GmbH on 31 July. The FIA's announcement sizes Cosmobilis at nearly €4 billion of revenue, Park Square at more than $22 billion under management, and the FIA's own 2025 result at an operating profit of €6.7 million. It puts no figure on the transaction, no number of years on the agreement, and no capital behind the growth fund it lists as a headline benefit.

  8. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of a bare grand prix motorcycle frame on a paddock stand with no bodywork and an empty engine cradle, forks and swingarm exposed, a fully faired and liveried machine of the outgoing generation standing complete behind and to the left.

    Yamaha says MotoGP's 850cc reset is the ideal moment to promote a rookie. No factory team acted on it.

    Prima Pramac Yamaha confirmed Izan Guevara for 2027 on 27 August, the third rookie announced for MotoGP's new formula. All eight seats at the four factory teams are now filled, every one by a rider who has already raced in the premier class, and the longest term any of them has put a number on runs four years.

  9. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of an engine dyno control room, a live test cell beyond the observation glass with an engine on the bed and its driveshaft running to the brake under overhead ducting, and further along the wall a second window onto a dark cell with an empty bed and a wire seal across the closed door.

    The FIA's first ADUO rulings never mention Red Bull Ford. That silence is what locks it out of the rest of 2026.

    Audi, Ferrari and Honda each got two extra engine homologations in a season whose baseline is none. Mercedes got one, worth exactly $3m and 70 dyno hours per period. Red Bull Ford got nothing, and Appendix C5 says a manufacturer granted nothing in the first two review periods cannot be granted anything in the third.

  10. Two-tone hatched-ink illustration of a panelled institutional corridor with a worn parquet floor, tall doors set flush into the plaster with no handles, and at the far end a single open doorway onto bright bare space with a sheet of paper lying on its threshold.

    McLaren cannot appeal the penalty its driver served. The only appealable decision Monaco produced was the one that gave Gasly his podium back.

    The 2026 Sporting Regulations bar appeals against the penalties handed out for pit lane speeding. That is why Alpine went the right of review route, why nobody who served a penalty at Monaco could challenge theirs, and why the case the International Court of Appeal heard behind closed doors on Tuesday is aimed at Gasly's relief rather than at the measurement error nobody disputes.