“I wouldn’t be too vocal supporting the comeback of a V10 engine if I liked what I saw from 2026,” said Carlos Sainz during the pre-Bahrain Grand Prix press conference.
As he did so, a palpable wrinkle of disdain passed across the bridge of his nose. Warming to his theme, he continued.
“But as I don’t really like what I see from 2026 in terms of what the car is going to do, the engine’s going to do, the way everything is going to work, I would say yes – I would like a V10 engine, with a few tweaks, to make it back sooner rather than later.
“At the same time, it's not fair to not give those regulations a bit of a chance, if everyone believes they’re so good. But everyone seems to believe they’re not so good anymore – that’s why everyone’s talking about it [V10s] again. So a bit of a strange one, no?”
It seems most peculiar to speak about a set of technical regulations which were pretty much agreed upon four years ago as if they were an abstract thought experiment. But here we are.
The power unit format is at the heart of the 2026 technical package and the fundamentals of that were settled while Jean Todt was still FIA president. At the time, Honda was heading for the exit, the list of putative new power unit suppliers was a short one, and there was no guarantee of the existing ones hanging on for much longer.
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You might assume Ferrari would remain loyal – but would it want to be last man standing, like Maurice Gibb when his fellow Bee Gees stormed off the Clive Anderson Show? Unlikely.
So, with governments around the world leaning on car manufacturers to embrace electrification, it was agreed upon to increase the influence of the electrical systems on the balance of engine power. In another bid to consolidate the existing portfolio of car makers and potentially add new ones to it, the expensive and notoriously difficult-to-perfect ERS-H was consigned to the memory hole.
Perhaps rightly so – it never made it into mainstream car production.
The new format has succeeded in luring the likes of Audi and Cadillac but, as the deadline for implementation looms, F1’s stakeholders have belatedly grasped the full horror of the unintended consequences. The 2026 chassis regulations, finally ratified very late in the day, are an unholy mess of ugly compromises to minimise the power units’ limitations.
F1 and the FIA have tried to window-dress these foolishnesses as improvements to the spectacle. What the spectators will make of X-mode or Y-mode or whatever is yet to be determined; what we can say with utmost certainty is that the drivers don’t give a fig.
Dewy-eyed nostalgia often rides in on the coat tails of fear of the unknown, and so it is here. The 2026 regulations have had to service so many disparate voices and conflicting interests that the finished article was never likely to satisfy everyone. The increasingly noisy clamour from those wanting to rewind to 2004 suggests the 2026 package now has very few cheerleaders apart from the chaos-is-a-ladder merchants.
