Fans in the grandstands as an F1 car passes the Four Seasons Hotel during the 2019 Azerbaijan Grand Prix. Photo: The Presidential Press and Information Office of Azerbaijan, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Baku produced two Formula 1 engine stories in the space of three days, and the quieter one matters more. On Monday the F1 Commission agreed to cut 15 kilometres out of every 2027 grand prix. On Thursday, in the FIA press conference, two of the people who will have to design the sport’s next power unit confirmed the headline everyone wanted, then admitted that almost nothing behind it has been decided.
Mattia Binotto, who runs Audi’s works programme, was blunt about both halves of that. “We know it’s a V8 for certain, 2030 the earliest introduction,” he said. In the same answer he said there is “no clarity yet” on what the FIA will actually propose. Both statements are true, and the space between them is where the next decade of Formula 1 engineering gets settled.
What has actually been agreed
A cylinder count, and a date that is a floor rather than a target. No published FIA regulation contains a 2030 power unit. Displacement, turbocharging, hybrid output, minimum weight and fuel specification all still live inside working groups. Asked directly whether the turbo survives, Binotto offered “turbo, possibly yes,” which is not how a manufacturer talks when it is reading from a finished rulebook. Anything more specific doing the rounds this week is a proposal, not a rule.
What he did supply is the number that governs this entire story: the regulations have to be agreed and voted before the end of this year, so that concept and design work can begin through 2027. That is not a team boss being theatrical. A clean-sheet architecture means new dyno hardware, new single-cylinder test programmes, fresh energy-store and cooling packaging, and a homologation deadline that lands years before anyone races. Miss the vote and 2030 quietly becomes 2031.
The 15 kilometres that explain the rest
Now the part with a paper trail. The F1 Commission met on 21 September and, according to the FIA’s own statement, approved cutting race distance from 305km to 290km for 2027, worth two or three laps, in line with the refinements to the power unit rules arriving that year on fuel flow. Gearbox homologation goes too, dropped after consultation with the manufacturer working group to preserve supplier development freedom. All of it still needs World Motor Sport Council sign-off.
Sit with that for a second, because it is a remarkable thing for a championship to publish about a formula it launched this year. Race distance in Formula 1 is now an energy calculation. Change what the combustion side is allowed to consume and the arithmetic of a 305km race stops closing, so the race gets shorter rather than the cars getting slower. Laurent Mekies described the repair job as a small step for 2027 and a significant one for 2028: two more seasons of legislating before this ruleset races the way it was sold.
The giveaway is the language both men reached for. Mekies said the shared objective for the next rules is “flat-out racing, flat-out qualifying.” Nobody sets that as an aspiration if they already have it. Charles Leclerc, a day earlier, described swings in competitiveness from weekend to weekend driven by “the optimisation of your power unit,” which is a diplomatic way of saying the fastest car is now partly whoever solved the energy sums for that specific track. Honda changing the leadership of its F1 engine programme reads rather differently in that light.
One more item in that statement deserves more attention than it will get. The three-hour overall window for a disrupted race disappears, replaced by a hard stop time for the end of any racing activity, with the two-hour limit on actual racing retained and extra flexibility to extend interrupted practice. Translation for anyone buying a ticket: a wet Sunday is now less likely to end with a race being guillotined half-finished because the clock ran out during a red flag.
Cost is the actual regulation
Binotto’s first stated objective for 2030 was not noise. It was money. He wants a clear target on cost, because the current power unit remains, in his words, “very expensive.” That is the same logic that produced the separate financial regulations for power unit manufacturers in the current ruleset, and it is the strongest case for eight simpler cylinders. A cheaper engine is not a nostalgia project, it is the entry fee that determines how many manufacturers are on the grid in 2031. Audi only arrived this season, and Cadillac is buying Ferrari power in the meantime, with Sergio Perez confirming the team has Ferrari’s latest unit in Baku.
He also drew the line he will not cross: whatever the format, F1 has to stay a platform for innovation. That is the real negotiation. Cheap and simple are easy to write into a regulation. Cheap, simple and still worth a board-level marketing budget in Ingolstadt, Maranello, Brixworth and Sakura is a much harder brief, and it is why the hybrid layer will survive in some form even if it shrinks.
Then there is ADUO, the catch-up mechanism baked into the current rules, which both Binotto and Mekies said needs fine-tuning. Binotto set out its two original purposes cleanly: a safety net for manufacturers who start behind, and a lever to force convergence. He also named the failure mode, which is a system that ends up handing extra development to a team already at the front. That is neither a safety net nor convergence, and it is the single most important lesson to carry into 2030, because the opening seasons of any new engine formula are where titles are won and where grid penalties for power unit changes quietly rearrange results.
Nobody has decided how you overtake
The most consequential open question is not the engine. It is the overtaking device bolted to it. Push-to-pass “is on the menu,” Binotto said, and he listed three candidate mechanisms that are all still live: boost pressure, DRS, or electrical deployment. Mekies would only say it is early days.
Each of those writes a different engine. A boost-based system needs turbocharger headroom, extra thermal margin and a compressor sized for a duty cycle the rest of the lap never uses. An electrical one drives energy store capacity, motor sizing and cooling, which is precisely the complexity everyone says they want to delete. An aero solution hands the whole job back to the chassis regulations and leaves the engine designers alone. Pick the overtaking system last and you will design the engine twice, which is exactly the sort of expensive detour a cost-driven ruleset is meant to prevent. Seen that way, the V8 headline is the least consequential thing agreed so far, and a reminder of how differently engine rules are framed across the major racing series.
What to watch from here
Three dates do the work. The World Motor Sport Council still has to ratify the 2027 package, shorter races and all. A vote on the 2030 architecture needs to happen before the end of December, or the earliest introduction stops being 2030. And mid-October, per Binotto, is the last realistic call on whether this season’s final two rounds run as scheduled, with Imola holding itself ready as a standby venue.
Before any of that, there is a grand prix to run, and a street circuit that has never needed a clever engine formula to produce chaos. The Azerbaijan Grand Prix runs on Saturday, on a layout where the longest straight on the calendar will do what it always does: expose exactly how well each manufacturer has learned to spend its energy. Whatever replaces this formula in 2030, that is the test it will have to pass too.
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