Formula 1’s new power unit rules for 2026 are too much of a compromise, says the series’ former technical director Pat Symonds.
The man who conceived the new chassis regulations for 2022 had some input into the change in power units for next year before he left Formula One Management to join Cadillac’s nascent F1 programme. He admitted he chose to leave FOM partly because the FIA began to exert more control over the technical rules.
“It was a little bit of the frustration that Formula One Management were getting less and less involved in the regulations, very much the FIA and things like the ’26 power unit was not what I wanted it to be,” he told Autocar.
The FIA made too many concessions to what the teams wanted from the 2026 regulations, said Symonds.
“When we did the 2022 car we listened to what the teams were saying, but we ruled them with a firm hand,” he explained. “We said, ‘okay, we’re listening to you, but we’re actually going to do this’. We took some of their input.”
“We knew that each one of them had an agenda,” he added. “This is the advantage of [me] spending so many years as a competitor. So we were quite rigid in what we wanted.”
As a result the 2026 power unit “is probably not what I would have liked it to be,” said Symonds. The FIA rejected a proposal to allow designers to generate energy from the car’s front axle, to help make up for the losses incurred by removing the MGU-H, due to objections from one team.
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“With the ’26 power unit, the FIA said it wanted to involve the manufacturers more. Unfortunately, I think it’s like when you get a committee to design a racehorse, you end up with a camel.
“I think that’s happened a little bit, because one of the briefs for the ’26 engine was to remove the MGU-H, because that was something that certainly improved the efficiency of the engines massively, but it was quite complex.
“It was decided to remove that really to try and encourage new manufacturers into the sport, which in some way was successful. Ford came in, Audi came in we’ve got Cadillac come in. Porsche almost came in, they sort of faltered at the last minute.
“But once you remove that energy source, if you keep everything else similar, we’ve increased the power of the motors and things, the idea was to replace it with recovering energy from the front axle. If you did that, everything balanced out quite nicely, you weren’t short of energy, you could have a lot more electrification on the car.
“But unfortunately, because of this committee approach to things, one team was very much against front axle recovery. I think the president of the FIA at the time, Jean Todt, thought we were talking about four-wheel-drive, which we weren’t, we were talking about energy recovery. Maybe drive once you’re on the straight but certainly not in the corners, so not a four-wheel-drive, classic, car.
“So, because of this sort of very democratic approach, one of the times when democracy is not good, we ended up with this camel. We’ve ended up with a power unit that’s sparse on energy. Okay, there are ways around it, but they’re not good ways around it.
“So I wouldn’t say that the ’26 power units ended up the way I wanted. [But] the chassis, the aerodynamics, I think they’re pretty good, the active aero is a good step forward, I think.”
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