F1 in reverse again: V8s and refuelling set to come back from bans?

FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s comments to reporters at Silverstone last week were framed as a look forward: refuelling potentially returning to Formula 1, an independent engine supplier reminiscent of Cosworth, and a switch to lighter, naturally aspirated V8s from 2031.

Taken at face value, it’s a cost-cutting, competition-levelling vision for the next regulatory era.

Taken in context, it looks like something else entirely.

The FIA head is not proposing anything new. He is proposing to reverse two decisions the ruling body has already made — and already unmade — once before.

Formula 1 has a habit of solving its problems by swinging back to whatever it banned last time, and the current proposal is simply the latest lap of a cycle the sport has been running for four decades.

Two reversals, one pattern

Let’s start with refuelling.

“The refuelling we are studying as we speak,” Ben Sulayem, speaking to British reporters at Silverstone, was quoted as saying by Reuters. “It’s not a concern if you do it in the right way. So we are studying this. Nothing is being done yet.

“Refuelling with sustainable fuel with electrification. Maybe we look at giving more electrification than 10%. Really still we are open.”

Refuelling was banned between 1984 and 1993, brought back for the 1994 season, and then banned again from 2010 onwards, a decision made largely on safety and cost grounds after a string of pitlane fires, including the widely remembered Jos Verstappen incident at the 1994 German Grand Prix.

Fifteen years on from that second ban, refuelling is back under serious discussion, and for broadly the same reasons it was reintroduced the first time: lighter cars, and the strategic variety that comes with variable fuel loads.

Then there’s the engine formula itself, which has swung even more dramatically.

Turbocharged engines were banned outright from 1989 after a decade in which power output, cost and safety concerns had all spiralled together — some late-1980s qualifying units were reportedly producing over 1,000 horsepower in short bursts.

The sport spent the next 25 years on naturally aspirated V8s, V10s and V12s, before turbos returned in 2014 in hybrid form, paired with energy recovery systems and pitched as a statement of technological relevance.

Twelve years into that hybrid era, the FIA boss is now discussing stripping much of that complexity back out again, with a return to simpler, naturally aspirated V8s by 2031.

Laid side by side, the two timelines are similar: Ban, reintroduce, ban, reconsider. Turbo, naturally aspirated, hybrid turbo, naturally aspirated again.

Each reversal has been justified on its own terms at the time, but taken together, they describe a sport that keeps arriving back at ideas it previously discarded.

None of this is really about the FIA discovering new information. It’s about the sport swinging from one extreme to its opposite because each ‘solution’ quietly creates the problem that gets fixed by undoing it.

Turbos were banned in 1989 for being too powerful and too expensive; the naturally aspirated years that followed were eventually criticised as short on technological ambition, which is part of what the 2014 hybrid formula was built to answer.

Now the complaint is that hybrid power units are too complex, too costly to develop, and delivering a poor experience for drivers, so the V8s are coming back.

Refuelling follows the same shape: banned for safety, missed for the strategic drama it created, brought back, banned again for the same safety concerns, and now reconsidered for essentially the same appeal it had the first time around.

The common thread isn’t really engineering, but an institutional pattern.

Formula 1 tends to discover, roughly once a generation, that whatever it banned last time is the thing it now misses.

That’s a more uncomfortable story for the FIA than saying “we’re modernising the regulations,” because it suggests the modernising has already happened twice before, in the opposite direction, and didn’t stick.

What’s actually different this time

To be fair to Ben Sulayem’s proposal, there is a genuinely new variable in this version of the cycle that wasn’t present in 1989 or 2010: the emphasis on manufacturer influence, not just cost or safety.

It was the FIA’s single-seater director, Nikolas Tombazis, who put it most plainly back in April: Formula 1, he said, cannot be hostage to automotive companies over whether they choose to remain in the sport.

The current 2026 rules were shaped heavily around what manufacturers needed to justify joining or staying, most visibly Audi and Honda, whose entry/re-entry to the sport was explicitly tied to the near 50/50 combustion-electric split, itself pitched as relevant to its road-car electrification programme.

When that same formula began producing the driveability and super-clipping problems that have dominated the opening rounds of this season, the FIA’s attempt at a more radical 2027 hardware fix reportedly ran into resistance from Audi, whose sign-off the regulations require.

The body designing the rules found itself unable to change as much as it wanted because the manufacturers whose participation depends on those rules also hold a vote over amending them.

That’s the concrete backdrop to the independent-supplier idea.

It isn’t only about diluting the leverage that Mercedes, which currently powers four teams, or Ferrari, which supplies three, hold over the grid – though it’s difficult to separate from the broader unease around Red Bull‘s ownership of both a works team and Racing Bulls, and the influence that carries in the paddock too.

It’s a direct response to manufacturers using their regulatory leverage to slow down a fix the FIA would like to make sooner.

A cheaper, simpler, FIA-controlled engine, available to any team regardless of manufacturer politics, is as much an attempt to stop that leverage recurring as it is a cost-control measure.

That’s a governance argument as much as a technical one, and it doesn’t map neatly onto the earlier turbo or refuelling reversals, which were driven almost entirely by cost, power and safety rather than by who got a seat at the table when the rules were written.

Early reaction suggests the pitch isn’t landing as intended, though.

Renault‘s chief executive, Francois Provost, was fairly blunt when asked whether the plan might tempt the manufacturer back into building its own power unit: stabilising the current team is the priority, not reviving the shuttered engine programme at Viry-Châtillon.

If the goal of a simpler, cheaper V8 formula is to draw manufacturers back in, the first manufacturer asked about it publicly ruled itself out.

The cycle itself is the story

Whether the 2031 V8 plan is right on its technical merits is almost beside the point.