Would any F1 team actually want an independent engine?

Buried inside Mohammed Ben Sulayem’s comments last week about restricting manufacturers to powering a single team each was a specific reference point: an FIA-approved independent supplier, in the mould of Cosworth.

While it’s natural to treat it as a technical and financial question — Can it be built? Can it be made competitive? Does it bring costs down? — there is a much more basic one: would any team actually want to run it?

That’s not a rhetorical question.

In a sport where a manufacturer badge on the power unit still carries prestige, and often technical credibility with sponsors and drivers, running a standardised, non-manufacturer engine could read as a second-tier signal regardless of how competitive it actually is on track.

It’s also, on Ben Sulayem’s own description, explicitly designed as a second tier: he has described it as an engine for “B-teams” specifically, with no comparable “control” exerted over a team’s status relative to an “A-team” running manufacturer power.

Smaller or newer outfits are the obvious customer base for an independent unit, and they’re also the teams with the most to lose if it’s perceived, fairly or not, as a downgrade.

But before getting into whether the idea can work, it’s worth asking whether it’s actually solving a problem any current team says it has.

The precedent for wanting it: the DFV years

History gives a genuine answer to why a team might want this, and it isn’t just nostalgia.

The Cosworth DFV was available to any team willing to pay for one from 1968 onwards, went on to win 155 grands prix and power 12 drivers’ championships between 1968 and 1983, and for long stretches of the 1970s was fitted to more than 70% of the grid.

Lotus, Williams, Brabham and Tyrrell all won titles on DFV power — the same engine, to the same specification, that mid-pack and backmarker teams were running too.

That’s what wanting an independent supplier looked like in period: for over a decade, buying a customer engine wasn’t a compromise, it was a straightforward route to competing at the front if your chassis was good enough.

A team choosing the DFV over trying to build its own power unit wasn’t settling for less.

If an independent 2031 supplier could recreate that dynamic, the appetite question answers itself, but things are not as simple anymore.

The precedent against wanting it: 2010-2013

The more recent Cosworth chapter complicates that considerably.

Cosworth continued producing F1 engines into the 2000s. After a brief hiatus without any customers from 2007, the company returned to Formula 1 in 2010, supplying Williams, Hispania/HRT, Lotus Racing (later Caterham) and Marussia — four teams that spent most of the following seasons at the back of the field, competing against manufacturer units that had already pulled well clear of anything a standardised customer engine could match.

None of it looked like the 1970s.

It looked like exactly the second-tier association a team weighing up an independent supplier today would be right to worry about.

Whether that outcome was specific to Cosworth’s 2010s programme or a sign that the gap between customer and works engines had already become structural by then is hard to separate out.

But it’s still the more recent memory, and it’s the one that would likely shape how a team’s sponsors, drivers and fans read the decision to switch, regardless of what the FIA’s engineers or the company it hires manage to build.

What’s actually different about today’s grid

Part of what made the DFV desirable was that Cosworth wasn’t trying to out-develop factory engines from the likes of Ferrari or Renault on their own terms.

Instead, it built a lighter, simpler, cheaper alternative and let teams spend the difference on chassis development.

Today’s power units operate under a cost cap and a dense technical rulebook, with Mercedes currently supplying four teams and Ferrari three.

In a sense, the current customer system already resembles a form of standardisation, and being a customer team already tends to mean operating a tier below the works outfit, regardless of chassis quality, something that has been more evident under the 2026 rules reset.

That matters for the appetite question specifically: if teams already associate a customer engine with a performance ceiling under the current Mercedes and Ferrari arrangements, an independent FIA supplier isn’t introducing a new stigma so much as making an existing one more explicit.

Persuading a team to actively choose that route, rather than being assigned to it by circumstance, is a different proposition, and one the FIA hasn’t yet had to sell to anyone.

Of course, some of the appetite question depends on details that haven’t been decided or revealed.

Would the FIA commission and own the unit outright, contract a manufacturer or specialist engineering firm to build a spec engine on its behalf, or license production to more than one contractor?

The closest existing template within the sport’s own ecosystem is the single-supplier model already used in Formula 2 and Formula 3.

Whether that model, and the funding and reliability assurances that come with it, would be enough to make a team choose an independent unit over a manufacturer deal is genuinely unclear, because nobody has put the choice to a team yet.

What is clear is Ben Sulayem’s own stated rationale, and it isn’t primarily about performance.

He has framed the B-team engine explicitly as protection from leverage, arguing that if it’s affordable, every B-team could run the same unit so that no manufacturer could use engine supply to pressure a smaller team into voting a particular way in FIA or F1 governance matters.

That reframes the appetite question. It’s no longer simply “would a team choose a standardised engine over a manufacturer badge on competitiveness grounds?”. It’s whether a smaller team would welcome being insulated from that kind of leverage, even at the cost of being visibly designated a B-team, especially if it’s a team that has felt that pressure directly.

Who might actually say yes 

That’s the real test of Ben Sulayem’s proposal: which team, given the choice, would be the first to publicly back an independent supplier over a manufacturer engine?