The Athletic

The Races

The Racer is on, and F1 has committed to making bigger evolutionary changes

by rolling back on the 50-50 electric conventional engine split in 2027

as it pushes to make the most

of the current power units. So what are the implications of that? And what do we know about

the pathway F1 has embarked upon for the mooted switch to V8 engines? I'm Ed's draw and here to

unravel the technical and political intrigue are John Noble and Ben Anderson.

Well, the big news is that F1 has announced its intention, its commitment in principle

to increasing the power of the V6 and slightly reducing the deployment power of the MGUK in 2027.

So, John, what exactly do we know about the changes?

What's happening? There is, as you've mentioned,

it's an agreement in principle. So there's nothing's been finalised. It's still got a long way to

go before it's in the regulations. But there are four key changes that are on the table for next season.

Only two of these have mentioned in the press release. The first one is increasing

the ICE. You increase that power by 50 kilowatts. You pull back the battery power deployment by

50 kilowatts. So the famed 50-50 split gets more towards 60-40 in favor of the ICE. On top of

that, they're evaluating bigger batteries, so potentially we jump

from maybe four megajoules to five megajoules, and then further tweaks to harvesting, which

at the moment's capped at 350 kilowatts. So potentially you can lift that to 400, 450 kilowatts.

And the end result of that is more power in which gives you more power out more energy

available and hopefully get rid of these energy staff cars struggling especially in qualifying

...