Season 2026, when sweeping new rules will arrive, is now only the ker-ching of a cash register away.
Liberty Media, the FIA, and teams have all been on the same song sheet for this one. Each sweetly singing about improved sustainability, better racing, more manufacturers and the exciting arrival of that world famous force in Formula One... Cadillac. This is our last season of those naughty 100 litres of fuel per race V6 ICEs coupled with MGU-H, and MGU-K complications.
Are we all going to arrive in the land of milk and honey in March 2026? Every apex a battle, every podium decided by fractions of a millisecond? Is that the point of the rule change?
Of course not!
The dearly missed titan of truth, Dr. Mike Lawrence, used to advise one to "Follow the money". In that way one would carefully discover the driving reasons behind moves within F1 which on the surface made no sense, or were a finely crafted mis-direction.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a 1956 science-fiction/horror movie produced by Walter Wagner, directed by Don Siegel, starring Kevin McCarthy, and Dana Wynter. (Spoiler alert...) It features alien spores which drift to earth and recreate copies of people within pods. The original human then 'dies' and the pod-person replacement is all that remains. If you enjoy black and white movies it is worth a watch as a timeless classic. (It, and the Donald Sutherland remake, are both part of the official Pitpass HQ DVD collection - Ed).
The FIA and Liberty Media have been busy with their own pod-people creations. The real sport of F1 has been placed in an induced coma with the pod replacement due to fully arrive in 2026. The cover story is all the blab about cost savings, better racing, sustainability etc. etc., while the real story is that of the invasion of the money snatchers. On the surface they look and talk like real fans and lovers of F1 as a sport, in truth they are only in it for the money! Just don't tell any one! Profit is the new game in town, not the secondary question of who will be on the podium.
You doubt this invasion of the money snatchers...? Consider the money trail...
Ferrari, Williams back in time, McLaren and Renault of old. Each spent their way back into contention in various seasons. Profit was an after-thought. Indeed most ran at an alarming loss, requiring owners, investors and sponsors to throw cash on the fire at an alarming rate. Lord Hesketh raced his eponymous team from 1973 to 1978, James Hunt famously driving for him, yet found he simply could not afford the spending race.
Fast-forward to the Liberty Media purchase of F1, and the initial seeds were planted to grow the pod-people. A trim here, a nip-and-tuck there... and billions of reasons for the teams to agree to a cost cap. Nothing to do with the racing. No. All to do with finally turning a profit! Liberty Media was going to use pod-people to turn F1 from a sporting cost centre into a business profit centre.
Consider the most obvious pod-person replacement, Stefano Domenicali, Ferrari team principal, and an honourable lover of the sport, from 2008 to 2014. Then out of public view for much of the period from 2016 to 2020, as CEO of Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A. This is probably when the pod-person swap took place, before the new emotionless Stefano appeared as the CEO of Formula One Group in 2021. All emotion for the sport replaced by an overwhelming focus on the business of pure profit.
Various media sources, based on publicly available figures released by teams, estimate team worth to kick-off at just one billion US dollars for Haas, moving up the field to the eye-bulging figures for Ferrari of $4.78bn, followed by Mercedes at $3.94bn, then Red Bull on $3.5bn, with all other team values falling in between.
The 2023 published figures for Mercedes state they achieved £546.5m (around $678m) of turnover, with a profit of £83.8m. That's a profit of around 15.5%. If one considers Airlines run around 2% profit, and large defence firms around 9% this is a wonderful rate of return on investment.
Liberty Media have sold the team owners on the concept of driving costs down with ever-increasing coverage of items within the cost cap, plus improving revenue through all the glitz and publicity we've seen over the past few years increasing global exposure for the former-sport turned profitable entertainment. F1 teams are now in that magical billion dollar buy-in zone of those other American entertainment franchises; NFL, NBL, MLB and NHL. No wonder Cadillac want in on the invasion of the money snatchers!
Consider the simplification of the engines for season 2026. Audi and Cadillac are going to manufacture engines, Honda is staying, while both Ford and Toyota are sniffing around again. And just to confirm it's all about the money not the sport or the technology, Flavio has cut Renault's engine manufacturing, claiming it is a waste of time and money. No, he's not yet a pod-person, but he has always naturally chased the money.
Our 2025 season is the final year for the current complex engines. Consider...
In 2026 we retain a 1.6-litre V6 turbo hybrid as the ICE. No change to the concept so far. We move from 10% sustainable ethanol fuel to "100% fully sustainable". No idea what that really means, but as Saudi Aramco are behind it I'm sure it is designed to continue our addiction to fuel in our road cars. Then the figures get more interesting. To achieve a fuel use drop from 100 litres per race to 70 litres the ICE power output drops from 840bhp to 535bhp. That's around a 37% drop in power! Do you think the engine manufacturers that can produce 840bhp now are going to find it awkward to achieve around 535bhp from the same general engine concepts?
The 2025 MGU-K can produce around 160bhp for a total output around 1,000bhp. The goal for 2026 is to drop the MGU-H and up MGU-K output to around 470bhp, more or less double, to get back around the 1,000bhp level.
So a few more standardised items, the MGU-H out the window, ICE output dropped 37%, and more items creeping into the cost cap. Thus continues the invasion of the money snatchers. I explored wind tunnel, CFD resources and simulator limits in a previous article. Again the pod-people hide behind the phrase "better racing", while all cost saving measures act to reduce operating costs for teams, and thus boost profits.
Liberty Media will be looking to complete the invasion by season 2027. You can play a fun little media game to amuse yourself when the racing is dull. Notice how many people from the FIA, Liberty Media or the teams, talk in emotionless tones of the business of Formula One, and not the sport of Formula One. Occasionally they will mix things up a bit with entertainment, or fan experience. Sport and emotion are nowhere to be seen in this alien profit-centric universe.
A last observation. Pod-people have no emotions. Hence no love of the sport, and no reaction to anything. So the real reason Mohammed ben Sulayem has a swearing ban in place is to ensure the drivers blend in with the new pod-people as best as possible. A pod-person never swears, never shows genuine emotion, therefore the last remaining humans in the sport, being the drivers, need to be controlled so they do not alert us to the invasion.
When will we know the invasion is complete? First team profits will be eye-watering, and then when V. Max is in a press conference displaying all the stirring emotion of a dead battery we will know that the invasion of the money snatchers is complete.
(Editor's note: Before you point it out, no the picture isn't from the original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers but the 1978 version. The iconic image of Donald Sutherland far better suits the article than the crazed look on Kevin McCarthy's face as he uttered the immortal line... "They're here, they're here already!")
Max Noble
Learn more about Max and check out his previous features, here
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