Ben Sulayem wants to change the rules to keep Alonso in Formula 1

Mohammed Ben Sulayem spent Thursday at the Spanish Grand Prix in a meeting with Lawrence Stroll. On Friday morning he explained why, and he did not dress it up. The FIA president is working on a further set of concessions for Honda, and the stated reason is to keep one driver in Formula 1.

“There is no way we can allow Fernando to leave,” he said. “He has to be successful, and then he leaves whenever he wants, not because he was forced to leave because of the performance.”

Ben Sulayem told Alonso to name what he wants

The conversation that started this happened at Monza. Speaking at the New Economy Forum in Madrid, the same event where he named BYD and Geely as candidates for a twelfth team, Ben Sulayem described finding Alonso in a state he did not want to see.

“I saw him very sad,” he said. “I said, Fernando, I understand that it’s not acceptable that you are coming to your own country, and then now, after two times the world champion, you are in the last place.”

What he did next is the unusual part. Rather than outline an FIA position, he asked the driver to set the agenda.

A day earlier he had sat down with Stroll to discuss what could be done for the team. According to The Race, those talks are preliminary and nothing has been specified with Honda. The options on the table are understood to include homologation flexibility, additional spending room, or a targeted adjustment to Honda’s development constraints.

The FIA has already helped Honda once this year

None of this would be starting from zero. The 2026 regulations came with a catch-up mechanism built in, and Honda is already inside it.

The system is called ADUO, Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities. A manufacturer qualifies once its internal combustion engine is two per cent or more behind the benchmark on the FIA’s performance index, and the help scales with the size of the gap.

The ADUO scale. The upgrade opportunities run across two seasons, so a manufacturer that earns two in the current year gets two in the next one as well.

In May the FIA secured manufacturer agreement for expanded ADUO assistance for Honda, including extra test bench hours and additional spending, part of it structured as borrowing against future cost caps. That was already a rescue package. What Ben Sulayem is now discussing would be a second one, on top of a mechanism that was designed to be self-executing.

Three points in thirteen races, and all of them Alonso’s

The numbers explain why anyone is having this conversation at all.

Aston Martin has three points from thirteen races and sits tenth in the constructors’ championship. All three belong to Alonso, one from Monaco and two from Zandvoort. Lance Stroll has not scored. In the drivers’ table Alonso is nineteenth, in a season that began with the team’s first car designed under Adrian Newey and a works Honda engine deal that was supposed to be the reward for years of patience.

The scale of the engine problem is not officially published, but the Italian outlet Autoracer reported at the start of September that the Honda unit is around 70 horsepower down on Mercedes, worth roughly 1.2 seconds a lap. Whether or not that figure is exact, nobody in the paddock disputes the direction of it.

Our read: a competitive balance decision wearing a tribute

ADUO exists precisely so that a manufacturer who gets the new rules wrong is not stranded for five years. Using it is not scandalous. It is the system working.

What is different here is the stated reason. The president of the governing body has publicly tied a possible regulatory adjustment to the retention of one driver, and has invited that driver to tell him what the adjustment should be. However popular Alonso is, and he is the most popular driver in the room at this particular grand prix, that is a governing body describing competitive balance as a matter of sentiment.

Rival manufacturers spent the last three years and enormous sums getting the 2026 power unit right. They will have noticed that the reward for being at the front is watching the rules move towards the back, and they will be entitled to ask what the threshold is now: a measured performance index, or a driver who looked sad at Monza.

There is a second problem, and it is the one nobody at the FIA can fix with dyno hours. Alonso’s objection is not only that his car is slow. It is that he does not enjoy these cars. He has said the current machines are not the best to drive, and that his best day of the year was in old machinery with no hybrid system at all. A faster Honda makes Aston Martin more competitive. It does not make the car he is driving more fun.

Formula 1 has already agreed in principle, back in May, to shift the 2027 power split from roughly fifty-fifty towards sixty-forty, with more from the combustion engine and less from the energy recovery system, plus a fuel-flow increase. That is the sport’s actual answer to the complaint Alonso is making. It is also incremental, and it arrives after he has to decide.

What to watch

Three things. Whether a concession is formally tabled, and what the other four manufacturers say when it is. Whether Honda’s next upgrade closes any measurable part of the gap, because a plan that does not produce lap time will not change anybody’s mind. And Alonso’s own timetable, which he has kept deliberately vague.

He has already confirmed that the World Endurance Championship is a real option for 2027, and when he was asked when an announcement might come, he answered “not soon”. Our full account of what he said in Madrid about his future is on the site.

We are covering the rest of the Spanish Grand Prix weekend as it happens on the RNT-Motorsports live blog.