Ben Sulayem tells BYD to come back with a serious offer

Mohammed Ben Sulayem did two things in Madrid this week. He said Formula 1 should have a twelfth team and that it should be Chinese, and he named the two manufacturers he has been talking to. Then he told them what it would cost to be taken seriously.

“The FIA can open for a 12th team,” the FIA president said at the New Economy Forum. “But, do we need a team, Mr President? No, we don’t need a team, we need the team.”

The FIA president named BYD and Geely out loud

Naming manufacturers in public is not something FIA presidents usually do while talks are live. Ben Sulayem did it anyway.

“I had meetings with them, and they came and they said, we need to be in,” he said. “And one of them was BYD, and one was Geely.”

He went further, and put Formula One Management alongside him. “Even the promoter agrees that we need the team, and the team has to come from China.” That is a rare piece of public alignment between the governing body and the commercial rights holder, two organisations that have spent recent years disagreeing about almost everything to do with grid expansion.

Then came the condition. BYD, according to Ben Sulayem, does not want to buy its way in by taking over an existing team, the route Audi used at Sauber. It wants a new entry. His answer to that was short: “Fine. Then come back with a serious offer that we can see that it’s going to work.”

BYD has been talking since Shanghai, but talking is not bidding

This is not new ground for BYD. Its vice president Stella Li met Formula 1 chief executive Stefano Domenicali at the Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai in March, and has been open about the attraction ever since.

That is interest. It is not an application. Six months on there is still no expression of interest process open for a twelfth team, no submitted project, and no public commitment from BYD’s board to spend money on one.

Domenicali has been notably less enthusiastic than the FIA president. His position has been that any bid would have to be of real significance, because the grid is already at a point where there is no more room. Eleven teams is a new number for Formula 1, and the existing ten fought hard against getting there.

The entry ticket alone cost Cadillac 450 million dollars

The last time this process ran, it was brutal. Ben Sulayem pushed the FIA to open an expression of interest process in early 2023 for an eleventh team, against resistance from most of the existing outfits. Of everyone who applied, one survived. Cadillac joined the grid at the start of 2026.

The price of that seat is the number that should anchor this whole conversation. Cadillac paid a 450 million dollar anti-dilution fee, divided between the ten teams that were already there, before it had built a car or hired a race engineer. The 2021 Concorde Agreement had set that figure at 200 million. The teams decided that was too cheap, and the commercial framework that runs from 2026 carries the calculation that would apply to a twelfth entrant.

BYD can afford it. It is the largest electric vehicle manufacturer in the world by sales, and it passed Tesla to get there. The question has never been whether the money exists. It is whether a board that has built its reputation on industrial efficiency wants to write that cheque for a sporting project that will not win anything for years, under a cost cap designed to stop money solving problems quickly.

The rulebook is not moving, and that is aimed straight at BYD

The most pointed thing Ben Sulayem said in Madrid was about the regulations, and it was aimed at the one argument BYD might have expected to work.

BYD’s entire identity is electrification. There was an assumption in some quarters that Formula 1 might lean further towards electric technology to make itself attractive to a Chinese manufacturer. Ben Sulayem closed that down. The regulations are not going to be reshaped for Chinese entrants, he said, and stability has to be kept in them. He acknowledged that cleaner air can be pursued through several routes, hydrogen, hybrids, electrification and sustainable fuel, but the framing was unmistakable.

He also made the point that Formula 1 has already invested in China. “We have a race in China. It’s huge,” he said, referencing the legacy of Zhou Guanyu, who raced for Sauber from 2022 to 2024, before adding the line that matters: “But it has to be on our terms and our regulations, which is fair for everyone.”

So the offer on the table is: come in, be welcomed, and adapt entirely to a rulebook you had no part in writing.

Our view: 2031 is the only date that makes this real

Strip out the enthusiasm and one number decides whether this is a story or a conversation.

Formula 1 is set to move to V8 engines in 2031. For a manufacturer that wants to build its own power unit rather than buy one, that is the natural entry point, and it is five years away. Five years is enough time to build a facility, recruit several hundred people, establish a supply chain and go through an FIA process. It is not enough time to do any of that casually.

Which means the test of whether BYD is serious is not what Stella Li says at a grand prix. It is whether an expression of interest process opens, and whether BYD staffs a technical organisation before it does. Teams are built by hiring, not by announcing.

There is a second reading worth holding onto. Ben Sulayem naming BYD and Geely in public, and saying FOM agrees the team should come from China, reads less like a status update and more like pressure. Publicly identifying your preferred candidate is how you make it expensive for them to walk away quietly, and how you make it awkward for the existing teams to object later. Whether that produces a bid or simply raises the temperature is the part nobody can answer yet.

The honest position today is that Formula 1 has eleven teams, an FIA president who wants twelve, a commercial rights holder who is lukewarm, ten existing teams with a financial interest in saying no, and a Chinese manufacturer that has said it is interested and has not said it is applying.

What to watch

There have been reports linking the project with Christian Horner, the former Red Bull team principal, who was a guest of BYD at the Cannes film festival earlier this year and is said to have held meetings with Stella Li. Neither party has confirmed any of it, and until one of them does it belongs in the speculation column rather than the news one. What is true is that building a team from nothing is a very specific skill, and there are not many people who have done it.

Three things will tell you whether this is real. Whether the FIA formally opens an expression of interest process for a twelfth team. Whether BYD starts hiring into a racing organisation rather than talking about one. And whether the ten existing teams, who have just been paid 450 million dollars to accept an eleventh, show any appetite for dividing the pot again.

For the wider picture of how the sport is structured and governed, our Formula 1 overview sets out who decides what.