The FIA President Speaking for a Driver: Steiner, Alonso and the Power Knot of the 2026 Season

FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem stood in the paddock interview line just before the Spanish Grand Prix. He said his body had “done something earlier, in May, legally for the team towards the engine to go and improve.” He added that it was “not acceptable” for a two-time champion to be running at the back, and that he had seen Fernando Alonso looking very sad. A few days later, on a podcast, Guenther Steiner answered. Nobody deserves anything, he said. Aston Martin needs to figure that out. That is their problem, not the federation's problem. The first speaker holds the most powerful chair in the sport. The second has just stepped off a team principal's pit wall and now lives by talking. The distance between the two statements is not about personality. It sits on a foundational question: whether the federation has a duty to engineer the conditions for a champion to keep racing. An FIA spokesperson later clarified that the president's comments related to the ADUO system. That detail turns a few minutes of exchange into a governance file, and that is why this column is devoted to it. In 2026, Formula 1 entered a new power unit cycle. The power split between the electrical and combustion halves sits at roughly fifty-fifty, sustainable fuel makes up 100 percent, the MGU-H has been removed, and cars run active aerodynamics with two wing configurations. At the same time, for the first time in a decade, the grid carries an eleventh team called Cadillac. When the rules change, the pecking order changes with them. But performance dispersion in the first season of a cycle is always wider than the public assumes. That happened in 2026 and again in 2026. It is happening once more. Aston Martin is described as having a torrid 2026 campaign. The file I read offers no lap-time figure, no aerodynamic data, no qualifying gap. I state that plainly: I have no quantitative evidence of the severity of the deficit, only an assertion. And an assertion, in my trade, is a hypothesis that has not yet been tested. Fernando Alonso turns 45 during 2026. His contract expires at the end of the season. Two possibilities are floated in the file: a move to Alpine, or full retirement. Neither has a specific source. Cadillac, the eleventh team, has yet to score a point. The timing of the remarks deserves a note too. They were delivered immediately before Alonso's home race, where any statement about him is amplified many times over compared with an ordinary Grand Prix. That is a communications choice, whether deliberate or merely convenient. On the racetrack, these four nodes do not touch. On the executive table, they sit close enough that a single sentence can reach all of them. Every race is a network; I only look for the knot. The knot here has the shape of a cross. At the centre is the power unit manufacturer supplying Aston Martin. Its four arms carry four different pressures. The first arm is technical performance: an engine below the benchmark. The second is regulatory power: whether the federation is permitted to intervene. The third is the driver market: a potential empty seat. The fourth is commercial image: a two-time champion leaving the grid. ADUO is the mechanism that grants a power unit manufacturer additional development if its power unit sits below a defined performance benchmark. Framing it this way makes it look like a neutral technical tool. On paper, it is one. But every time that tool is triggered, a slice of power shifts from the team to the federation. That is the part readers rarely see. A weak engine is a technical problem. A weak engine that the federation confirms is weak, and for which the federation opens a development valve, is a political problem. The distance between those two sentences is only as wide as a press release. The diagram does not lie, but the people reading it do. I once sat in an analysis room in Melbourne, presented a heat map to a coaching staff, and realised the whole room had no idea what I was saying. Since then I have kept a habit: if a piece of data cannot be drawn as a shape, it is not ready to be argued over. ADUO can be drawn as a shape. Picture a pressure valve on a high-pressure pipe. The valve is fitted so the pipe does not burst. Its function is to release pressure, not to hand out favours. But once the valve opens, the first question people inside the industry ask is not how much pressure. The first question is who opened the valve, and by what standard. That is the moment a technical mechanism becomes a governance dispute. A performance-equalisation mechanism always has two sides. It stops a manufacturer from being locked permanently at the bottom of a cycle. At the same time, it reduces the value of investing correctly and investing early. If I were a manufacturer that spent precisely in order to clear the benchmark from the first race, I would ask what I got in return for that decision. Across this entire file, nobody has answered that question with a public number. Based on my experience following races since I began covering Formula 1 in 2026, disputes of this kind never erupt when a rule is written. They erupt when the rule is first applied, to a specific case, with a specific name attached. The specific case of 2026 is called Aston Martin. The verifiable data is clear enough. Alonso won the championship twice, in 2026 and 2026. He has 32 Grand Prix victories and 22 pole positions. He has made more than 400 race starts. His most recent Grand Prix victory came at the Spanish Grand Prix in 2026. That data is accurate, and it tells a very different story from the emotional one: thirteen years separate his last peak from the present. A two-time champion still carries enormous commercial value thirteen winless years later. That is proven by the very fact that the head of the federation publicly wants to keep him on the grid. Nobody needs to explain why a driver who no longer wins still matters to the sport's revenue. The intervention itself is the explanation. On the tactical map, emotion is the coordinate people forget to plot. Ben Sulayem mentioned that Alonso was sad. The head of a rule-making body does not often cite a driver's emotional state. When he does, he is speaking the language of a fan, not the language of an administrator. Emotionally, I understand it. I have watched Alonso race since he was a young driver, and I too am tired of seeing him run at the back. But here, someone in a coaching staff like me has to separate two things. Sympathy belongs to the grandstand. Responsibility belongs to the rulebook. The counterintuitive point sits here. Steiner says nobody deserves anything, and that is a clean principle. It is also incomplete, because the FIA is not a referee standing outside the contest the way a football referee does. The FIA is a co-author of this product, alongside the commercial rights holder. A body that writes the rules and also takes a share of the sport's revenue can never be perfectly neutral. The president's concern about a star leaving the grid has a structural basis. The real problem is not that the FIA president likes Alonso. The real problem is that the institution was never designed to separate its regulatory role from its co-ownership role. When a spokesperson has to appear in order to narrow the scope of his own president's remarks, that is a sign of an institution healing itself with a patch, rather than by repairing the structure. And this is the blind spot on both sides of the argument. The camp defending Alonso focusses on emotion: a legend should not end his career at the back. Steiner's camp focusses on principle: the federation owes nobody a seat. Both skip the most important operational question: what the ADUO performance benchmark is measured against, who measures it, and to whom it is published. If that benchmark is not transparent, every trigger can be read as a favour. If it is transparent, this dispute dissolves on its own. Steiner raises a question nobody answers. He asks about Cadillac: if the FIA helps a team because its driver is a two-time champion, what does the federation owe a brand-new team that has yet to score a point? That is the sharpest question in the entire file, and it has no principled answer within what has been published. There is a counterfactual worth placing alongside it. If Aston Martin were weak because of its chassis rather than its engine, the FIA president would have no mechanism to point to at all. ADUO exists only for the power unit. In other words, the mere existence of the mechanism steered the story toward the manufacturer, regardless of where the true cause lies. The tool created the story, not the other way round. The manufacturer supplying Aston Martin has other customers on the grid. If the power unit system is loosened, the benefit does not stop at one team. It flows to teams the file never names. That is why I do not read this as a story about Alonso. I read it as a story about how a new regulatory cycle redistributes advantage across an entire group of teams, while only one name reaches the front page. This dispute will cool quickly. It only heats up again if Alonso announces a decision, or if there is another ADUO trigger. But even as it cools, the valve that has been opened stays open. And every season, one more person learns that the fastest route to being helped is not aerodynamic improvement, but falling below a loosely defined threshold. That is the kind of incentive data cannot measure, because it does not live in a lap-time sheet. It lives in behaviour. Data is a shelter, but story is home. What I want to verify at the next race is concrete: whether any information indicates ADUO has been applied to a manufacturer other than this case, whether any FIA document publishes the performance benchmark and the method of measurement, and whether Aston Martin's power unit development rate over the coming rounds matches the extra development granted. Those three points, taken together, will say more than any statement. As for Alonso, I have a thought I do not want to hide behind the numbers. That 45-year-old man has raced more than four hundred times, won thirty-two times, been champion twice, and last stood on the top step in his own country, thirteen years ago. If he is sad, it is a very private sadness, and no federation mechanism can fix it.