F1 2030 engines: Details have emerged, and it's dreadful news

F1 Analysis

Details have emerged about F1's 2030 engines - and it's dreadful news

Strap in for a diatribe

Chris Deeley Editor

Experienced sports writer covering F1 and other motorsports since 2023

Wednesday 23 September 2026 20:55

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It's time for F1 fans to accept one simple fact. Unless there is a massive change at almost every level of the sport's governance, naturally aspirated engines are never coming back.

Some figures in the paddock have been talking up the potential of returning to a naturally aspirated setup when the next major set of regulation changes arrive in 2030. That will not be happening.

Motorsport.com have reported that a framework has been agreed between al the major stakeholders, and the next F1 engine will be...a 3.0-litre V8 turbo.

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There's also the potential for a 'push-to-pass' overtake button to be introduced, a system currently in use in IndyCar. Goody.

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The reason that the comeback of naturally aspirated engines and their iconic roar was knocked on the head and stuffed into the bin of a public park? It's, uh, their iconic roar.

A lot of F1's street circuits – and there are a lot of them – have noise-emission limits. That pretty much made naturally aspirated engines a non-starter, although the intention is to make the 2030-onward engines at least a bit noisier.

F1 and the FIA will play the 'well, hands tied!' card about this in the coming months and years. 'Well, we'd love to have proper engines back, but there's all this red tape!', 'this is out of our hands', and so on, and so forth. Do not, for a second, swallow that.

This is a direct result of F1 making the enthusiastic decision to go chasing a quick few million dollars by planting races in the middle of any city rich enough to pay through the nose for the privilege.

You don't get to palm off responsibility for something that's happened because you got greedy. That's not how this works.

Looking at the tracks namedropped in the Motorsport.com report – Melbourne, Miami, Madrid, Singapore, Baku and Las Vegas – is pretty revealing.

All of those bar Singapore (2008) and Melbourne (1996) have been added to the calendar in the last decade as F1 chases money and rapid expansion. Are they good circuits? God, no. Vegas is a glitzy joke, Miami is one of the worst tracks on the calendar, and Madrid's sole positive is that it means Monaco isn't the most boring race of the season.

This is what F1's sold its soul for. Bad racing at tracks whose entire reason for existing is to put an extra zero on the sport's bank balance. That's why good, well-designed race tracks are mothballed, and why we'll never hear a real roaring engine again. Congratulations, you created shareholder value. It only cost you the beating heart of the sport.

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The thing is, this isn't even the first time this week that F1 has been forced into a bad choice by its own actions.

Races are going to be shorter from the 2027 season onward, because they're scrambling to mitigate the damage done by their last catastrophic power unit concept.

"We have to make the races shorter," they're saying, "because otherwise drivers will run out of petrol when we switch to a 60/40 combustion engine/battery power split, instead of the 50/50 split that everyone told us would be bad, which we introduced anyway. This is clearly something out of our hands."

The apparent inability of anyone involved in the governance of F1 to think more than a single step ahead is increasingly baffling, and infuriating.

They're like a little kid who excitedly spends all of their pocket money the day they get it, then complains for the rest of the week that they can't afford any sweets. You did this! This is on you! This is a direct consequence of the things that you chose to do!

Every bad decision the sport makes just keeps compounding. They can't even undo their messes properly. It is painful to watch something you love get progressively worse and worse in pursuit of money, while the people at the top insist that everything's fine because teenagers watch the race highlights on YouTube. Screw you. Give us our sport back, you goddamn vultures.

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Chris Deeley - Editor

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