Wolff warns F1 faces 'catastrophe' over engine measures

Mercedes team principal and executive director Toto Wolff has come out strongly against any suggestions that F1 should introduce a new engine equalisation clause that would impose limits on the entire field.

His comments came after the F1 Commission met last week and agreed an evaluation into what action if any can be taken to help manufacturers who have fallen behind and need help getting back on a level footing.

At the moment, Alpine's power units provided by Renault are down by an estimated 30 horsepower compared to its counterparts used by Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes, and Alpine bosses have been negotiating to get some sort of break.

“The engine is a bit behind for sure," Alpine’s interim team principal Bruno Famin admitted to the media at Spa last week. "It's a fact that the engine is in a frozen period, and we cannot develop performance.”

Such measures under consideration might allow them extra development time and budget or 'joker' wild cards, while the other teams' development remains frozen ahead of new 2026 engine regulations.

But Wolff is very much against previous suggestions that the top teams should be pegged back and penalised for their success, saying that such an approach would be catastrophic for the sport and even lead to the 'bankrupting' of F1.

• Read also: Renault not pushing for changes to F1's 2026 engine regs

“Entertainment follows sport, and why the sport is so credible is because you have just got to work hard to be successful,” Wolff is quoted as saying by Motorsport.com this week.

“If you're falling back as an engine supplier, and your engine isn't as performant as others, that's obviously everybody's problem," he acknowledged.

"At the same time, with a frozen engine, we don’t want to lose out on giving someone opportunities," he stressed. “But it needs to be done in a meritocratic way.

"For that, we have a rule in the 2026 power unit regulations that if one power unit will drop out of three per cent below the top power unit, then the teams would sit down in good faith and debate what could be done.

"Once we have a common understanding of what the lack of performance is, we need to discuss how much more dyno hours and jokers can be given and that is something that we are to debate.

“But touching any kind of fuel flow or Balance of Performance [BOP] is a catastrophe and bankruptcy declaration for F1, it should never even be talked about.”

BOP is a system used in many sports car motor racing championships to maintain parity between competing cars by adjusting limits on a car's parameters, such as horsepower, weight, engine management and aerodynamics.

The concept dates back to GT3 2005 and has been seen in different forms in British Touring Car Championship and Japanese Super GT where it was called 'success ballast'.

After the matter of engine equalisation was raised by the FIA at least week's F1 Commission, the matter has now been passed to F1’s Power Unit Advisory Committee to evaluate what needs to done about the current "notable" gap.

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