Steiner Fires Back at Ben Sulayem: The FIA Owes Nobody a Faster Car

At the Barcelona circuit, where Fernando Alonso once had the whole grandstand chanting his name, FIA President Mohammed Ben Sulayem stood in front of the cameras and spoke about the Spanish driver in the tone of a man worried about the sport’s shared assets. That Alonso has to drive a car that is not competitive enough, he said, is “not acceptable”. He recalled that the FIA had done something “earlier, in May, legally for the team towards the engine to go and improve”, and he repeated that Alonso is “very sad”.

Placed side by side, those statements build a rare image in the paddock: the highest regulatory body of Formula 1 standing up as an advocate for one particular driver and one particular team. An FIA spokesperson later had to narrow the scope: the remarks related to the ADUO system.

Then Guenther Steiner appeared. On a podcast, the former Haas team principal said simply that nobody “deserves” anything, that Aston Martin has to sort out its own problem, and that the federation has no obligation to solve it.

Two men, two readings of the same word: entitlement.

A new season, new rules, and a mechanism few people notice

2026 opens a new technical cycle in Formula 1: a new-generation hybrid power unit, active aerodynamics, sustainable fuels, and an 11th team called Cadillac. In a reset cycle, performance dispersion between power unit manufacturers usually widens and then compresses — but it compresses far more slowly than a chassis gap, because power units are locked by regulation and by long development cycles.

ADUO — Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities — exists because of that fear. The mechanism grants additional development allowances to a manufacturer whose power unit falls below a defined performance benchmark. It is a close relative of the reverse-order allocation of aerodynamic testing time that Formula 1 has used for years.

Based on my experience tracking races and regulation cycles, I always test a new mechanism with two questions: what does it measure, and whom does it measure. ADUO measures power unit performance against a threshold. It does not measure effort, strategy, or the driver. So when that mechanism is invoked for a specific team, it concedes something very concrete: somewhere in that team’s supply chain there is a structural deficit.

For Aston Martin, the 2026 season has been described as torrid. Alonso is out of contract at the end of the year. The rumours circle two doors: a move to Alpine, or retirement. Cadillac, the new team, has yet to score a point.

A legal mechanism and a statement that is not neutral

The most striking thing here is not whether the FIA intervened. Levelling power unit performance is normal, has precedent, and in a new cycle is arguably the right thing to do. The striking thing is the channel: an FIA President chose to speak publicly about one driver and one team, while the entire technical file had already been handled quietly through ADUO.

“The defeat at Luzhniki taught me what victory never admits.” In 2026 I misread Germany’s formation against Mexico and paid for it with a published correction. Since then I have learned to separate statements from data. Here the data is this: the FIA acted legally under a mechanism already in force. The statement is this: the FIA President expressed a wish for one specific driver to be competitive. The two layers do not clash on the law, but they clash on the role.

The timing makes it clearer still. He spoke ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix — Alonso’s home race. A statement like that, set against a grandstand full of Spanish flags, gets amplified many times over compared with the same words at a neutral round. From my work hosting major events, I learned that timing is part of the content.

The commercial side is easy to understand. A two-time champion still racing is a television asset, and this sport has lived on such assets since documentaries turned drivers into mainstream characters. But the guardian of the television asset is the commercial rights holder, not the referee of the racing.

And here is the sharpest point Steiner touches: consistency. If the FIA acted because Alonso is a two-time champion who is “very sad”, then what does the federation owe Cadillac? A new team, in its debut season, with no points, no legend in the cockpit, and no mention by the FIA President in the media. When the criterion for intervention is affection for an individual, that criterion cannot be expanded into a rule. The governing body has yet to answer that with any technical mechanism.

The contrarian read: both sides are half right

The laziest reading arranges the story as cinema: the federation saves a legend, the hard man objects. I do not read it that way. “The viewer watches the move; I watch an entire chessboard in motion.” The chessboard here is the negotiation over the regulator’s right to intervene, and both sides are playing their positions.

Steiner’s principle — nobody deserves anything — is morally clean in a sporting sense. But it ignores one technical detail: if the deficit sits on the power unit supplier’s side, then “let Aston Martin sort it out” is only half true. A team cannot conjure horsepower out of thin air, nor shorten a power unit development cycle that the rules have locked. That is precisely why ADUO exists.

Conversely, Ben Sulayem’s statement is right on the commercial side of the sport and wrong institutionally. An FIA President is entitled to want Alonso to be competitive. He cannot say it as though the federation owes a driver a debt.

In athletics, nobody shortens the track for a famous runner. In football, nobody lowers the crossbar for a big club. But both sports do have levelling mechanisms: draws, revenue sharing, seeding, qualification quotas. “The track and the pitch are not opposites; they are two beats of the same heart.” The question was never whether to level the field. The question is whether it is done by a published, transparent, measurable rule — applied identically to every team.

“I do not believe in luck; I believe in numbers lined up straight.” The ADUO performance threshold is a number. If that number were published in full and applied consistently, this controversy would not exist. It exists because the emotional part is spoken aloud while the numerical part stays silent inside the technical meeting room.

What to watch

Three signals will decide whether this story becomes news or dissolves into commentary. One: Alonso’s contract — staying at Aston Martin, moving to Alpine, or retiring. “The transfer market does not buy the present; it buys promises about the future.” For a 44-year-old driver, that promise is priced by the laps left in his legs, not by the trophies in the cabinet. Two: how ADUO is invoked next, because every application sets a precedent for the whole 2026 cycle. Three: the FIA’s messaging discipline — whether the President keeps naming a specific team in public.

What I want to know is not whether Alonso gets help. It is this: if a brand-new team with no points also finds itself “very sad”, what will the federation say?