Steiner, Ben Sulayem and the FIA's Red Line: When the Referee Publicly Takes a Side

Last weekend, Guenther Steiner did not open his conversation with pit-stop tactics or tyre strategy. He opened with a line that Mohammed Ben Sulayem, president of the FIA, had delivered ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix: that Fernando Alonso having to drive a non-competitive Aston Martin was something unacceptable. Steiner's answer was blunt — Aston Martin's problem belongs to Aston Martin, not to the federation. In a single sentence, the former Haas team principal turned a seemingly harmless remark into a debate about the boundaries of power in this sport. I have watched F1 from the technical side of the garage for eleven years, and I have learned one thing: when the referee starts talking about a specific driver in the voice of a fan, the system is already wobbling. Not because the sentiment is wrong — Alonso is a two-time champion, and anyone may feel for him. But because of the position of the speaker. An FIA president, the man who signs off on technical and sporting decisions, openly wishing a specific team would go faster. That is data, and data does not lie. To understand why this story is heavier than it looks, it has to be placed in the right cycle. 2026 is Formula 1's biggest regulatory shake-up in decades: new hybrid power units, active aerodynamics, sustainable fuels, and the arrival of an eleventh team — Cadillac. Every time F1 resets its rules, the competitive order is reshuffled. Strong teams suddenly fall back, midfield teams climb, and in the early years a gap between engine manufacturers can become locked in faster than a chassis gap. That is precisely why a mechanism called ADUO exists — Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities. It is a tool within the 2026 power-unit regulations that grants a manufacturer whose engine falls below a defined performance benchmark additional development opportunities. Its purpose is anti-ossification: to prevent an engine gap from being frozen for too long, mirroring the reverse-order logic F1 already applies on the chassis side through its aerodynamic testing allocation. Aston Martin, in the 2026 season, is described as enduring a torrid campaign. Alonso — a two-time champion, reported to be very sad — is out of contract at season's end. Rumours point in two directions: to Alpine, or to retirement. Ben Sulayem recalled that in May, the FIA had done something legal for the team, directed at the engine, so it could improve. An FIA spokesperson quickly confirmed the remark related to the ADUO system. And the timing was chosen carefully: ahead of the Spanish Grand Prix — Alonso's home race. The key point is this: this is not a performance story in the ordinary sense. No lap times are given, no grid gaps, no top speeds. The only technical thing in the story is a regulatory signal — and it weighs more than any data table. When a power-unit manufacturer's ADUO is triggered, that is a structural admission that its engine sits below standard. Here the signal points toward the power unit more than toward Aston Martin's own aerodynamics department. In other words, much of the team's difficulty may lie upstream — with its engine supplier — rather than solely inside Aston Martin's own design office. This complicates the argument Steiner wants to build. If a team sabotages its own game, then it is right that it must fix it itself. But if the engine is the root, then part of the problem lies beyond the team's direct control — and the ADUO mechanism exists precisely to handle that kind of problem. In that case, the FIA's action is not necessarily favouritism; it is a mechanism operating exactly as designed. Yet precisely because ADUO is a legal tool, the story becomes more subtle. The FIA acted legally in May. So where is the problem? In the language. The FIA spokesperson had to quickly narrow the scope of the president's remarks, reducing them to a technical mechanism. That is an institutional retreat: the organisation separating the personal sentiment of its head from the commitment of the institution. When an institution has to issue a statement clarifying that its head was really only talking about technical matters, the very act of clarifying is evidence that the original remark drifted off-message. In eleven years of writing about this sport, I have always viewed the process as an information-processing system. A tactical machine does not run on emotion; it runs on information. When a federation president speaks through emotion, what the system receives is a distorted signal about standards. And that signal is not harmless. In a reset cycle, neutrality is the most fragile asset. Any manufacturer competing against Aston Martin's engine has the right to ask: why should one team benefit from the public remarks of the regulator's head, while others quietly get on with their work? Here I must remind myself of an old lesson. In 2026, I wrote a World Cup final preview and made two errors: I misspelled N'Golo Kanté's name and misstated his tackle count in that match. I deleted the piece, went back through the entire dataset, then built a five-layer verification process: cross-check the source, rewatch the footage, check the count, ask an expert, and wait thirty minutes before publishing. My mistake is named Kanté, and I do not want to forget it. It taught me that in any debate, the first step is not to pick a side, but to determine what was said, what is inferred, and what has no evidence at all. Applying those five layers here: Ben Sulayem's remarks are a real event, reported through named quotations. The FIA reducing the comments to ADUO is a real event, confirmed by an institutional spokesperson. Steiner's rebuttal is a real event, aired on a podcast. But what the article does not provide — and what readers most need — is lap-time data to assess how far the car has fallen, and how much the engine truly lags its rivals. Without that data, any judgment about severity is only speculation. There is another angle that is often overlooked. In the 2026 cycle, with both technical and financial regulations new, the regulator's power to define the performance benchmark becomes decisive. That benchmark determines who receives extra development opportunities. This is the point few readers notice: the real debate is not whether the FIA is helping Aston Martin, but where the benchmark is set, who sets it, and whether it is applied consistently across all manufacturers. When the criteria are not transparent, even a legal action can smell of bias. An ADUO trigger for one team may also affect more than that team. If Aston Martin's engine belongs to a manufacturer supplying multiple teams, then other customer teams running the same power unit could fall within the affected zone. That is a spillover the original article does not mention, yet it matters to the overall competitive picture. On the driver market, this story is notable for a rare feature: a third party — the regulator — inserting itself into what is normally a bilateral negotiation between team and driver. Usually, whether Alonso stays or goes is a matter between him and the team. But when the FIA president openly wishes him retained, that negotiation gains an unofficial variable. It raises the media cost of his exit, and through that, may raise the driver's leverage. Alonso stands at the late stage of his career curve — the phase where a driver continues for competitiveness, not for money. A contract expiring at season's end, rumours of Alpine, rumours of retirement, plus the image of him reported as very sad — together these form a signal that retirement is a live option, not merely a bargaining chip. On the team side, the biggest risk is not lost points, but a lost commercial asset. Alonso is Aston Martin's biggest face, a driver still capable by every description in the story — the problem lies with the car, not with his pace. If he leaves, the team loses the figure who draws commercial attention, and the article names no successor. That is a talent-pipeline gap. The counter-intuitive angle lies in the question Steiner raised that no one answered: what about Cadillac? F1's eleventh team joined this season and has yet to score a point. A rookie team without points is normal in a debut season. But if the standard is that it is unacceptable for a team to be uncompetitive, then that principle must apply to all — or to none. Here, it is applied only to a team fielding a two-time champion and a major brand. That is the blind spot of the entire help argument. No one states clearly what the regulator owes which team, and on what criteria. The home-field brief has changed; stop clinging to the old formula — I usually use that line about home advantage in football, but it applies here too. New rules, new cycle, but the way people write and speak about fairness stays the same. What makes this debate hard to close is that both sides are partly right. Ben Sulayem is right that a champion should not have to drive a bad car. Steiner is right that a team's problem is not the federation's problem. The issue is not who is right — it is that a spokesperson cannot stand on both sides at once. There is a commercial reason behind it that few state outright: an Alonso still racing is a media asset. The fact that the regulator intervenes to keep him is evidence of just how large his commercial value is. But when commercial assets are protected by the referee's remarks, the line between sport and entertainment blurs. One more layer: if ADUO becomes a routine mid-season tool, it will reshape engine manufacturers' commercial planning — development budgets, upgrade timing, and how teams allocate resources under the cost cap. Those effects do not appear in this story, but they will quietly decide who grows stronger over the coming years. This story will not end at the podcast. It will end at Alonso's decision — stay, return to Alpine, or stop. Once the driver acts, the debate shifts from principle to news. But one question still hangs: if another team is uncompetitive next time, will the FIA speak up for them? Do not ask who drives well; ask which side the system stands on. And when a system answers through the remarks of its head rather than through a transparent process, that answer becomes data worth recording — to be checked later, when the season closes and people want to know who was treated fairly.