FIA Actions Spark Success for Independent F1 Teams

FIA’s engine regulations reshaped F1, enabling fair competition and empowering customer teams like McLaren to achieve groundbreaking success, says Zak Brown.

A customer team in F1 capable of winning the Constructors’ Championship? That’s exactly what McLaren F1 achieved in 2024 with a Mercedes engine.

To make this possible, the FIA had to step in several years ago.

This is precisely what McLaren CEO Zak Brown acknowledges today, emphasizing that engine parity was one of the main reasons for the team’s success in securing the 2024 title.

In 2018, F1’s governing body intervened to ensure that engine manufacturers provided both works teams and customer teams with identical power unit specifications, covering both components and engine mappings (the different software operating modes of the engine).

During the first four years of the turbo-hybrid era (2014 to 2017), some customer teams did not have access to the same parameters as the works team. In 2024, McLaren became the first customer team of the turbo-hybrid era to win a championship.

“The biggest change, the one that brought complete parity, is that engine mapping must now be the same for all users of a given engine.”

“That used to be the difference between a works team and a customer team—there were all these different power modes we had that didn’t have to be identical.”

“As soon as that rule came into effect, I was fully confident that we could take the engine out of Lewis [Hamilton]’s car, put it in Lando’s car, and vice versa. It’s the same power unit.”

“The advantage for the works team is that they have a bit more insight into the engine’s integration and packaging, so when they design their car, they start with a slight edge in that area.”

“But we’ve proven that if you do an outstanding job, you can overcome that.”