Cleaner, greener fuels are coming to Formula 1. Here's what that means

The 2026 F1 championship will be raced using 'sustainable' fuels. But how much of a difference will it actually make to the sport's carbon footprint?

- ANA SANTI

Next year, Formula 1 (F1) will pull into the pits for one of its most ambitious overhauls yet – trading fossil fuel for a 100-per-cent sustainable alternative.

It's part of a broader effort to meet new environmental rules and to prove the sport can, in F1’s words, “keep us driving without building new cars.”

But not everyone’s convinced. With fuel from races making up less than one per cent of the sport’s total carbon footprint, experts say F1 has far bigger environmental problems to solve. So, what are they and how can they be tackled?

FRESH FUEL

In 2020, F1’s governing body, the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile (FIA), set a deadline for race cars’ engines to run on 100-per-cent sustainable fuels from 2026 and for the sport to be carbon neutral by 2030.

The transition began in 2023 and 2024, when Formula 2 and Formula 3 (Fl’s feeder racing series) started using 55-per-cent ‘sustainable bio-sourced fuel’, before switching to 100-per-cent ‘advanced sustainable fuel’ in 2025.

Now, F1 has developed its own ‘sustainable’ fuel for 2026. This fuel has been designed specifically for the hybrid engines in today’s F1 cars, which rely on both an internal combustion engine and two electric motor-generators.

F1 says the new fuel won’t add to the overall amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Instead, the carbon used in the new fuel will be extracted from existing sources – including household waste and nonfood biomass – or captured as carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere.

This will then be used to make a synthetic fuel - an artificially-produced fuel designed to do the same job as the fossil fuel-derived petrol that’s currently being used. In the long term, the FIA says that F1, 2 and 3 will all eventually adopt this “fully synthetic hybrid fuel”.