FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has confirmed he held unofficial talks with BYD and Geely about potentially adding a 12th team to the F1 grid – but ruled out changing any of the sport’s regulations to attract Chinese carmakers with EV-heavy product line-ups. 

“I met with other manufacturers, and they came saying they wanted to join. One of them was BYD and another was Geely,” Ben Sulayem said at the New Economy Forum in Madrid recently. 

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F1 expanded to 11 teams this season by bringing Audi and Cadillac into the fold, and the FIA supremo doesn’t appear to be in a rush to up that figure to 12. “The FIA can open the door for a 12th team. But do we need a 12th team? No. We don’t need a team, we need the team,” he said.

Ben Sulayem also revealed that he spoke to BYD about the possibility of buying out an existing outfit instead of creating its own team from the ground up: “I said, ‘Why don’t you take over a team to start with?’ That was with BYD, why would I hide it? And they said, ‘No, we want to have our own team.’”

The FIA boss said the carmakers need to “come back with a serious proposal that shows us this is going to work” as he explained the importance of China to the sport.

“We have a race in China. It’s huge. We have the manufacturers, we also had a Chinese driver, and Chinese technology is there,” he said. “But everything has to be done on our terms and according to our regulations, which are fair to everyone.”

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The switch to a new hybrid set-up that places more emphasis on electrical power has been a dud for Formula 1, with fans and drivers alike complaining about cars harvesting energy in corners instead of going flat-out.

Ben Sulayem has been pushing for a regulation change that would see V8s introduced in either 2030 or 2031, but altering the rules further to suit manufacturers that specialise in EVs instead of internal-combustion models appears to be out of the question. 

“The regulations will not be changed just because of the Chinese manufacturers. We cannot do that. The regulations need to remain stable,” he said.