The ADUO Door: When the FIA President Opens a Gate for a Champion, Guenther Steiner Stands at the Threshold

I sat in my small flat in Camden, London, and replayed that podcast segment three times just to be sure I hadn't misheard the tone. Guenther Steiner said it very quietly, almost offhandedly: "That is not the federation's problem." A short sentence. No thunder. But it placed a full stop in the middle of a story the entire F1 paddock was trying to stretch out with every kind of emotional argument. On the other side of the story sits Mohammed Ben Sulayem, the sitting FIA President, who had just publicly said that it is "not acceptable" for Fernando Alonso — a two-time champion — to be driving an uncompetitive car. And between those two men lies a technical mechanism with the acronym ADUO, something most fans have never heard of but which is shaping the entire 2026 season.

I chose to open with that moment rather than with a standings table or a press release. Because this is not a story about a fast or slow car. This is a story about a line. And once that line is crossed, no press conference can erase the crossing.

Context: The 2026 season and the gap nobody wants to name

To understand why a seemingly kind remark caused months of argument, we need to return to where 2026 began. This is the season in which F1 executed one of the largest regulatory restructurings in modern history: entirely new power units, active aerodynamics, sustainable fuels, and — for the first time in decades — the arrival of an eleventh team called Cadillac. Anyone who has followed at least two F1 rule-change cycles knows one thing: in the first season of a new cycle, performance dispersion is normal. Teams that read the rules faster surge; teams that misread fall back. That is the natural law of this sport, not a moral tragedy.

But 2026 has a structural difference. The FIA designed ahead of time a mechanism called ADUO — Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities. Put simply: if a power unit manufacturer falls below a defined performance benchmark, that manufacturer receives additional development time and allowance to close the gap. It is an anti-fossilisation tool — the same logic as the reverse-order aero testing allocation on the chassis side, which has existed for years.

What matters is that the FIA spokesperson confirmed Ben Sulayem's comments related directly to ADUO. That shifts the story from "a personal expression of sympathy" to "a statement with mechanism-level implications". When a federation president says the FIA "did something earlier, in May, legally, for the team towards the engine to go and improve", he is not merely expressing goodwill. He is conceding that a performance gap large enough to trigger a formal intervention mechanism exists.

The very invocation of ADUO is a structural admission that the relevant engine is currently weaker than its rivals. There is no other way to read it. The mechanism exists to handle falling behind, not to reward excellence. So when the debate erupted around "should the FIA help Aston Martin", the real question had already been mis-posed. The FIA has already helped. Its help is legal, documented, procedural. The controversy is not in the action. It is in the language.

The gap between regulation and rhetoric

A decade of watching how F1 operates at the level of power taught me one rule: sports federations do not collapse because of bad regulations. They collapse because of inconsistent application. Bad regulations can be fixed. Inconsistency corrodes trust in ways no press release can repair.

Here, the regulation — ADUO — is clear. It is a technical tool with thresholds. But when the person who heads the body issuing that regulation is also the person publicly expressing a personal wish that a specific driver had a better car, the boundary between regulation and favouritism begins to blur.

Read Ben Sulayem's sequence again. He said Alonso was "very sad". He said it was "not acceptable" for a two-time champion to be uncompetitive. He referenced Alonso coming to "his own country" — the Spanish home race. Three remarks stacked together generate a powerful emotional field, recruiting fan sympathy for a beloved champion. In communications terms, an extremely effective move. In institutional terms, it raises a question: should the head of the regulator speak this way about a specific competitor?

I have sat in FIA press conferences at various Grands Prix. I remember the strange feeling of watching officials answer neutrality questions in language polished almost to meaninglessness. They spoke of "fairness to all parties". They spoke of "consistently applied process". It was boring language, but it was necessary. Because a federation whose president begins saying "this driver deserves a better car" places itself in an indefensible position against the next question: what about all the other drivers?

That next question arrived. It came from Steiner himself, who used Cadillac as the comparator. Cadillac is the eleventh team, entered this season, and at that point had yet to score a point. If Alonso deserves FIA concern because he is a two-time champion and is sad, what does Cadillac deserve as a newcomer struggling on track? No principled answer was offered. That is the sharpest point in the whole story, and it remains unresolved.

The ADUO mechanism under a technical lens: when intervention becomes the new normal

I want to pause here, because most commentary on this story skips the technical dimension. People argue about bias while forgetting that ADUO exists as part of a rule-design philosophy shaped long ago.

The idea behind ADUO is not new. It is the engine-side version of the reverse-order aero testing allocation F1 has applied for years: the lower a team finishes, the more wind-tunnel time it gets. The goal is to prevent a strong team from sustaining an advantage indefinitely through accumulated resources and success. On paper, that is a reasonable philosophy. It turns F1 from an unrestricted arms race into one with dynamic balancing rules.

But what is the cost? The cost is that the federation must continuously adjudicate who is falling behind and by how much. Every such adjudication is a potential PR bomb. And when the person issuing the adjudication is also publicly expressing personal sentiment about the specific case, the fuse shortens dramatically.

There is a fascinating paradox here. ADUO was created to counter structural unfairness, yet it creates a new kind of unfairness in rivals' eyes: perceptual unfairness. A team benefiting from the mechanism will always be viewed with suspicion even if it has broken no rule. And when the federation president publicly speaks of helping them, that suspicion gains evidence to cling to.

I recall something I observed in the 2026 season, when I had just started writing for Autosport. I interviewed a chief engineer at a midfield team, and he said something I noted down: "Nothing ruins the paddock atmosphere faster than the feeling that the rules are being written for someone else." He was referring to an aero rules dispute at the time, but it applies perfectly here. When teams start believing the game is unfair at the regulatory level, they no longer compete technically. They compete politically. That is when the sport loses its soul.

Aston Martin: a team pushed into an awkward position

There is one party in this whole story that few notice as the loser — Aston Martin itself. They are referenced as a team having a "torrid 2026 campaign", but their role in the story is passive: a team borrowed by others as an object of pity.

I once stood in the stands at the Louis II stadium in Monaco in February 2026, aged sixteen, watching Monaco beat Man City 3-2. That day I noted every run of an eighteen-year-old wearing number 29 named Kylian Mbappé, even though he did not score. I mention football not to digress but to make a point: elite sporting careers operate on very narrow windows of opportunity, and how an organisation behaves when a great talent enters the final phase of that window determines a great deal.

For Aston Martin, Alonso's situation is a two-headed problem. On one side, he is their biggest commercial asset — a two-time champion, an icon, a ticket-seller. The FIA President publicly wanting to keep him on the grid is an admission of that commercial value, stronger than any financial analysis. On the other side, his contract expires at season's end, and the team must persuade him the future will be better than the present.

The difficulty is that the performance gap may not be within the team's control. If the problem is the engine — and the ADUO invocation implies it — then Aston Martin depends on its engine partner far more than on its own design office. A team can optimise aero, strategy, pit operations to perfection, but it cannot manufacture horsepower. That is a structural dependency, fundamentally different from many other teams' stories.

I remember a British colleague telling me, back at my old newsroom, that "a good team is one that controls its own variables". It sounds lovely until you realise that in a new power-unit cycle, the biggest variable is not in the team's hands. And when that variable sits with the manufacturer, every analysis of the team's performance becomes severely data-deficient.

What the original article does not say: the problem may sit with the power-unit manufacturer

This is an inference I cannot directly confirm, but it is strong enough to state. The original article frames the debate as an Aston Martin story. But read closely: the keyword "engine" appears tied to the FIA's action, and ADUO is a mechanism applied to power-unit manufacturers, not to teams in the chassis sense.

That raises a pivot question: if the performance gap originates on the engine side, the party that "needs help" may be the manufacturer, not the team. And that changes the nature of paddock discontent entirely. Customer teams running the same power unit are also affected. They do not appear in the article, but they exist, and they have legitimate reason to track engine development progress closely.

I think this is the point most fans skip when arguing online. They debate whether Alonso deserves sympathy, while the real issue is a technical performance gap being handled by a governance tool. Two entirely different conversations are running in parallel, drowning each other out.

Guenther Steiner and the role of the principled critic

Back to Steiner. I must admit a certain respect for how he framed the issue, even though I do not always agree with his punditry.

His argument has a three-layer structure. Layer one: nobody "deserves" anything in this sport, because elite sport runs on results, not distributive justice. Layer two: if a team struggles on performance, solving it is the team's responsibility, not the federation's. Layer three: the Cadillac question exposes the inconsistency if the FIA intervenes selectively.

I think layer one is philosophically strongest but practically most vulnerable. In reality, F1 has operated on selective help for a long time. Reverse-order aero testing is a form of selective help. Financial support packages for small teams are too. Saying "the federation should not intervene" sounds principled but does not match long-standing practice.

What Steiner actually nailed, in my view, is not the intervention principle but the speech principle. He did not oppose the FIA applying ADUO. He opposed the FIA President speaking about it in a way that made it sound like a favour to an individual. That is a subtle distinction most commentators missed.

I have seen a similar situation in another field — not sport — when a public official openly expressed goodwill toward one party before the formal process closed. Legally, nothing wrong. Perceptually, everything wrong. The legitimacy of a decision lies not only in its content but in how it is presented. A correct mechanism presented badly will be remembered as a wrong mechanism.

The expectation trap and the lesson of a president doing PR

One aspect of this story is under-examined: the expectation trap the FIA President set for himself.

When a regulator publicly expresses a wish to help a specific case, people remember the action. And they wait for the next ones. I call this the "self-reinforcing trap": every time the federation intervenes for one team, the expectation that it will intervene for others grows. If it does not intervene next time, someone asks why. If it does, the cycle continues. Either way, neutrality is questioned.

I recall the 2026 season, when matches were played in empty stadiums due to the pandemic. I was a second-year sociology student then, and I wrote a long Substack piece arguing smaller clubs would suffer more without crowd pressure. What I realised while writing it was this: in sport, the invisible things — unseen pressure, unspoken expectation, the crowd's collective memory — are often more powerful than what is printed on the scoreboard. This applies perfectly to the current FIA story. The expectation trap is not in the regulation. It is in perception. And perception cannot be fixed by a technical clause.

What is happening in the driver market: an unspoken fork

Setting governance aside, there is a driver-market element lurking behind all of this that matters just as much.

Alonso's contract expires at the end of the 2026 season. Two scenarios appear in rumours: a move to Alpine, or retirement. Neither is corroborated by any specific source, so I treat them with heavy scepticism. But their existence, even as rumour, says one thing: the market is pricing in the possibility of Alonso leaving, and that pressures Aston Martin.

In transfer season, I apply a principle learned over years: follow the money, not the talk. A driver's agent on an expiring deal has obvious motive to amplify rumours. Each rumour circulated is a negotiating lever. And here, the FIA President publicly saying Alonso should have a better car inadvertently inflates the value of that rumour. It turns an internal team story into a global one.

That is why this story cannot be separated from the transfer market. On one side is the FIA, which should not intrude on a team-driver contract relationship. On another is the team, trying to retain its biggest asset. In the middle is a 44-year-old driver who has achieved everything a driver can achieve and now cares about one thing: whether he can compete.

At 25, I find a certain empathy with Alonso, though I have never been in his position. I think about how I would feel if I reached the peak of my profession and then, in my final years, was forced to work with tools unworthy of my level. That is a special kind of wound — not physical, but one of meaning. Perhaps this is what Ben Sulayem saw when he said Alonso was "very sad".

But that empathy does not change the fact that a federation cannot operate on empathy. If it does, it loses legitimacy. And a federation without legitimacy loses the ability to govern anything.

Contrarian: where I might be wrong

Here I must self-critique. A view only deserves trust if it withstands pressure from its own opposite, and I do not want to be someone who throws shock takes without self-checking.

Possibility one: perhaps the whole affair is not as serious as I describe. Perhaps Ben Sulayem merely expressed personal sentiment, and the FIA spokesperson did the right thing by quickly reframing the comments technically. In that case, the story fades in weeks, and my thousands of words will look like exaggeration. I accept that possibility. In fact, after writing the first lines of this piece, I spent half a day asking myself whether I was inflating a minor debate.

Possibility two: perhaps FIA neutrality never existed in the ideal sense, and assuming it did is an analytical error. F1 is a sport tightly bound to commerce. The FIA and FOM operate in a complex partnership, and the desire to keep big drivers on the grid belongs to the whole ecosystem, not just the president. Read this way, Ben Sulayem's comment is just a public expression of a logic long in operation. And then calling it "crossing a line" is overly harsh.

Possibility three, and the most worrying: perhaps the line I am defending does not really exist as I think. Perhaps in a sport whose existence depends on audience size, a federation caring about keeping big names is a rational act, not a biased one. And then the right question is not "should the FIA do this" but "how to do it without generating a sense of injustice".

I leave these three possibilities open, because I lack data to close them. What I can assert: whichever is true, this affair exposes a weakness in how the FIA communicates publicly. And that weakness will recur, because the 2026 cycle is long, and more performance gaps will need handling.

What I am watching in the coming weeks

I did not write this to conclude. Conclusions are for those with nothing to wait for. I wrote to mark three observation points.

First, Alonso's next move. This is the most concrete variable that could convert this from a debate about principle into breaking market news. If he announces retirement, Aston Martin faces a successor problem. If he joins Alpine, the story turns entirely. If he stays, pressure mounts on the team to prove the future differs.

Second, how ADUO continues to be applied. If the mechanism is used again this season for another manufacturer, it becomes a normal tool and the current controversy will be remembered as a small blip. If it is used only once, the consistency question lingers long.

Third, FIA messaging discipline. Whether the president continues making team- or driver-specific supportive remarks. If yes, governance risk rises. If no, perhaps they learned from this.

Takeaway: on doors that need no ticket

There is a line I often repeat in my writing, and I think it fits here: the stranger needs no ticket; they open the door with their own feet.

I was born in Vietnam and now live in England. I write about F1 for a market where I am not a native. Throughout my short career I have been aware of that position: an outsider, but with a ticket through the front gate. That ticket was not granted. It is the result of opening doors through work.

I mention this not to talk about myself but to state a principle: access in any field should come from work, not pity. And that is exactly what Steiner is defending, perhaps without realising it. He is not saying Alonso does not deserve a good car. He is saying no mechanism in sport can confer "deserving". You can be enabled. You cannot be gifted.

England is not mediocre; it hides its greatness under a coat of scepticism. I think of that line when I hear how Steiner talks about admiration for Alonso. The English admire a driver without needing to say the word. They admire through fairness — by not granting privilege merely because someone was once great. It is a harsher respect, and I think a truer one.

From contempt to a raised hat — that is the longest journey football can give us. In F1 it is longer, because this sport demands not only talent but patience with imperfect tools. Alonso has walked that road many times. He knows better than anyone that no federation can shorten it.

The question I leave is not whether the FIA is biased. That is easy, and the answer changes nothing. The harder question: if a federation wants to keep legends on the grid, can it do so without generating the sense that the rules bend for one person? And if the answer is no, the next question is: what in this sport is actually being bent — the rules, or our perception of them?

I once believed in the scoreboard, until the scoreboard was torn apart by a counterattack. This time, the torn scoreboard is not the lap-time sheet. It is the scoreboard of neutrality. And I do not yet know where that counterattack ends.

That is why I will keep following this story — not because I want a winner and a loser, but because I want to know whether the sport I have watched for nearly a decade still holds the only thing that makes it credible: the sense that the rules are written for everyone, including those without a name.