Formula 1 Fuel: What Fuel Do F1 Cars Use?

• F1 cars have run on fully sustainable fuel since 2026, a petrol-like drop-in fuel built from non-food biomass, municipal waste and captured carbon, with no new fossil carbon burned.
• The race fuel allowance has fallen from 110kg during the 2022 to 2025 E10 era to 70kg for 2026, as the power unit’s electrical share roughly doubles.
• There is no single published octane number. F1 requires the fuel to sit within the sport’s usual octane band and remain a genuine drop-in for a petrol engine, whichever of five suppliers, Shell, Petronas, Aramco, ExxonMobil or BP, provides it.

From 2026, Formula 1 cars run on fully sustainable fuel for the first time in the sport’s history, replacing the E10 blend used between 2022 and 2025. It is still, deliberately, a petrol-like drop-in fuel rather than some exotic rocket brew, built to the same broad specification as the fuel in a road car, just refined to a far higher standard and made without burning new fossil carbon.

It is difficult to overstate how big a shift this is. For seventy-plus years, every Formula 1 car has ultimately run on fuel refined from crude oil. The 2026 rules end that outright, mandating that every drop in the fuel cell come from non-food biomass, genuine municipal waste, or captured carbon rather than a barrel pulled from the ground. Combined with the power unit’s move to an even 50/50 split between combustion and electrical power, it is the single biggest change to what actually powers a Grand Prix car since the sport adopted turbo-hybrid engines in 2014, and it arrives with a genuine claim on relevance: the fuel is designed to be a template for what a combustion engine could burn long after F1 itself has moved on.

That fuel feeds a power unit whose full 2026 specifications pair a 350kW electric motor with a 15,000rpm combustion engine.

What Fuel Do F1 Cars Use In 2026?

What fuel do F1 cars use now that the E10 era is over? Fully sustainable, fossil-free petrol, formulated under the FIA’s 2026 Power Unit Technical Regulations to contain no new fossil carbon at all. Every previous F1 fuel, including the E10 blend that ran from 2022 to 2025, was still built on a fossil petrol base with a renewable component blended in. E10 itself was roughly 90 per cent conventional unleaded and 10 per cent renewable ethanol. The 2026 fuel inverts that entirely: it is a drop-in replacement for petrol, chemically similar enough to work in the same engine architecture without redesigning it, but every constituent has to trace back to a sustainable source. It is the difference between adding a renewable ingredient to fossil fuel and removing the fossil fuel altogether.

What Is F1’s Sustainable Fuel Made From?

F1’s 2026 fuel is built from three permitted feedstock categories, and teams and fuel suppliers can blend and process them however they choose as long as the finished product is certified. The first is non-food biomass: organic material that nobody was going to eat anyway, agricultural waste such as rice husks being the standard example. The second is genuine municipal waste, including household byproducts like used cooking oil. The third is carbon capture, where renewable electricity is used to split water into hydrogen, which is then combined with captured carbon dioxide to build synthetic hydrocarbon molecules from scratch. Any of the three, or a blend of all three, is legal, provided the fuel supplier can prove the sourcing through the FIA’s certification and traceability process rather than simply asserting it. What none of them involve is new fossil carbon pulled from the ground, which is the entire point of the switch.

What Octane Is F1 Fuel?

F1’s regulations do not publish a single fixed octane number for the 2026 fuel the way a road-going pump does. Instead they require the finished product to sit within the same broad octane band the sport has run for years, rather than mandating one exact figure regardless of feedstock or supplier. That is a deliberate design choice: because three different feedstock routes are legal, locking every supplier to one precise number would have ruled out perfectly good sustainable blends before the fuel had even been tested. What is fixed is that every certified fuel has to be a genuine drop-in for a petrol engine, meaning its octane rating still has to sit close enough to commercially available pump fuel that it needs no special engine tune. Practically speaking, that means F1 fuel remains high-octane relative to the unleaded sold at a service station, but it is regulated by equivalence to pump fuel rather than by a single published number.

Do F1 Cars Run On The Same Petrol As Road Cars?

Not exactly, but they are far closer relatives than most people assume. Yes, F1 cars run on a form of gas that is chemically recognisable as petrol, refined to the same drop-in standard a road car’s engine could theoretically burn without modification. What is different is precision, not category. F1’s supplier fuel has to pass the FIA’s certification process, including third-party verification of its sourcing and consistency, batch to batch, in a way no pump fuel is ever required to match. Think of it as the same basic substance a road car runs on, but engineered and audited to a motorsport tolerance the average petrol station has no reason to bother with. So do F1 cars use gas? Yes, just a far more rigorously certified version of it.

How Much Fuel Does An F1 Car Use In A Race?

An F1 car is now permitted a maximum of 70kg of fuel at the start of a race, or roughly 154lb, down from the 110kg (242lb) ceiling that applied throughout the 2022 to 2025 E10 era. That 110kg figure is now history rather than the current rule. It was itself an increase from 105kg back in 2018, and further back still, cars were burning through 160kg in the early 2010s before flow restrictions and hybrid recovery started cutting consumption year on year. The 2026 drop reflects the power unit’s electrical share roughly doubling: with the MGU-K alone jumping from around 120kW to roughly 350kW of electrical output, the combustion engine simply has to burn less fuel to produce the same lap time. Fuel flow to the engine is now controlled by energy rather than by mass or volume, capped at 3,000 megajoules per hour under the FIA’s 2026 power unit regulations, a mechanism change from the mass-flow limits used through 2025. How that energy based fuel flow limit works in practice is a subject of its own.

Fuel sits outside the scales entirely: the 768kg minimum weight is measured with the driver aboard but the tank empty, so the 70kg race allowance is carried on top of it.

How Big Is An F1 Fuel Tank?

An F1 car’s fuel lives inside a specially engineered fuel cell mounted directly behind the driver, built to a crash-safety standard rather than sized for maximum capacity. It only ever needs to hold one Grand Prix distance’s worth of fuel, not a road car’s multi-tank-fill range, and the 2026 regulations tighten the safety structure around that cell further still, rather than changing its broad size. The engineering behind how an F1 fuel tank is built and protected is a safety story in its own right.

Who Supplies F1 Fuel In 2026?

Every power unit manufacturer partners with a fuel supplier, and for 2026 the pairings are:

Ferrari, Haas, and Cadillac run Shell fuel.

Mercedes, McLaren, Williams, and Alpine run Petronas fuel.

Aston Martin runs Aramco fuel.

Red Bull and Racing Bulls run ExxonMobil fuel.

Audi runs BP fuel, under the Castrol brand.

Several of these are more than technical partnerships. Petronas and Aramco in particular carry title sponsorship of their respective teams, which is why their branding sits so prominently on the Mercedes and Aston Martin liveries.

Why Did F1 Switch To Fully Sustainable Fuel?

Three reasons converge here. The first is road relevance: a fuel built from waste and captured carbon that still works as a drop-in replacement for petrol is a genuine testbed for what a combustion engine could burn once fossil fuel is off the table, and F1’s official framing of the 2026 rules leans directly on that road relevant language. The second is F1’s own sustainability commitment, part of the sport’s broader push toward net zero carbon. The third sits alongside the fuel change rather than separate from it: the power unit’s electrical share is roughly doubling for 2026, the same shift behind the perennial question of whether F1 cars are electric, and the two changes were designed together. A combustion engine that burns fully sustainable fuel and a hybrid system doing far more of the work are, together, the actual answer to how F1 plans to keep racing while cutting its fossil fuel use to zero. How the internal combustion engine burns that fuel, sustainable or not, is its own subject. Fuel is also only half of what flows through an engine: what oil F1 cars use is certified on an entirely separate track.

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Sources

• FIA: 2026 Formula 1 Power Unit Technical Regulations (Fuel)
• Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team: Facts and Stats, Advanced Sustainable Fuel
• Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team: Facts and Stats, Power Unit Regulation Changes

Reviewed by Jack Renn, July 2026

Read this article in: Nederlands

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