Gary Anderson has spent more than four decades in Formula 1 chassis design. When he sits down to do the arithmetic on F1's hybrid power units, the numbers tend to win the argument. And in his column for The Race on Saturday, the former Jordan, Stewart and Jaguar technical director's calculator returned an answer that the 2026 grid has been grumbling about for weeks: the much-trumpeted 50/50 split between internal combustion and electric power was never going to happen.
'The question I would ask is when Formula 1's 2026 regulations were put in place, how did anyone think that they could get anywhere near a 50/50 hybrid power split,' Anderson wrote, before laying out the back-of-the-envelope problem.
In his read, the rules dropped a 350kW MGU-K into a car whose driver wants full power for roughly 60 per cent of a lap, on a circuit that only allows the system to harvest energy for around 20 per cent of it. The 350kW unit, fed from a battery sized for the 2026 deployment table, can only sustain its peak output for about 11.5 seconds before depletion. Run the demand and recovery side-by-side, Anderson argues, and the deficit is roughly 5.2 to 1 - meaning the actual usable output, averaged across a lap, sits closer to 440kW (about 590bhp) than the headline 700kW (940bhp) the 50/50 description implies.
That is the gap drivers have been describing as 'super clipping' since pre-season testing - the abrupt 50km/h drops that left Carlos Sainz warning of safety risks at street tracks like Baku and Singapore, and Ollie Bearman taking evasive action in Bahrain. It is also, Anderson believes, why the FIA spent the Miami weekend convening teams, manufacturers and Liberty for an emergency stakeholder review.
The outcome of that review, agreed in principle on Friday, was a 2027 patch: roughly 50kW more from the internal combustion engine, roughly 50kW less from the ERS deployment - a tilt toward what Stefano Domenicali described to teams as a 'more intuitive' hybrid behaviour. The FIA Formula 1 Commission framed the move as an evolutionary step rather than a rewrite.
Anderson is unconvinced the patch closes the gap. By his maths, shaving 50kW off ERS deployment without redesigning the harvest envelope still leaves the recovery side starving the deployment side. Drivers will still have to lift-and-coast to bank energy for the next straight, and the sudden power drops that have sent Bearman into the runoff and forced Verstappen into first gear at Bahrain's Turn 10 have not, in his analysis, been engineered out.
'The one thing I tried not to do was make the same mistake twice,' Anderson noted, framing his own design philosophy against the regulatory moving target.
For a sport that has spent two months absorbing what FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem already concedes is a 2030 V8 reset, Anderson's column lands at an awkward moment. F1 is publicly committed to the hybrid pathway through to the end of the decade, but its first month of racing has produced one Mercedes whitewash, one Sainz safety warning, one Lance Stroll quote calling the cars 'fake', and now an internal regulatory revision before the calendar has reached Europe. Anderson's underlying point is that drivability is not just a feel problem - it is a maths problem - and the maths remains unflattering.
The 2027 tweaks now go to teams for sign-off in time for the next World Motor Sport Council meeting. Whether they survive contact with Honda and Audi - both of whom have been handed extra ADUO development hours to chase the front runners - is the next question. Anderson's column suggests F1 may be back round the table sooner than the FIA has admitted.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/gary-anderson-2027-f1-engine-numbers-still-dont-add-up-50-50-hybrid-impossible). Visit for full coverage.*
