The FIA has approved new regulations for 2027 aimed at tightening Formula 1 budget cap enforcement and closing off a long-suspected loophole involving special projects divisions and shared resources.
This week, the World Motor Sport Council signed off on a 12-page package that will require stricter separation between Formula 1 personnel and non-F1 staff. The rules follow years of suspicion that teams used technology divisions to support their racing programs without those resources being fully counted against the cost cap.
What changes in 2027?
The key change is simple in principle but significant in practice: teams will have to separate Formula 1 operations from non-F1 work more clearly. That includes physical division of facilities, electronic access controls and record-keeping requirements that must be kept for three years.
The FIA first moved on this issue in 2023 with the TD45 document, which required intellectual property transferred from a technology division to a Formula 1 team to be fully accounted for under the cost cap. More recently, the FIA also shut down the ability of teams to allocate only part of a salary when staff split time between an F1 team and a special projects division.
Why the rules matter
The new regulations are designed to stop teams from using shared staff and shared facilities in ways that could give them extra support without those resources being fully reflected in cost cap figures. According to The Race, the FIA was still not fully satisfied that teams were not exploiting the use of non-F1 staff.
That concern is especially important in a sport where small advantages in structure and staffing can matter as much as upgrades on the car. By forcing a cleaner divide between Formula 1 and non-F1 operations, the FIA is trying to make the cost cap easier to police and harder to work around.
What comes next
The 2027 timeline gives teams time to adjust, but it also signals that the FIA is willing to keep pushing on enforcement rather than assume existing rules are enough. For organizations with large engineering networks, the new standards could require meaningful changes in how they organize factories, access, and internal reporting.
For now, the message is clear: Formula 1 budget cap enforcement is moving beyond accounting rules and into operational structure. The FIA wants a sharper line between F1 and everything else.
