Nigel Mansell Says F1 Needs 26 Cars and V10s Again—And Calls Modern Overtaking “False”

Nigel Mansell won the 1992 Formula 1 World Championship and the 1993 CART Indy Car title back-to-back – the only driver in history to hold both crowns simultaneously – so when he says modern F1 has lost the plot, it’s worth listening. In a recent interview, the British racing legend laid out exactly what he’d fix, and the list is shorter than you might expect.

>“The thing that disappoints me is – I’m pleased there’s 22 cars on the grid, there still should be 26 cars on the grid,” Mansell said. “Minimum 26 cars. So a few more teams need to come and play. I hope – I hope China come in with a team. I really do.”

>That’s not an outrageous ask. Back in the mid-1980s, according to Mansell, 46 cars were competing for just 26 grid slots. The sport was so attractive that teams were being turned away. Cadillac’s arrival as F1’s eleventh constructor in 2026 brought the grid to 22 cars – the most in years – but Mansell thinks that still falls short of what the spectacle deserves.

The Engines Are the Real ArgumentThe grid size point is almost secondary to his push on power units. The 2026 season introduced a new hybrid architecture splitting output roughly equally between combustion and electrical power, and it has not gone down well. Mansell has called the new overtaking method- where drivers deploy electrical boost on demand – “false,” a view shared by many including Max Verstappen.

>Mansell’s preferred alternative: “I’d love to see the V8s or V10s come back with the noise, and have something standard and keep it like that.” The appeal isn’t purely nostalgic. “You don’t have to have engines costing millions of pounds. You have to be sensible at times, and hopefully that might come back.”

>He has context for that argument. “The cost of a current power unit, I think it’s certainly over seven figures isn’t it, just for one engine,” Mansell noted in a separate interview with GrandPrix247. For comparison, he pointed to the Cosworth DFV era: “You don’t have to look back too many years and certainly in our day, you got a great Cosworth DFV for $25,000. Back in the early 80s, it was only £2–3 million a year to pay everybody.”

>Those numbers tell the story better than any editorial comment could. Mercedes alone reportedly spent around $1.4 billion developing the original turbo hybrid unit after 2014. The 2026 power unit cost cap has been raised to $130 million – per manufacturer, per year.

>The V10 conversation has been circling F1 for years. FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem has publicly argued that the sport “should consider a range of directions including the roaring sound of the V10 running on sustainable fuel,” and Ferrari and Red Bull have backed the idea. But after a manufacturer summit in Bahrain, the consensus was that V10s won’t arrive before 2030. The 2026 hybrid regulations are locked in, and a switch before then was deemed too disruptive for the teams that committed to the new architecture.

>Mansell’s pitch isn’t complicated: more teams, simpler engines, regulations that “get something where drivers can drive flat out all the time.” Whether F1’s commercial and political machinery is capable of that kind of simplicity is a different question entirely.