Enlarge / Pierre Gasly driving the Alpha Tauri Honda AT01 leads Alexander Albon in his Red Bull Racing RB16 during the F1 Eifel Grand Prix at Nürburgring on October 11, 2020 in Nürburg, Germany. The energy drink company Red Bull may quit the sport with both teams if it cannot find a solution to its engine supply problem. (credit: Dan Istitene - Formula 1/Formula 1 via Getty Images)

At the beginning of October, Honda shocked the world of Formula 1 by announcing its decision to quit the sport at the end of 2021. Currently, it supplies a pair of teams—Red Bull Racing and Alpha Tauri—both owned by the Red Bull energy drinks company. Red Bull now has to find a replacement supplier for the fiendishly expensive, insanely complicated hybrid powertrains required by the rules. And it too might quit the sport in 2022 if it can't do that to its satisfaction, a warning issued this week by Red Bull's sporting director Helmut Marko. So what the heck is going on?

F1’s hybrid era

The first F1 cars to add an electric motor to their internal combustion engine powertrains took to the track in 2009. These were 80hp (60kW) motor-generator units (MGUs) that could recover kinetic energy from the rear wheels under braking and return it to those same wheels for short bursts of additional power during a lap. However, only four teams adopted this idea—called KERS, for kinetic energy recovery system—during the year, and it was abandoned by mutual consent at the end of that season.

In 2014, the sport adopted its current technical ruleset . The old naturally aspirated 2.4L V8 engines were replaced by new 1.6L turbocharged V6s, now with two mandatory hybrid elements to the power train. In place of KERS, there was an MGU-K (for kinetic), and a new MGU-H (for heat), which captured or deployed energy to the engine's turbocharger. The new powertrains are hugely powerful, reaching around 1,000hp (746kW) in qualifying trim last year. And they use less fuel than ever: since this article was written in 2016 , the V6s have actually now exceeded 50 percent thermal efficiency.

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  A rendering of what a Formula 1 race car will look like in 2021. [credit: FIA ]

On Sunday afternoon at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, Lewis Hamilton sealed his sixth Formula 1 world championship. Unquestionably one of the sport's greats, he wowed fans even during his debut with McLaren in 2007, winning his first title for that team the following year. The rest of his titles have come at the wheel of a Mercedes-AMG, and all since 2014.

The year 2014 happens to be when F1's last big rule change happened, ushering in the current era of complicated and expensive turbocharged hybrid V6es . During that time, the cars have gotten faster than ever before—even if they are approaching Le Mans prototypes in weight. They have also become even more ruinously expensive to design and operate, with little to no effect on the quality of the racing. But starting in 2021, that will change thanks to a new set of technical rules and more equitable sharing of the proceeds among the teams.

At least, that's what Liberty Media hopes. The US-based entertainment company bought the commercial rights to F1 in 2017 , and since then it has been trying to fix some of the huge structural problems with the sport. That's easier said than done; a more equitable sharing of the pie means the well-funded, politically powerful teams will get less, and politically powerful turkeys rarely vote for Christmas . But that's what happened—the FIA World Motor Sport Council just voted unanimously to approve Liberty's intended changes, despite worries that Ferrari would exercise its veto .