Mohammed Ben Sulayem has put one of Formula 1's longest-running political tensions back on the table. In remarks confirmed this week, the FIA president told paddock reporters that the governing body is examining the integrity of multi-team ownership structures across the grid - the latest reopening of a debate that has lived in the corners of the championship for over two decades but rarely been challenged directly.
'I do believe that owning two is not the right way,' Ben Sulayem said. 'If we lose the sporting spirit, I believe that there will not be any more support for it.'
The statement, reported by Racing News 365 on Thursday, lands at a politically loaded moment. Red Bull GmbH has owned both its eponymous senior team and the Faenza-based junior squad - now branded Racing Bulls - for over 20 years, an arrangement that survived Formula 1's commercial transitions under Bernie Ecclestone, CVC and Liberty Media. Mercedes has been linked, in private, with a strategic stake in Alpine, whose minority shareholder Otro Capital already controls 24 per cent of the Enstone-based outfit. Cadillac's arrival as the 11th constructor in 2026 has added two further questions about ownership structures and engine alignment.
The lightning rod inside the paddock is Zak Brown. McLaren's chief executive has spent the past two seasons publicly calling for the FIA to draw a hard line under co-ownership, framing it as an unresolved sporting integrity problem rather than a mere governance question.
The specific worry is no longer abstract. The summer 2025 removal of Christian Horner as Red Bull team principal was followed within days by Laurent Mekies' move from Racing Bulls into the senior role - a change of personnel between two technically independent teams that, according to Brown, illustrates exactly the kind of free movement that competing constructors cannot match. Red Bull and Racing Bulls vote separately on F1 Commission matters, share information through agreed firewalls, and operate from separate facilities, but their commercial parent is identical and their senior personnel demonstrably interchangeable.
For Ben Sulayem, the review now follows a familiar pattern from his presidency: announce a principle, draw the regulatory consequences in slow motion, and use the threat of formal action as leverage in the underlying commercial discussion. The 2030 V8 announcement and the in-season ADUO revisions for Honda and Audi have both been delivered through the same playbook in recent weeks. There is no formal rule change yet, no announced timetable, and no specified team in the firing line. But the framing - that multi-team ownership is something to be defended rather than assumed - is itself new.
The ownership map most likely to be tested first is also the most awkward to unwind. Forcing Red Bull GmbH to divest one of its two teams would require both a willing buyer and an FIA-approved entry framework, neither of which has been the easy part in F1's recent commercial history. The Mercedes-Alpine question, by contrast, is unresolved precisely because Mercedes has not yet committed.
To the rest of the grid, that is the point. Brown's message - and now Ben Sulayem's - is that the rules around who owns what should be clarified before, not after, the next acquisition. Whether F1's stakeholders deliver a written framework or simply use the noise as a deterrent is the question. Either way, multi-team ownership is no longer a structural feature of F1 that nobody discusses.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/ben-sulayem-fia-multi-team-ownership-investigation-zak-brown-red-bull-racing-bulls-alpine). Visit for full coverage.*
