BYD to F1: EV Giant Says “Yes” And Meetings With Stefano Domenicali Already Happened

Those are three very different commitments. A works team is a billion-dollar decade. A power unit program is an engineering moonshot under the 2026 regulations that have already chewed up more experienced manufacturers. A title-sponsor-style partnership is more a checkbook thing.

But with FIA president Mohammed Ben Sulayem continuing to campaign for a 12-team grid that includes at least one American and one Chinese entry, a Chinese manufacturer of BYD’s scale walking through the door solves half of that wish list in one move. Cadillac is handling the American side from 2026. The Chinese seat has been conspicuously empty.

Why This Is Different From the Usual F1 Rumor

Manufacturers flirt with F1 constantly. Most of it is noise, a CEO at a gala (we’re looking at any Christian Horner news, really), an analyst’s deck, a journalist’s well-sourced maybe. But this is a vice president of the company confirming a meeting with the sport‘s CEO by name, and she’s saying the discussions are happening rather than that they might happen one day.

BYD also has the one resource that usually kills these conversations: money. The company outsold Tesla globally in EV deliveries last year and arrived in Beijing this week with the kind of home-market dominance that funds expensive hobbies.

Whether F1’s 2026 power unit rules, hybrid, with a much bigger electric component, make this a logical fit or a brutal learning curve depends entirely on which of those three entry routes BYD picks.

Either way, the answer to ‘is BYD coming to F1’ stopped being speculation this week. It’s now a question of how, and when.