F2 and F3’s Shared Pathway Towards Fully Synthetic Fuel

Formula 1 is moving to fuel made entirely of sustainable components in 2026. However, two of its feeder series – Formula 2 and Formula 3 – will already be there next year.

A 100 per cent sustainable fuel for both championships is being developed and supplied by Aramco, the Saudi Arabian state-owned oil company that will soon start supplying the Aston Martin F1 team, of which it is already a key sponsor.

Since the start of the 2023 season, both F2 and F3 have run on fuel with 55 per cent of the content being sustainably derived, but that proportion is being increased.

The move to 100 per cent sustainable content fuel is part of the series’ movement towards the greater goal of adopting fully synthetic fuels in 2027. That will be possible once Aramco has worked out how to produce enough for two grids of more than 20 cars.

‘We started the agreement with Aramco in 2022,’ says Bruno Michel, CEO of F2 and F3. ‘We started to use Aramco fuel in our cars in 2023, with advanced sustainable fuel from biomass. It’s something that has been working extremely well. We have had quite a lot of development to make sure we could get the proper homologation, working with [Aramco] to ensure we are always aligning the fuel with the engine’s request.

‘Next year, we have something very important happening – we will use 100 per cent advanced sustainable fuel. We have advanced on what we had in the original agreement.

‘We want to go and use synthetic fuel from 2027. That’s the next step that we have in mind. We are very confident that, with Aramco’s capacity of development, we are going to be able to achieve it.’

The 2025 fuel in F2 and F3 is classified as ‘advanced sustainable’ because it contains at least 70 per cent sustainable components. The FIA defines a sustainable component as either a second-generation biomolecule or the product of non-bio carbon capture and synthetic processes.

The step up from 55 per cent sustainable content to 100 per cent has come with its challenges.

One has been to ensure the 3.4-litre Mecachrome engine used by both series has the same performance attributes without sacrificing consumption. To address this, the engine will adopt direct injection next year, in addition to indirect injection.

‘We have tested this fuel for the past months already on the dyno, and on track,’ says Pierre-Alain Michot, FIA F2 and F3 technical director. ‘We have achieved quite a lot of mileage.

‘With this fuel, we…