This will be a DAS situation at best. The engine will have been designed with this compression trick in mind, it's not likely to be something they can just disable with the flick of a switch before Australia. And the FIA is not going to rule that half the grid can't compete because of this engine thing. It will either be deemed legal and other teams will have to figure it out, or it will be banned for next year but legal this year.

All this bitching about innovation. Do you want F1 to be the pinnacle of motorsport or A1GP? All the history of every era has its unique or monster cars and the only way that happened was with the grey in the rules. Competition is one thing but you can’t have both and be mad when one happens and not the other.

I see a lot of people arguing online about this

What I found (in the newest I could find, which is June 2024 surprisingly) in the 2026 regulations is this

No cylinder of the engine may have a geometric compression ratio higher than 16.0. The procedure which will be used to determine this value may be found in the Appendix to the Technical and Sporting Regulations

I didn't look that up because I don't care to have a flame war, but I imagine this plays out similar to DAS if it turns into anything. Something like "the rules weren't clear enough but we'll make them clear enough, by x date you have comply with it"

Wolff said: “The power unit is legal.

“The power unit corresponds to how the regulations are written

Let's see:

So no.