For three days last week, the Bernina Pass smelled of hot brakes, high-octane fuel and almost a century of motoring history. What was different this year is where the fuel came from. At the Bernina Gran Turismo, held from 11 to 13 September 2026 in the Engadin and Valposchiavo, drivers of historic cars, classic cars and supercars filled up at a Synhelion fuelling station near the paddock at Bernina Ospizio. The gasoline in the pumps was renewable synthetic gasoline, produced at Synhelion’s industrial-scale plant DAWN in Jülich, Germany. Synhelion is a SPIN member.
The Swiss solar-fuel company was the event’s official fuel supplier and one of its main sponsors, and it describes the delivery as the start of a long-term collaboration. It was also the first time the event had run on renewable fuel at all.
Why a hill climb is a serious test
It is tempting to file this under lifestyle marketing. That would miss the point. A mountain race is about as demanding an environment as a road fuel will ever see: cold starts at over 2,000 metres, full-throttle climbs, engines that were designed decades before anyone wrote a fuel standard, and owners who care a great deal about how their car sounds and pulls. Nobody enters a pre-war racer in a hill climb to test a fuel. If the fuel does not behave exactly like the fossil gasoline the engine was built for, the driver notices within the first corner.
According to Synhelion, none of that happened. The synthetic gasoline was used in the existing engines without any modification, and the cars kept their performance and their character. Luca Moiso, Director of the Bernina Gran Turismo, framed it as connecting the event’s past with its future while preserving its historic identity. Philipp Furler, Synhelion’s Co-Founder and Co-CEO, put the same thought more bluntly: “we can change the fuel without changing what people value about driving.”
The fleet that will never be electrified
That sentence is the real news here, and it applies far beyond the paddock. Electrification is the right answer for most new passenger cars, and nothing in this story changes that. But there are vehicles that will never carry a battery: historic cars, of which Switzerland alone has tens of thousands on the road; motorcycles and boats; specialist and emergency vehicles; and, above all, the hundreds of millions of ordinary combustion cars already sold worldwide that will keep driving for another fifteen or twenty years whatever the sales statistics for new cars say. Every litre of fossil gasoline they burn in that time is a litre that could have been renewable.
Synthetic gasoline is a drop-in fuel. It meets the same standards as fossil gasoline, runs in the same engines and flows through the same tankers, pumps and filling stations. That is exactly the property that makes it useful for the existing fleet, and it is the reason why SPIN has always argued that renewable fuels and electrification are complements, not rivals. Together they cut cumulative CO₂ emissions faster than either could alone.
What “up to 100 per cent” means, and what it depends on
Synhelion states that its renewable synthetic gasoline reduces net CO₂ emissions by up to 100 per cent compared with fossil gasoline. The “up to” matters. The fuel is made from renewable energy and recycled CO₂; how close a given batch comes to zero depends on how the energy was generated and where the carbon came from.
One condition remains non-negotiable from a Power-to-X perspective: synthetic gasoline only makes climate sense when the carbon it contains is recycled CO₂ from biogenic, atmospheric or industrial sources, and when that recycling displaces fossil carbon instead of providing a reason to burn more of it. Synhelion’s DAWN plant was designed around that principle, and the company’s public statements on its feedstock have been consistent. The fuel that was poured into a historic racer on the Bernina last week is a small, very visible demonstration of a closed carbon cycle.
A busy month for a Swiss company
The Bernina weekend caps an unusually dense fortnight for Synhelion. On 1 September it engaged Saipem for pre-FEED engineering on a 30,000-tonne-per-year plant at RWE’s Hürth-Knapsack site; on 8 September it signed a memorandum of understanding with Morocco for a 100,000-tonne plant in Tan-Tan (we analysed both here). In August, its next demonstration plant in Jülich secured EU-backed German funding. The company has already delivered synthetic fuels for cars, aircraft and ships and says it is now scaling towards commercial production.
Seen together, the announcements describe a company moving on two tracks at once. One track is engineering and finance: pre-FEED studies, site agreements, offtake contracts, plant sizes with five zeros. The other is demand and acceptance: showing drivers, fleet operators and, not least, regulators that the product exists, works and is wanted. A hill climb in Graubünden does not build a plant in Morocco. But a fuel that people have seen working in a car they love is a fuel that is easier to write into a blending mandate.
The Swiss angle
Which brings us, as it usually does, to the framework. The fuel that ran on the Bernina was produced in Germany, because that is where Synhelion’s first industrial plant stands and where the regulatory ground is firmer. In Switzerland, the revised CO₂ Act now recognises renewable synthetic fuels in principle, but the ordinances beneath it still treat them in ways that make no sense for a product that is chemically identical to what it replaces: from missing customs tariff numbers to a mineral oil tax that is levied in full on renewable fuel that should be exempt. SPIN’s position paper from July lists 42 such blockages.
The drivers on the Bernina Pass did not need to be persuaded that synthetic gasoline works. They filled up and drove. It would be good if the Swiss regulatory framework caught up with them, so that the next time renewable fuel powers a race in the Swiss Alps, it can be produced in Switzerland as well.
Source: Synhelion press release of 15 September 2026. Feature image: Synhelion’s Co-CEOs and Co-Founders Philipp Furler and Gianluca Ambrosetti in front of the Synhelion fuelling station at the Bernina Gran Turismo 2026. Photo: Synhelion.
🤖 AI transparency: This text was created using AI, reviewed and approved by a human. Photos: Synhelion / Andrea Klainguti.
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