How F1 designers are approaching the 2026 ruleset

In six races' time, almost everything in contemporary Formula 1 will be rendered obsolete. Next year's cars will share a few basic characteristics with their forebears: four wheels, steering wheel, front and rear wings, and a space for the driver - but little else has escaped the gargantuan broom run through the technical changes.

Even though next year's powertrains remain underpinned by a turbocharged V6 internal combustion engine, the dimensions and the demands are different to ensure every manufacturer starts from the same point. Restrictions on fuel now come from an energy flow rate, rather than mass flow; this will encourage fuel suppliers to develop their products to be more energy-dense to reduce the fuel needed on board the car, and engine builders to pursue further efficiency in the ICE.

The upscaled electrical components will also force aerodynamicists to pursue higher levels of efficiency. This falls in relation to earlier concerns that the entirety of the battery's stored charge could be dumped on a long straight, with little opportunity to recoup it into the next corner. However, powertrain engineers are making continued progress with mapping, allowing the cars to deploy and recharge energy at a rate that retains the maximum uptime of the 350kW ceiling from the rear-mounted motor.

While the active aerodynamic states will help here, minimising drag will be crucial. The power needed to overcome drag scales with the cube of velocity, and thus restricting the magnitude of the other variables - drag coefficient and frontal area - is a cheap way of reducing that power requirement.

There's a lot to consider in the design of the new cars. Some of it will present a return to a familiar platform, owing to the reintroduction of flatter floors and more conventional front and rear wings, but with various other ancillary changes that freshen up the aerodynamic formula; the width reduction of 10cm, marginally narrower tyres, shorter wheelbases, and lower weight all have consequences on the design.

When presented with a complete clean-sheet design, where on earth do the designers start? When there's no year-on-year iterative process of development, where a team can analyse where the previous year's car went wrong and implement a variety of fixes, or develop new features to introduce a certain characteristic into the car, designers are collaboratively living in a CAD/CFD world throughout the year.

A new concept will undergo many changes through the gestation period but, as Sauber - soon to be Audi - technical chief James Key told Autosport in an exclusive interview, defining the start point is all in the preparation.

The FIA's 2026 F1 model is almost ubiquitous now - expect the new generation of cars to look quite different

Photo by: FIA

"I must admit it's something I think a lot of people really enjoy because you have a blank sheet of paper effectively. You've got no reference points at all, and I guess everything's open," Key explains. "There's an opportunity to succeed or fail, it can go either way. What is a quick 2026 car? That was the same question we were asking about 2022 cars several years back.

"I think where you start is the only thing that's really carried over: the fact that you're a team set up to design and develop a car. Everything you know about that process obviously kicks in pretty heavily. I think when you think about '26 and certainly that was the case as well with back in 2021 when you've got 12 months to do the aero, you do as much second guessing as you can in the year before.

"So you're really well prepared, you've got lots of options to consider, you have the discussions that happened in technical advisory meetings, some potential CFD from allowed by the FIA to develop the regs, you've got a little bit of learning there."

Let's not forget that, at each team, there is a series of different design departments that all have to be unified. The findings in the aerodynamics team will correspond to how the chassis team develops the tub. The tub needs to be defined in conjunction with the vehicle dynamicists, as does the suspension - which is affected by the aero loading.

"There's many different things that you've got in preparation, but you're absolutely flying blind - even mechanically when you really don't know what the aero is going to demand of the car" James Key

For a manufacturer team, the car design may affect the external powertrain layout, which the customer teams get as-is and have to work around. It's a perpetual relay, one that only notionally stops when the team decides to settle on a launch-spec car - yet, the development continues to define in-season updates, considerations for 2027, and beyond.

When engineers speak of the 'tools' at the factory, most consider CFD and wind tunnels to be the main factors, but there's so many more aspects that have to be employed. Seven-post rigs test the response of the suspension in certain conditions, finite element analysis helps to define load paths and structural integrity, and there are myriad other software applications that can simulate every single aspect and are linked together to assist with the definition of the car.

The engineers can then start to define a prototype, and the simulation runs then start to build a clearer picture of the virtual machinery at a team's disposal. Perhaps a team will have a variety of aero concepts, and decide to flesh out one out a little bit more; begin with the wider brush strokes, and then start to establish the details.

Key is overseeing Audi's first F1 challenger as the brand joins next year

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

"There's many different things that you've got in preparation but you're absolutely flying blind even mechanically when you really don't know what the aero is going to demand of the car," Key continues. "You're also trying to figure out load cases, you've got no idea what they're going to be.

"There's a lot of unknowns and you have to come up with a plan of basically one minute past midnight on the 1 January, where you're pressing the button on your CFD cases and you're running like hell. I think you get into it with a lot of preconceptions with the ability to go and design and develop the car and with some fundamental rules that you know apply to every F1 car which you know certain things about your sensitivity, certain things about stability on turn-in or all of these basics that you want to get right for three-corner balance. They apply everywhere, it's just that you tune their priorities a bit depending on the regs."

Key then explains the process of extracting more performance out of the basic concept. For all of the numerical strings that permeate through the pores of each simulation, the only one that truly matters is the one displayed upon the face of a stopwatch. The expectation is that the incoming cars will be a fair bit slower than the machinery in 2025 - how much remains unknown at this juncture. Regardless, the team will assign a target time that it believes will account for top-end performance, and make the requisite adjustments to reach it.

The use of the driver-in-loop simulator (ie. the at-base simulators that the drivers test new parameters within) helps to underpin that progress, but the role of race simulation tools is perhaps less heralded in the development process. These do not use a driver at all; instead, engineers build a virtual model of their drivers based upon their inputs and plug the associated numbers into an application that also encapsulates the numerical data pertaining to the car - including powertrain figures, aero mapping, suspension characteristics, set-up data, and the like.

At this stage, the aerodynamic geometry is still not necessarily defined. Effectively, the engineers simultaneously work in relief and in intaglio; defining the outfacing concept in conjunction with what it needs from behind it.

"You go in with that knowledge and then you begin to derive an understanding of how much potential there is, what you believe there is and that begins to sort of fix a target, a lap time target I suppose of some sort that you work towards," Key explains.

"Normally you have to add about 50% of whatever you've derived on top to actually be quick, so you tend to begin to set really really high numbers for aero, really difficult numbers for weight reduction. You're running really fast, and gradually bits of information drop out with tyre testing, with Pirelli and obviously ongoing simulation work, and ongoing aero work.

Without on-track testing until January, simulator work is the next best thing for drivers to provide feedback

Photo by: Alpine

"If you're well organised then you should be able to hit some sort of really key milestones during the year, which have got nothing to do with releasing designs, but absolutely to do with establishing information, establishing understanding. This year, for example we've got a lot where we want to be at a certain point - so we can step back and say 'are we happy with that? Do we understand this, and is there anything missing? What does it mean for load cases, or weight reduction?'"

One can never cease to be amazed at how an F1 car progresses from bean to cup, especially when there's absolutely no reference point available. Take a look at 2022's cars, for example; while aero concepts differed and were subject to convergence throughout the year and deeper into the ruleset's lifespan, the absolute basics were pretty similar. But there's so much more left undiscovered that, when the cars (hopefully) touch down in Barcelona, the real-world running will start to fill in some of the gaps - and present new problems. Simulation tools are refined these days to a point where maybe 90% of the picture is complete, but it's no substitute for the real thing.

Remember how porpoising reared its head in 2022, as restrictions on wind tunnel speed and conditions meant that many of the teams had not encountered the issue - which many found to be a result of the underbody vortices bursting under load, subsequently rebuilding as the ride heights rose, and creating a cycle of sudden decay and reformulation underneath the car.

For all of the numerical strings that permeate through the pores of each simulation, the only one that truly matters is the one displayed upon the face of a stopwatch

While teams might hear paddock whispers about performance through 2025, they won't have any real idea about their cars until well into the season as the designers start to follow the plotted development curves. Key says that every outfit is hoping that they'll be the pacesetter when the new cars first turn a wheel in anger but, inevitably, there will be solutions across the grid that demand immediate attention.

"You progress through it, and you kind of turn up thinking hopefully they're going to be looking at our car thinking we knocked it out of the park - but sometimes you look at others and you think 'Christ, we didn't even think of that!' It's a bit of a gamble".

Thus, the development war will open for business - and the best ideas will disseminate into the designs of those looking elsewhere for performance breaks. While expectations might be muted for the next wave of cars, those intrigued by the technical aspect of Formula 1 will find it endlessly fascinating.

F1's 2022 cars came in all shapes and sizes - expect 2026's initial designs to have similar variance

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images