How much performance has each F1 team gained over 2026?

Whenever a new regulation set emerges in Formula 1, no single team can ever be entirely certain that their solution to the 254-page document outlining the technical rules is the correct one. In reality, none of the 11 designs will entirely fit the bill completely but, at some point, a team has to make a decision on their baseline concept for the new season and work around it.

A team will go through the design process for a new set of regulations like this: they'll choose the baseline concept, effectively a best-guess of the different design aspects they want to include, continue to develop the ideas around simulations until a set deadline, and a snapshot of the car is then taken to go into production.

Developments beyond that point will likely be bundled up and brought to either the pre-season tests, or the opening rounds, as an update package. It's not unreasonable to assume that these updates have been in the pipeline since the previous year, but the production resources won't be freed up until both cars are fully built. After that point, the floor is then open to start manufacturing the latest developments; there's a lot more of a time lag between design and manufacture than you'd think. 

At the start of a new ruleset, these developments can often yield a lot of lap time. Since the regulations aren't anywhere near as mature as the end of the previous era, the designers are far away from the arena of diminishing returns and each new part can offer tenths of a second, rather than thousandths.

Speaking on Mercedes' in-house podcast, the Silver Arrows Radio Show, technical director James Allison explained that "aerodynamically, the gain rate for each passing week in the wind tunnel, the amount of lap time we find, that's the gain rate, is about six to seven times what it was last year." And that's just the aero side; there's also plenty to be found with regards to the new power units as the coding gurus tinker with the numbers - presumably in a manner similar to those manipulating the code in The Matrix, staring at endless strings of green-tinged digits in an attempt to nail the deployment settings out of Luffield. 

If unclaimed lap time was rife at the start of the year, how much have the teams gained in the first 11 races? For this, this writer sought the calculating embrace of an old friend to make sense of it all. In other words, I've put together an overly complicated metric in Microsoft Excel to determine each team's time gain - which I'm calling the Aston Martin Baseline 90 Metric (or AMB90M for short, eat your heart out Richard Herring). 

Aston Martin's development-free approach to the first 10 races has given our author a lap-time gain baseline

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Almost as if the team knew that I wanted to do this, Aston Martin provided considerable help by choosing not to update their Formula 1 car for the first 10 rounds of the season - so I'd like to thank the team for its immense sacrifice in making this possible. By using Aston Martin's performance as the baseline for the rest of the field, we can see how much each team had gained with its developments from Melbourne to Spa-Francorchamps. There is a significant deductive leap here, in that this assumes Aston Martin's performance had no variance across those 10 races, but it's as good as we're going to get.

Why have we done it like this? People watching F1's coverage will occasionally take note of its performance graphic, where it tends to estimate how much lap time a team has gained or lost between the first round and - usually - the previous round to the current weekend.

The problem here is that it is completely relative to the 100% 'theoretical best' lap at those two races; so, if one team was the fastest in Australia and then third best at, say, Silverstone, the graphic will show that it has 'lost' time - even if the car is actually significantly quicker. This is why we did not use Mercedes as the benchmark; the team has upgraded its car through the year but, if we were to compare its 100% time in Melbourne to its 100.352% best in Hungary, that comparison would suggest it has made its car slower. 

Racing Bulls has made up the most time with its updates through the season. Although this might be slightly surprising, it actually makes sense when you look at its rate of progress through 2026; at the start of the year, it was behind Alpine and Haas, and occasionally Audi on pure performance terms

Aston Martin using effectively the same car for the first 10 rounds gives us the best benchmark we'll get. The problem this poses is that the team took significant developments to Hungary, and therefore it is no longer helpful at this point. To ease this transition, we'll make another deductive leap: Alpine did not register any updates for Hungary, and therefore we'll transpose its performance as the new baseline and base everything around that to give us our Hungary figures. 

For the first 10 races, we've given Aston Martin a default 90-second lap time. From here, we can calculate the difference in supertimes (as a reminder, this is a team's best lap versus the fastest lap set at any point in the weekend, expressed as a percentage) and work out how much faster - or slower - a team would be based on their own supertime compared to that of Aston Martin.

To illustrate this, here's an example: Aston Martin's supertime percentage in Melbourne was 104.395%. If its fastest lap was 1m30.000s, this means that Mercedes - with the 100% time and thus 4.395% faster - registered a 1m26.045s. By comparison, Cadillac was 0.810% slower than Aston Martin at the Australian Grand Prix, so its best time would come in at a 1m30.729s. 

Alpine has taken a step back in recent rounds as it awaits further development

Photo by: Guido De Bortoli / LAT Images via Getty Images

Now, managing the transition between Belgium and Hungary took a little bit of thinking, but using Alpine as a surrogate Aston Martin works best. Versus Aston Martin's baseline 1m30.000s, the Belgium supertime (Alpine being 3.517% faster than Aston Martin) brings the French squad a 1m26.835s. This now becomes our new baseline time, and we adjust the supertimes around that.

In Belgium, Alpine was 1.888% off the best, which grew to 2.120% in Hungary - probably what you'd expect to see if a team had not developed between weekends. This 1m26.835s becomes the baseline time at 2.12% off the fastest, giving us the chance to calculate how the other teams (including Aston Martin) got on around that. 

The final part of this method is to use some averaging to cover the swings in performance between races, as one circuit might suit a car more than another or, particularly at the start of the season, a team had issues to iron out in the first round. For this, we'll take an average of the expected times (still using Aston Martin's 1m30s baseline) at Australia and China, then at Belgium and Hungary, and compare them.

Here's our estimated lap time gains for each team:

Lap time gain across 2026

The first thing to point out is that Aston Martin's Round 10-11 average does take into account its pre-upgrade time in Belgium and, if we were to base this purely from its performance at the Hungaroring, this would actually sit at 2.08s per lap. Having estimated its lap time gain previously via another method and estimated this to be worth north of 1.8s, we're probably in the right ballpark here.

The remainder will be conservative estimates, given the averaging, but it should provide a clear picture of who's made the most time with their updates.

Per the AMB90M system, Racing Bulls has made up the most time with its updates through the season. Although this might be slightly surprising, it actually makes sense when you look at its rate of progress through 2026; at the start of the year, it was behind Alpine and Haas, and occasionally Audi on pure performance terms.

It has not only surpassed all three, it has stayed ahead and had become an almost-guaranteed fixture in Q3 during the first half of the year. Alan Permane's squad deserves immense credit for its rate of progress, although one might argue that its use of 'customer' parts frees up staff to pour their expertise into other areas. It's also a double-edged sword, however; the suspension and gearbox components are set in stone, meaning that the team effectively has to work around them.

By our count, Racing Bulls has found the most lap time with upgrades through the season

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Red Bull, Audi, and Cadillac are the next three to have developed significantly, finding at least over 1.8s through its development programmes. The biggest crests in Red Bull's development curve emerged with its Monaco and Austria updates, which generally turned the tide on a difficult start to the year and ensured the RB22 was a little bit easier for the drivers to handle. That's not to say that the car is perfect, by any means, but it demonstrates that the work is being done at Milton Keynes to ensure Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar can at least turn up to the party with more than just chips and dip. 

Audi's progress has come from a mix of powertrain developments and aerodynamic progress. The team was, in the opening rounds, being slightly outdeveloped as points became much more difficult to attain, but its work in the background has slowly started to bear fruit. In terms of pace, it moved ahead of Alpine in Hungary and has scored in the past three races - demonstrating that the Audi project is developing at a comparable rate to those ahead of it on the grid.

As for Cadillac, it's of little surprise that the team is continuing to build; the first few seconds are the easiest to find, as the team gathers F1 experience and now has the catalogue of other cars to mull over in its own development plans after spending the winter effectively blind. Its car is reflective of the trends seen over 2026, from the reshaped sidepods to feed the top of the diffuser more effectively, to the little additions around the front wing to chase the inwash-outwash balance at the front. It was hard to shake the idea of the MAC-26 being a 'facsimile' of an F1 car in the early season, but it is now a genuine F1-worthy package. 

Presumably, all teams will have some degree of development on the car for Zandvoort - which might make the continuation of this spreadsheet difficult to maintain

On the other end, it's unsurprising that Haas and Williams have not developed as much. Haas is currently working around a parts consistency issue, where the build quality of each part has some degree of variance - which is affecting performance. This means that, although the team is bringing updates to the car, this variance means that the predicted performance gains are not necessarily visible.

The manifestation of this is that, every time the team builds and rebuilds the car between events, the car's parameters are not quite the same - it could be more rigidly assembled one weekend, with more flex in the next. The uncertainty of this means that it's very difficult for the team to get a read on its aero updates, as the platform is never the same.

Williams, meanwhile, has put much of its focus into weight-shedding, and perhaps hasn't developed aerodynamically as the other teams. Per the AMB90M, this put its at around a second of lap time gained, but it ultimately has been outdeveloped by its rival outfits - and it is waiting for its Baku updates to bring it back into play.

Haas and Williams have lost out in the development war so far

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Mercedes, meanwhile, has also not developed as much - but as Allison revealed on the team's podcast, this was down to its decision to develop late.

Doing so meant that the team could effectively have a Suzuka-Miami-period update available from the get-go, ensuring that it could start the season with a significant gap over the rest of the field, but it has been out of phase with updates as a result of that decision. As such, it went through the opening four races without a significant update, and it was only in Canada where it introduced its first major package; McLaren, Red Bull, and Ferrari had already taken significant updates to Miami.

Presumably, all teams will have some degree of development on the car for Zandvoort - which might make the continuation of this spreadsheet difficult to maintain. If someone could be kind enough to wait for Monza before bringing their next parts, that would be incredibly helpful...

F1's 2026 development curve has been steep - who'll be the next to climb it?

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