How the final F1 tech battles of the current era played out

Was there really going to be development over the course of 2025? There was a pervading sense that teams would shut up shop on their technical explorations as soon as the launch specification was punted out of the garage in testing, owing to the complexity of Formula 1’s incoming regulations for 2026. Instead, the limited simulation and financial resources would be spent on next season’s all-new machines, boasting active aerodynamics amid the shift away from ground effect aero.

In reality, almost every team expended some effort on refining their 2025 cars, some even taking development later into the season. Others opted for cursory updates in early rounds before calling time on their progress with this year’s models. There was general agreement that F1 was swiftly approaching convergence, with returns fast diminishing; while some development was necessary to make the best of 2025, getting out of that cycle at the right time before updates became too costly to produce was an important factor. Here’s how the teams tackled the challenge.

The push and pull of suspension options

Ferrari's switch to pull-rod front suspension was made in pursuit of more gains

Photo by: Roberto Chinchero

The difficulty of developing for a static ruleset, particularly when the shelf life of a new part is not particularly long, lies in determining which updates are worthy of the resource spend. Much of the performance gains across the past four years have come from the floor, and finding ways to operate it efficiently. Ensuring that the floor can generate consistent downforce through a wide range of cornering conditions has been vital to success.

Refining the geometry of the floor can only offer so much. Engineers also needed to innovate with the suspension packages to draw more from the underbody, be it from a geometrical or from a stability point of view, which has led to a series of teams trying out pull-rod suspension layouts at the front, or push-rod assemblies at the rear.

McLaren and Red Bull had run with pull-rod front, push-rod rear suspension from the get-go in this cycle of regulations, and more teams had been ready to explore the bounds of up-ending the suspension member that operates the dampers – for both packaging and kinematic reasons.

Ferrari, for example, had made the leap towards a pull-rod front package to bring it in line with the previous two constructors’ champions. It was oft-repeated that the Maranello team had hit a buffer in finding more performance in its preferred design concept, and felt that the pull-rod layout might present more gains. It’s all about how the front-end suspension manages the stability of the front of the floor; Mercedes persisted with a push-rod here, feeling it could manage the front and rear ride heights effectively without making wholesale changes.

At the rear, however, Ferrari made the intriguing decision to retain the pull-rod formula –breaking away from the increasing popularity of installing push-rods at the back. While the pull-rod is generally better for centre of gravity, since the torsion bars and rockers can be mounted lower down, the mountings associated with the push-rod allow for more open floor space underneath. Williams switched to Mercedes’ 2024 rear suspension and therefore made the switch to a push-rod format.

McLaren, meanwhile, took a less conservative approach to its front suspension design, situating the top wishbone’s rear leg low down along the chassis to pursue a clear anti-dive philosophy.

Flexi-wing clampdown ‘a waste of money’

Tougher load tests installed from the Spanish GP had little impact

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

In retrospect, the furore over flexing wings almost felt excessive. Ahead of the season, the FIA introduced more stringent flex tests for the rear wing in response to concerns that teams would potentially try to provoke the mini-DRS effect that McLaren had exploited at the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix in some fashion. Teams have attempted to use wing flex to dump drag for years, and reducing the allowable flex by 5mm aimed to restrict this further.

However, most expected the anticipated front wing flex clampdown to circulate a larger effect. More stringent front wing flex tests were pencilled in for June’s Spanish GP, allowing the teams to run with a more flexible wing for the first eight races before switching to a model that could remain legal for the new tests. The allowable flex was reduced from 15mm to 10mm when load was applied symmetrically, while the trailing edge could not flex backwards by any more than 3mm, down from 5mm.

Initially, the FIA hadn’t planned to introduce any changes in load tests following the nature of its “fact-finding mission” – in the words of FIA single-seater chief Nikolas Tombazis – at the 2024 Belgian GP, when the cars were loaded up with sensors to check wing flex. Yet there was an apparent need to control the wing flex exhibited by the teams, who were using it to balance out the downforce from corner to corner, and dump drag on the straights, hence the late arrival of the tests.

The impact was barely distinguishable. Those hoping that the burgeoning McLaren dominance would be clipped by the application of more exacting load tests were left disappointed, because the teams had been provided with enough of a run-up to mitigate the effect. “It just wasted everyone’s money,” Lewis Hamilton mused in the aftermath at Barcelona. “Everyone’s wings still bend, it’s just half the bending; everyone’s had to make new wings and spend more money to make these. It just doesn’t make sense.”

It’s hard to disagree that it was anything other than a waste of time; the only tangible change was a minor increase in understeer through high-speed corners. The teams found alternative ways of imbuing the car with a bit more balance from the front to the rear, essentially side-stepping the whole issue.

Red Bull’s recovery under Mekies

Mekies steadying the ship at Red Bull appeared to create a positive impact in its engineering crew

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

After Red Bull had fallen away in the latter half of 2024, the team had hoped that its weaknesses could be stamped out with its new RB21 – but instead, it produced another car with great potential that was often obfuscated by a perilously narrow set-up window.

When that narrow window was accessed, Max Verstappen could lay claim to poles and wins – but it was very difficult to reach that level. As such, the team found itself struggling with inconsistency throughout the first half of the year, and the dismissal of Christian Horner after 20 years in charge aimed to arrest the team’s declining fortunes.

Laurent Mekies’s installation as team principal seemed to give Red Bull’s engineers more licence to explore the RB21. Despite the dwindling focus on 2025 across the grid, Red Bull decided to invest and introduced a new floor for September’s Italian GP at Monza. It featured a new series of floor fences, edges and internal surfaces. A new front wing followed in Singapore, which very much suggested that Red Bull had found a way to run its car lower and modulate the airflow passing underneath with the aero at the front end.

“A lot of work went in, even from the very early races of this season, to try and give ourselves a better car,” explained chief engineer Paul Monaghan. “We thought we’d identified what was wrong, and it took us a couple of steps to really get to that and not just take a load of downforce out of the car.”

Red Bull followed that up with a small modification in Mexico at the end of October, although the new floor did not necessarily energise the airflow sufficiently in the high-altitude conditions to get the car working.

Although Red Bull’s fortunes did improve with the second-half revisions, it remained difficult to get the car working in bumpier conditions when the ride heights had to be raised. This was especially obvious in Brazil, where set-up changes for grand prix qualifying proved disastrous – but Red Bull at least tapped into a rich vein of performance when it pulled Verstappen out of parc ferme.

McLaren’s Canada suspension tweaks

Norris rediscovered a better feeling with his McLaren after a suspension tweak arrived in Canada

Photo by: Sam Bagnall / Motorsport Images

In the early part of 2025, McLaren’s MCL39 had proven to be the class of the field. Its pace had often been terrifying for the other teams, especially in the late part of stints. McLaren found great success in maintaining tyre life as others found their Pirellis waning, owing to superior thermal management, but its success came at a cost. The car was often peculiar to drive, requiring the drivers to be almost passive at the entry of corners rather than on the offensive.

Team chief Andrea Stella conceded that the car had a touch of ‘numbness’ at the front end, based on the feedback from his two drivers – and of the two, it affected Lando Norris more than Oscar Piastri. It is said that Norris, through years of sim-racing, has become more accustomed to feedback through his hands, not through his seat, and the McLaren’s front suspension had damped much of the ‘feeling’ out from the wheel.

A tiny change was made to the front suspension for the Canadian GP to thaw out the numbness, aiming to give the front axle more self-aligning torque with a small modification to the kingpin inclination. The suspension revisions were available to Piastri, but the Australian chose not to take them; he didn’t mind the McLaren’s handling sensations, and wanted to keep the car the same given his early success.

Norris’s season slowly blossomed – at least, after his clash with Piastri in Montreal – as the more responsive handling proved to be the missing piece in his personal feedback loop.

Haas’s late-late show

Haas used a late upgrades push to take some eye-catching results in the closing rounds

Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images

Development wrapped up for most ahead of the last third of the year, with the final flyaway rounds making logistics inconvenient enough to work as a natural stop in progress.

Haas elected to break with convention and scheduled an update for October’s United States GP, this being an all-new floor. Team principal Ayao Komatsu revealed that he’d left a small team of designers on the 2025 car as the rest of the workforce moved its focus onto next year, and the floor revisions had been brewing for some time in the background in an effort to close out the year with a flourish.

This was the final part of Haas’s refocused development efforts, after its dreadful weekend in Australia exposed a significant flaw with its VF-25: high-speed instability, exacerbated by the bumps at Albert Park’s Turns 9 and 10. Komatsu explained that the team reviewed its entire design processes, even back through 2024, to find the root cause; a hot fix was implemented as early as the Japanese GP in April (an “educated guess” according to Komatsu), with a subsequent upgrade at Silverstone in July aimed at smoothing out the issues more comprehensively.

The ‘Austin floor’ brought the car alive – at least in the case of Oliver Bearman, who registered fourth and sixth in Mexico and Brazil respectively. Esteban Ocon also enjoyed similarly strong race pace, but his own lack of confidence in the brakes in qualifying meant that the Frenchman’s results were muted when compared to his rookie team-mate’s oeuvre.

Ferrari flounders, Mercedes’ rear suspension rollback

Both Ferrari and Mercedes had development headaches to soothe during the season

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images

Ferrari’s significant change in its front suspension package may have been rooted in finding potential that was apparently missing from its previous layout, but it was not as if it could dig out consistent performance gains from its new car either.

The SF-25 was hindered by a few problems, including ride-height sensitivity and understeer through longer radius corners, and it was hoped that a revised rear suspension package for the Belgian GP at the end of July would help to stabilise the back end and allow the team more latitude with balancing out the car.

While Charles Leclerc reported that it was “a step forward” with the new rear end, helping the Monegasque to a podium at Spa, it did not materially affect the team’s fortunes, and it lost ground to Mercedes and Red Bull in the battle for second in the constructors’ standings. Instead, a decision to cut all aerodynamic development in April to focus on 2026 ultimately contributed to its dwindling fortunes, although podiums at Austin and in Mexico demonstrated that Leclerc could still get a tune out of a Ferrari that won’t necessarily be remembered fondly.

In Mercedes’ case, the team had produced a car that was more of an all-rounder; its 2024 car was particularly strong in cooler conditions, but suffered with rear tyre overheating when temperatures were higher. Russell hence took two wins in 2025 in Canada and Singapore, two circuits with vastly different temperature ranges, although Mercedes’ rear suspension developments had confused its progress through the year.

After introducing a new rear-end anti-lift geometry at Imola in May, the team chose to hold off on using it again until Montreal. As a package, it worked there as Russell won and Andrea Kimi Antonelli took his first F1 podium, but didn’t appear to work anywhere else. Antonelli’s nosedive in form seemed to correlate with the introduction of that rear-end suspension and, when it was removed in Hungary, he needed a few races to get back up to speed.

2022-25’s development secrets

The secrets to success in F1's second ground effects era was hidden in the car floors

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

We now say goodbye to the 2022-25 aerodynamic formula, and to the brief return of ground effect-style aerodynamics. The current generation began with much in the way of promise, as F1’s in-house technical team hoped to wean the championship off its dependence on DRS and allow the cars to follow more closely in the corners.

But retaining that effect was at odds with the teams’ methods of finding performance from their cars. The controls on dirty air, supplemented by the cut in aero furniture and addition of front wheel deflectors, became less and less effective as teams found new ways of producing downforce within the remit of the rules.

That said, the engineers found them difficult to work with owing to the sensitivity of the car to minuscule set-up changes and the trade-off in ride height and plank wear. Beyond the first-year porpoising curveballs and overwhelming suspension stiffness, the closeness of the field made it such that a tiny change to the aerodynamics could help or hinder a driver significantly. The sort of gaps that had been the difference between finishing first or fourth now presented the difference between first and placing outside of the top 10.

“With these cars, there are far fewer options, but the areas that you can influence are tremendously powerful,” explains Sauber chief designer James Key. “The floors – the downforce these cars produce now is unbelievably high. They’re real monsters, but it’s a lot of subtle detail. 3D surfaces under the floor, the fences, all that stuff, the tiniest of changes can make a huge difference.

“Everything that your mechanical grip wants is out the window, with the way we have to run these cars now. The easiest way to find more floor load is at the lowest of ride heights; if you’re not paying enough attention, you end up with a peaky aero map at very low rear ride heights.”

One of the toughest aspects in refining the aerodynamics was in tending towards peak load in high-speed corners, but just underneath those peaks to ensure the aero map could maintain downforce in the slower corners. While peak load output was the best option for performance, it generally had a detrimental effect on handling; as such, drivers could rarely access the higher planes of performance.

The teams no longer need to worry about the quirks of the 2022-25 era; the highly strung machines of this season will be put out to pasture, reserved only for future TPC tests to train the next generation of drivers.

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