Taken for a ride? The less heralded flaw of the 2026 F1 regulations

Ride heights and rake angles are perhaps not the most fascinating topics for dinner-party conversation, and yet they remain vital conceptual pillars of Formula 1 car performance. Adrian Newey pioneered the concept of elevating the rear of the car in his mid-1990s Williams designs, subtly at first, before pushing the idea to extremes with his similarly successful Red Bulls of the early 2010s.

When F1 shifted towards generating the majority of downforce through underfloor venturi from 2022-25, among the unforeseen consequences was that the cars became horrendously, unhealthily uncomfortable spaces to occupy. Ground-effect cars need to run as close to the track surface as possible to maximise the underbody airflow, and the combination of low ride heights and stiff suspension began to generate complaints from the drivers about potential long-term health issues.

Among the aims in composing the 2026 technical package, then, was to return the cars to more benign ride heights. That may have been the case at the beginning of the season but development has brought them back down to earth, as it were. Last weekend's United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of The Americas brought that right into focus, this being a notoriously bumpy venue where there is always a trade-off between running the car low and avoiding excessive wear of the underfloor legality ‘plank'.

"I've had a few scans done and you can see it in certain discs at the bottom of the back there's nothing left there," said Max Verstappen. "Before Turn 1 and Turn 19 I lift myself out of the seat before I get there, otherwise it's simply impossible. I'm getting the pills in to manage."

Lando Norris also revealed he pre-emptively takes headache pills before driving on bumpy tracks, although other drivers were more stoic.

"Well I destroyed my back already 10 years ago, so it's been f**ked since," said Valtteri Bottas.

"So, all good…"

COTA's bumps were a talking point heading into the race weekend

Photo by: Mark Thompson / Getty Images

At the start of the season, most of the cars on the grid had a relatively flat stance, if not necessarily ‘slammed'. The outliers were the Williams and Aston Martin, which ran noticeably more aggressive rake angles with a higher rear ride height. Now, these happened to be the slowest cars in the field, if largely for other reasons (being overweight in the case of the Williams, underpowered in the case of Aston Martin). But both of them have migrated downwards over the course of the season – an almost night-and-day change in the Aston's case when the B-spec AMR26 was rolled out in Budapest.

During Newey's appearance in the FIA press conference at COTA, Autosport took the opportunity to ask him about the thinking behind going high-rake in the first place, and subsequently backing out of it.

"When I arrived [at Aston Martin], it was early March [2025], then almost no aerodynamic research had been done at that point," he said. "When you then look at release dates for all the prime parts coming up before the August break, and then bodywork and so forth, wings, etcetera, coming up in, I don't know, somewhere around November time, then we had a very short, condensed research period. I looked at the regulations and felt that it could suit a high-rake solution, which is what we pursued.

"In truth, I think it had some strengths, but it also had some weaknesses. We've now come back to what I would call a middle ground, which we feel is quite a good solution."

"Like with a lot of things, this ultimately wasn't properly thought through either. It's more a case of, ‘Oh yeah, that's another thing that comes with it'" Max Verstappen

It's a fact of life in F1 that solutions converge over time, but in 2026 the process has been remarkably rapid. In the early 2010s, Red Bull enjoyed remarkable superiority because rivals struggled to emulate the high-rake concept. Newey has likened the philosophy to putting your finger over the end of a hosepipe, causing the water to be ejected at a higher pressure: lowering the nose relative to the tail had the effect of energising and accelerating the underbody airflow.

As rivals discovered to their cost, managing this as the rear suspension moved through its greater angle of deflection was very difficult. Convergence took years.

For these latest rules there was a powerful argument in favour of sticking with what you know: while the cars and their wheels are narrower, the rules governing the front wings and bargeboards are framed to avoid generating too much aerodynamic outwash, which is known to create ‘dirty air' that prevents cars following each other closely through corners.

Newey's designs gave Red Bull a period of dominance in the early 2010s

Photo by: Sutton Images

What changed was the adoption of active aerodynamics, one of innumerable sticking-plaster solutions to the problem of managing the amount of electrical power available in the new formula. The near 50:50 split of electrical deployment to internal combustion engine power was fundamentally misconceived in that the amount of power required could not be stored on board without larger batteries, or recharged through the lap without harvesting from the front axle – both of which added weight. Active aero was the compromise.

But the adoption of this technology has also come freighted with unforeseen consequences – largely owing to the difficulty of simulating the changes. Until the cars ran in the field, the effect on car stability during the transition between ‘cornering mode' and ‘straightline mode' couldn't be properly measured.

That dictated conservative ride heights at the start of the season but the progression has been downwards ever since. In straightline mode, with less downforce, the cars remain at a sensible height; the focus has been on tuning them to be as low as possible in cornering mode. So far as the impact on driver health goes, then, we're back where we were.

"It's probably worse [at COTA] because we have very low ride heights while cornering," Verstappen said in his Dutch media session after qualifying.

"On the straights you have the SM mode, so you go up. But in most places under the braking especially, you actually bottom out more than you did before. And most of the bumps are under braking or in the corner, not on the actual straight.

"Under braking, it's like actually a very stressful moment – especially when there are these kind of awkward bumps, not just bumps from the track getting older, but bumps from the surface underneath, the soil just moving up and down. Sometimes it's very hard to know what to expect, or if you're a tiny bit offline, you don't know what is there because no one really drives there. So, yeah, it's really not nice."

COTA's Turn 1 is perhaps where the bumps are at their worst

Photo by: Alex Bierens de Haan / LAT Images via Getty Images

There's an intriguing distinction here because the active aerodynamics enable teams to take more liberties with ride heights at circuits such as this than perhaps they might in the ground-effect era. The performance trade-off is all about running as low as possible while avoiding illegal wear of the plank. With a car that's very low some of the time rather than all of the time, there are fringes to explore.

"Like with a lot of things, this ultimately wasn't properly thought through either," said Verstappen. "It's more a case of, ‘Oh yeah, that's another thing that comes with it'. But by that point [in the gestation of the 2026 rules], everything had already been signed off, so there was nothing more you could do to change the regulations.

"Hopefully, these will all be learning experiences for the future, so that you won't want to do these things again" Max Verstappen

"If you looked at it logically, you could already understand that something like this would happen. At that point, you didn't yet know how much they would allow with Straightline Mode, but all of this is happening because they realised how inefficient the engine would be when combined with the chassis.

"Naturally, you then have to resort to things like this, with the front wing, the rear wing, and all that active aerodynamics. Hopefully, these will all be learning experiences for the future, so that you won't want to do these things again."

Ride heights is yet another area that F1 must learn from when it comes to the 2026 regulations

Photo by: Alex Slitz / Getty Images