The tech battles of F1 2026 so far… and what comes next

“Stand still, go backwards” is one of the oldest axioms of Formula 1, and one that encapsulates the boom-and-bust nature of a team’s fortunes throughout a season. Development is critical, and maintaining a steady course of improvement through a campaign can be season-defining.

Time has always been a significant element in the upgrade cycle; for example, in defining when to stop developing the current car and move all resources onto the next one. If the current season hasn’t been particularly fortuitous, then it’s easier to pull the plug early; if it’s brought a team into a championship battle, the decision to call it quits may not be taken so lightly.

In short, those time-critical aspects of the development war have tended to focus on when to start, and when to stop. This year’s development war, however, has been quite a different beast.

In 2026, timing the release of each update has been a consideration with a potentially huge pay-off. In the early stages of this ruleset, updates have been somewhat powerful. Teams aren’t yet into the world of marginal gains and diminishing returns, and we’re well away from the end-of-life convergence that we tend to see in F1.

That’s not to say that technical ideas and aerodynamic concepts aren’t cross-pollinating from one car to another, but there’s also plenty of room for teams to innovate and stretch the bounding boxes set out by the rules.

Over this year so far, the general discussions and complaints have largely hinged around the powertrain regulations, with mixed reviews over the style of racing produced by the greater reliance on electrical power. But the aero development aspect remains the most important factor.

Ferrari’s interpretation of the regulations led to the ‘Macarena’ rear wing innovation

Photo by: Marcel van Dorst / EYE4images / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Sure, energy deployment and the quirks within – the MGU-K continuing to deploy if a driver doesn’t lift off enough and wasting energy, the ability to exploit a trick with deployment by circumventing the power ramp-down, and the electronic systems’ ‘self-learning’ approach – can create lap time swings, but aero progress underpins everything else. The power units are too close in output to overcome the performance deficit of a distinctly average car.

Now that 2026 is about half-way through its run-time, give or take a race or two depending on how the calendar evolves with late deductions and additions, the trends emerging across the field are starting to become a bit clearer – and it’s been fascinating to see how the teams have progressed through the year so far.

Hey, Macarena!

Let’s not forget that 2026’s regulations introduced a few new key elements: the addition of active aerodynamics for one. Those blessed with the power to bend airflow to their will have almost had to come up with two aero packages in one; a wing geometry that produces bucketloads of downforce in ‘corner mode’, and dumps a healthy amount of drag in ‘straight mode’ to ease the energy consumption under acceleration and garner more top speed.

It’s a fine balancing act, one that has led to teams exploring beyond convention with rotating wing elements and other such devices.

In the beginning this was sold as being the next step of DRS, but with an actuator added to the front wing flaps and no longer subject to the one-second window to the car in front. The FIA could dress this up as it pleased, but it was little more than a way to reduce the energy consumption on the straights as simulations warned that the battery charge could be gobbled up very quickly at full tilt.

Opening up the parameters, and deleting the mandatory maximum slot gap of the rear wing led to a plethora of differing solutions.

Red Bull maintains that Ferrari’s active aero design had not influenced its own; its equivalent had teething problems

Photo by: Marcel van Dorst / EYE4images / NurPhoto via Getty Images

It was unsurprising to see most of the teams stick to a tried-and-tested DRS-style format, where the wing simply tilted on a hinge to open the gap between the mainplane and the upper pair of elements. Alpine and Audi explored the opposite rotation, tilting the trailing edge of the rear wing downwards to reduce the angle of attack, but both have since returned to the more conventional solution.

Ferrari’s interpretation of the regulations spawned the ‘Macarena’ wing, and installed rotary actuators in the rear wing to flip the upper pair of wing elements upside down. This emerged in Bahrain testing, and the larger slot-gap and choice of wing angle generated a clear benefit in outright drag reduction.

The trade-off here is the momentary increase in drag during the transition phase, with vortex shedding across the wingspan, but the engineers deemed this a small drawback against the outright increase in straightline speed. The wing made its full-race debut in Miami in May, when Red Bull debuted its own version.

Red Bull was adamant that Ferrari’s active aero design had not influenced its own, and the version on the RB22 was actuated differently using the centre-mounted linear actuator to rotate the wing in the opposite direction to the Ferrari equivalent. Furthermore, its upper element was able to be elevated to extend the gap between the mainplane and the active elements.

Rather than using a hinge point along the centre of the wing chord as Ferrari had, it put this at the trailing edge, and then used the actuator to push the leading edge downwards and around the hinge to open that area.

However, Red Bull’s wing appeared to be slightly more capricious than the Ferrari version. It’s understood that the extended time needed for the flow to reattach contributed to Max Verstappen’s offs at the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone, as the flow at the rear of the car was not fully stabilised when reaching for the brake pedal. This was left off the car for the Belgian Grand Prix as Red Bull sought to enact a fix, which seemed to have alleviated those issues when it was used again in Hungary. 

Front wings demonstrate that the desire to induce outwash remains

McLaren also tested its own version of the wing in practice at the Hungaroring, using the central actuator like Red Bull to rotate the upper elements, albeit with a lower point of rotation to potentially mitigate the issue with prolonged flow detachment.

An unexpected side-effect of the active aero regulations emerged when ‘straight mode’ was disabled for the Monaco GP, prompting the teams to think laterally about the bounding box used to house the actuator system. Since the actuators themselves were unnecessary, many of the teams planted additional winglets within that box to confer a modest boost to rear-end downforce.

Although the winglets themselves might have presented a small increase in local load, the devices actually sought to improve the upwash flow characteristics and thus expand the effective diffuser area at the back of the car. 

It was an ingenious step. Mercedes produced a whole vine of leaf-like winglets to sit in this area, as did McLaren, while the likes of Red Bull, Alpine and Haas retrofitted the existing actuator housing with small wing profiles. These additions were hardly a one-off either; Ferrari, which had perhaps missed the boat in Monaco, implemented its own version of ‘SLM devices’ for the high-downforce Hungaroring.

Outwash at the front, inwash at the rear 

When you look at the progression of an F1 car over the past 20 years, it’s easy to pinpoint where the outwash can of worms was opened and why it became such a problem child for those tasked with ‘spicing up the show’. The 2009 aero upheaval, with its oddly proportioned rear wing and full-width front wing, had aimed to reduce the area of the wake shed from each car.

In theory, the wide front wing would improve front-end downforce while running closely behind another car, and the drivers could use the car-operated front wing flap to adjust the aero balance in a given situation.

Inwashing slant at the rear of the sidepod is evident on the Mercedes W17

Photo by: Artur Widak / NurPhoto via Getty Images

With the narrower wings, the endplates were inclined at the rear to feed the airflow between the front wheels, allowing this to be picked up by the front of the floor and the bargeboard area. When the wings were allowed to span the full width of the car, it became much easier to send this airflow outwards.

This was great for restricting the impact of tyre wake on the floor, as the flow could be pulled away much more cleanly, but this had the effect of changing the flow structures emerging from each car. As the aero tools progressed, the ‘dirty air’ became much more difficult to contend with. 

Even with the return to narrower front wings for this season, making 2026’s cars look more like the natural successors to the pre-2009 classics, the desire to induce outwash remains. Most teams are using footplates with outwashing vortex tunnels, which allow the airflow to be curled up, compressed, and accelerated outwards to ensure it bypasses the front tyre without losing energy.

To compound this, many are using small tabs on top to complement that outwash, plus the wheel-width diveplanes to produce further tip vortices.

Some teams are trying to simultaneously employ some degree of inwash component to their front wing flow, which can then link up with the wheel guard and front suspension components and feed around the front tyre. This helps to clean up the path for airflow to move closer to the chassis centreline, and then tuck in behind the rear tyre to be picked up by the new-for-2026 floor board geometry. 

These floor boards, despite their geometric limitations, are becoming increasingly complex and teams are using them for a multitude of functions. The Mercedes floor board might be the most visually obvious example of how the squads stack their three allotted elements, and use it as an upwash generator, and every team has some element of this in their designs.

Floor edges ahead of the rear tyre are starting to get a lot more complex

That said, many of the outfits are using the floor boards for their primary purpose of cleaning up the tyre wake and tucking the flow into their sidepod undercuts. If the flow can be re-energised here, this is helpful in generating top-surface pressure along the floor and delaying any potential stall points. In many ways, these are the spiritual successors to the complex bargeboard packages seen pre-2022, but far more regulated. 

There’s also a clear rethink in how the teams have approached the sidepod packages versus the previous ruleset, and you can see the evolution of this through the season so far. Throughout the 2022-25 ground-effect aero rules, there was a clear convergence towards ramped sidepods – potentially with a top-surface ‘slide’ within to help the flow wash to the top of the diffuser.

There seemed to be a very clear correspondence between the airflow’s path on the top of the sidepod and with the flow underneath the car, and creating this sliding transition was the most popular way to manage the pressure differential between them.

In 2026, most of the top teams are using sidepod solutions with heavy undercuts to make best use of the pressure-side surface, with an inwashing slant to the rearmost section. This is particularly evident on the Mercedes and the Ferrari, which wraps in around the rear wheels to push the flow through and generate consistent pressure atop the diffuser. Red Bull, McLaren, and Audi are the exceptions here, as all three maintain some degree of ramp in their sidepod solutions – although McLaren’s design is almost a halfway house between the downwash and inwash variations.

New design floors

The good thing about the 2026 floor regulations is that they’re not anywhere near as sensitive as the previous generation. A one-millimetre change in ride height last year, for example, might completely change a car’s balance characteristics – and probably not for the better. A switch back to flat (sort of) floors has quelled the prevailing sense of highly strung-ness for which last year’s cars had become infamous.

No more porpoising, and no more spine-grinding bounces over the slightest bump; the drivers’ chiropractors will be looking elsewhere to drum up business. That being said, the current floors also produce a lot less downforce. The flow underneath isn’t designed to go through the compression-and-acceleration that produces the venturi effect, and aerodynamicists are relying on the front of the floor to do most of that work, and on the diffuser to produce that rear-end expansion.

New-for-2026, often multi-function floor boards are spiritual successors to the complex pre-2022 bargeboard packages

There are a few tools that can assist with this, as teams are allowed to implement a strake within the diffuser body to help it expand the ‘virtual’ diffuser space behind the car. As seen in pre-season testing, a number of teams are using a ‘hole’ at the rear part of the car to further expand this diffuser area, bleeding airflow outwards and around the brake duct-mounted aero components at the rear.

This is all in the name of creating downforce and, if the car can produce a steady pressure difference around the whole array of components here, this diffuser working area expands. 

The floor edges are also beginning to increase in complexity once again, especially ahead of the rear tyre. Under the previous round of flat-floor regs, this area was used to implement slots and aero devices to shape the airflow ahead of the rear tyre, and protect the diffuser from the impact of unstable flow created by the tyre’s deformation. These slots are starting to increase in complexity once again, allowing the aerodynamicists more control with their placement of flow patterns at the rear of the car.

What’s coming next?

For 2027, the floors are changing once more; 300mm will be lopped off from the front of the tea-tray area at the front of the floor, and the leading-edge devices here will be reduced in quantity from five to three. The object here is to cut downforce further, as the 2026 cars appeared to surpass the FIA’s expectations by some magnitude at the start of the year.

This means that the teams will have to reimagine their floors, but it might also prompt a handful of squads to explore high-rake solutions. Since the plank at the front will be shorter, teams will be less worried about front-end plank wear. There is theoretically more room to lower the ride heights at the front of the car and raise the rear, reintroducing the high-rake concept that was a staple of Red Bull designs pre-2022.

The rear wing tabs that have also sprouted over 2026 will be abandoned too, as will the Ferrari-inspired exhaust winglet, although there is the provision for teams to fit a wing-like support between the rear wing pylons to cover some of the losses here.

This article is one of many in the monthly Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the September 2026 issue and subscribe today.

Will floor changes lined up for 2027 result in a return of the high-rake set-up typified by this 2021 Red Bull?

Photo by: Valery Hache