The turmoil of F1's 2026 rules shift

Formula 1 is heading into an unusual situation where the FIA’s World Motor Sport Council is set to ratify new 2026 regulations that it knows are going to have to change.

In fact, after an intriguing weekend of developments surrounding the forthcoming rules revolution, the consensus is that what will eventually come for 2026 is nothing like what is about to be rubber-stamped.

This is because what the FIA has set out – which was presented ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix to the media at the same time the latest draft regulations were discussed at a Technical Advisory Committee meeting – is something that teams are universal in believing will not work.

McLaren team principal Andrea Stella spoke for many when he suggested that while the over-arching principles of the plans for a more sustainable F1 future with better racing were great, the way the rules were currently shaping up the cars fell short.

He said in Montreal: “I would say that at the moment, for the way cars are in the draft version of the regulations…the cars are not fast enough in the corners and too fast on the straights. These two aspects need to be rebalanced."

Whether or not the team kick back had been anticipated or not, it said much that in Canada, just 48 hours after the FIA revealed concept images of what the 2026 cars would look like, its single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis conceded that they were unlikely to look like that in the end.

“We're not in the final set of regulations yet,” he said. “We do have quite a few things that we need to define and discuss with the teams.

Nikolas Tombazis has conceded that the final cars will not look like the rendering used to launch the 2026 regulations

Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool

“We are fully conscious of some of the concerns of [things like the] level of downforce of the cars or straight-line speed, and these are things that we class as the refinements that still need to take place.

“So, between, let's say, the end of the month, when these regulations will hopefully be published, and the start of 2025, when teams can start aerodynamic development – because they cannot start earlier – we do expect a reasonable amount of extra work to be done in full consultation with the teams, with FOM and everybody else.”

How F1 has ended up in a situation where it is ready to green light an unfinished product depends on which side of the fence you sit on regarding how the draft regulations have been pulled together.

Governance timetables have also forced the rules to be made public before they are fully ready

From the team’s perspective, although none of them will say this in public, there are several voices who say that F1 has ended up with unfinished rules by the 30 June deadline because the process to get here has not been as collaborative as they would have liked.

Sure, the FIA asked teams for input and called on them for assistance with some simulations and simulator runs, but the flow of information was not as much a two-way street as hoped.

There were suggestions that the FIA did not always listen to advice and warnings over car characteristics (like speed in corners or active aero needing to be both front and rear), what some of them felt was an unachievable minimum weight limit and aspects of the rules that are so prescriptive they leave little room for designer freedom.

This is how, according to one source, we’ve ended up with the cars that are: “like dragsters on the straight and slower than F2 in the corners. It’s Formula 2.5”

The new cars are predicted to be slower in the corners than feeder series F2

Photo by: Formula Motorsport Ltd

The FIA’s viewpoint on things is very different though, and there are multiple factors at play for that.

In some respects, the feedback it got was not as great as it would have liked. From the drivers, for example, it is understood that a virtual meeting to discuss the regulations with the entire grid was attended by just a handful of them – although one did ask for a video file to watch it later.

Governance timetables have also forced the rules to be made public before they are fully ready. They have only had to enter the public domain now because of the 30 June deadline that is laid down in the FIA’s International Sporting Code that demands 18 months’ notice for any major new regulations.

The complexity of framing for the first time ever all-new engine and chassis rules at the same time meant it was always going to be a hard task to get things settled by this month’s deadline.

That is why there was some discussion recently about potentially delaying the publication of the draft regulations until October – to allow more time to get things finalised and problems ironed out.

But that idea fell through because it needed unanimous support – and Mercedes voted against it.

The German manufacturer’s motivation for doing so was because it did not want to wait until October for any further problems with the rules to emerge – because that would then leave just a couple of months to hurriedly address matters before teams needed to start work on their 2026 cars in January.

Mercedes voted against delaying the publication of the regulations to later in the year

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Instead, by flushing out the draft regulations now, the issues have been forced to come out into the open – so are far more in the public domain than they would have been had there been a delay.

The one upside of this happening in June rather than October is that it means there is a six-month window to sort things out.

Another explanation from the FIA is that the regulations have been deliberately approached from the perspective of too little downforce and with a clearly over restrictive nature, because it feels that it is a much better starting point for fine-tuning than if things had been the other way around.

"As Colin Chapman used to say, 'show me the rules and I'll decide if I'll enter or not'" Christian Horner

As the FIA’s single-seater technical director Jan Monchaux explained: “The regulation as has been presented now, and which hopefully will be voted, is probably the most restrictive teams will be seeing, because we think also it's going to be far easier in the next months to start increasing the freedom and review some aspects of the regulation which potentially currently are far too constrained than the other way around. They will all agree on having more freedom.”

Whatever the reality of how we have arrived at this point, the most encouraging thing from the perspective of delivering rules that will ultimately work is that all parties right now agree that things need to be change, and seem aligned on what the end game is.

Sure, it would have been far better to deliver draft rules by the 30 June deadline that everyone was happy with, but at least there is now a starting point to get them fixed – even if it means there will have to be some going and froing through the Technical Advisory Committee and F1 Commission governance process.

The teams all agree that something in the proposed regulations needs to be changed

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Needing to have anything that requires the support of teams always opens the risk of competitive self-interest taking over – and competitors will wilfully block rule changes if they feel it will hurt their prospects with the new cars.

But at least with the starting gun for aero development not going off until January, there remains a long enough window for teams not to feel that their own interests are going to be compromised by making changes now.

It would be a completely different response if work had already got underway on the cars, and those outfits that felt they had unlocked some promising potential risked facing having to throw their work in the bin and start again.

Talking to teams up and down the pitlane in Montreal, there appears to be consensus about the overarching principles that must be delivered with the new 2026 cars.

They must be fast enough for F1 to remain the pinnacle of motor racing, they must be good for racing, they must have a realistic weight target and they must have enough design freedom to ensure that the chassis remains a critical element of team success so F1 does not become a formula based solely on fuel and batteries.

Speaking in Canada on Sunday about whether teams could put aside their individual interests for the greater good for the best rule set, Red Bull team boss Christian Horner said: “It's tricky isn't it. As Colin Chapman used to say, 'show me the rules and I'll decide if I'll enter or not'.

“But I think it is the same for everybody. There are going to be compromises. I think the most important thing is that there is enough freedom for there to be differential between the cars, so they don't all look identical.

Horner quoted Colin Chapman when voicing his concerns

Photo by: Alexander Trienitz

“We have a budget cap, and the engineering creativity is there so that it doesn't become a battery and fuel formula. It should be a chassis-engine combination. If you don't have the best engine, maybe you can compensate on the chassis and vice versa.

“I think it is finding that balance, which I think Nikolas is very aware of and hopefully the recommendations that come back will be sensible."

While the very public debate about the rights and wrongs of the current F1 2026 rules last weekend may not have been ideal for the FIA, at least the talk is of fixing it – rather than lines having been drawn in the sand and the series risking a stand-off.

But it is one thing saying you want to make changes; it is another thing settling on those changes and making them good enough for everyone to be happy.

The clock is ticking.

The clock is ticking ever nearer to 2026

Photo by: FIA