MPH: F1 design innovations revealed - which will make the difference in 2026?

With pre-season testing finally over and the first race just a couple of weeks away, we’ve got an order-of-magnitude idea of the competitive order. But with the provisos that we made here a couple of weeks ago, particularly in reference to how with this generation of car/power unit, the speed hierarchy is likely to be much more sensitive to circuit layout than before. Especially so in such early days of the power unit understanding.

But what we apparently see from Bahrain is a Mercedes advantage, with Ferrari snapping at its heels and McLaren and Red Bull not far behind but definitely behind. Then a big gap — maybe around 1sec per lap — down to the midfield where Haas, Williams, Alpine and Racing Bulls might be expected to play, with Audi, Cadillac and Aston Martin completing the order.

What we are also better informed on is some of the differing technical choices the teams have made, some of which may be driving that competitive order.

The maximum wheelbase has been reduced by regulation to 3400mm this year (from 3600mm), making packaging what is a heavier and slightly bulkier power unit challenging. So it would not have been a surprise if every team had used the full permitted wheelbase. But that’s not the case: careful analysis of images — and subsequent confirmation from within the team — reveals that the McLaren is around 10cm shorter than the full wheelbase cars of Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull and Aston Martin. This makes getting down to the reduced minimum weight limit easier (as there is less car), but it also means there’s less downforce-generating floor area and in packaging terms, it almost certainly means a greater centre of gravity height.

Another key part of the regulations where some divergence is possible concerns the dimensions between the front axle line and the cockpit. Even within the same wheelbase, there is a 250mm variance possible. Bringing them as close together as possible allows a higher nose (and therefore more air volume to the underfloor) but makes it potentially more difficult to manage the wake around the front tyres. Red Bull appears to have opted to bring the cockpit and axle line closer together than Mercedes, Ferrari or Aston. McLaren, with its shorter wheelbase, has its cockpit about the same distance from the axle as Red Bull.

Mercedes has enhanced the volume of airflow being fed to the underfloor by stopping the downward-sloping nose short enough to mount it to the middle element of the front wing (everyone else has mounted theirs to the bottom main plane). Ferrari’s lower nose reduces the size of that gap for the airflow to the floor, but move to the other end of the SF-26 and we see some real lateral thinking from Ferrari and how it has sought to speed up that underfloor airflow by effectively extending the diffuser in a way that is not feasible for the non-Ferrari-powered cars.

Although the placement of the diffuser’s trailing edge is defined by regulation, Ferrari has found a way of having bodywork aft of there and shaped it in a way which continues the diffuser’s expansion ramp. Even if technically, the diffuser ends where the regulations say it must and the bodywork comes after that, the air sees the combined thing as just a bigger diffuser. Dimensional boxes determine where that bodywork can be and this is where Ferrari has spotted a loophole; the differential must be sited +/- 60mm of the rear axle line. Ferrari has chosen to mount it the full 60mm behind the axle — and then used steeply angled driveshafts connecting the diff to the wheels. Bodywork can extend 60mm behind the inboard end of the driveshaft (i.e., where it feeds into the diff).

On cars with a conventionally-sited differential with less angled driveshafts, 60mm behind the diff is still within the diffuser area. But on the Ferrari, it opens out some volume behind the end of the diffuser — and it’s here that Ferrari has inserted that diffuser-extending bodywork.

On Wednesday of last week, Ferrari then added to this bodywork what it terms a ‘flow turning device’, a vane, roughly square in section, aligning behind the two wing pillars, behind the exhaust and angled steeply upwards. This would help to further accelerate the airflow exiting the diffuser — the faster the flow, the greater the downforce — and possibly help some exhaust-aided airflow to feed the underside of the rear wing and thereby increase the wing’s downforce too.

As if that were not innovative enough, Ferrari then tried a rear wing which — in straightline mode — completely swivelled upside down rather than simply opening flat. The greater space this created between the two elements would, in theory, reduce drag further. But the endplate actuators apparently carry a weight penalty over the conventional central actuator.

Power unit performance — and the differences between the five PUs — are far more dominant than before. Not only because of the bigger spread resulting in moving from an established PU formula to a new one, but also because the active aero regs mean that any power and/or deployment advantage is worth way more lap time than before because drag is no longer such a powerful dampener.

What we could observe from Bahrain testing was that the Mercedes was able to generate terrific acceleration out of the turns. George Russell and Kimi Antonelli were typically braking much earlier than the Red Bull and — especially — the Ferrari, harvesting some electrical energy which was then used to devastating effect out of the corners. The Red Bull deployment advantage Toto Wolff referred to in the previous week’s test was no longer evident as the others ran their PUs in a more aggressive mode. The implication is that Mercedes was running its internal combustion engine more conservatively the week before, and therefore not harvesting electrical energy as efficiently.