The F1 teams that should shift focus to 2027 already

Formula 1‘s mid-season split between this year’s car and next year’s has always been a familiar calculation: bank what points you can, then quietly redirect the design team once the numbers stop adding up.

What’s different in 2026 is that 2027 isn’t necessarily a straightforward carryover.

Williams boss James Vowles has already warned that the aerodynamic changes coming next year are more significant than teams expected, and as many as half the grid has reportedly weighed rolling over this year’s chassis simply to manage cost-cap pressure, a plan complicated by the bigger fuel tanks 2027 cars will need.

Committing to 2027 now isn’t just an admission that this season is gone, but also a bet on which version of next year’s car a team gets to build.

Some teams look like they should already be making that bet, whether or not they’re all willing to say so publicly.

McLaren

This is the one team on the list that says, on the record, it isn’t planning on shifting to 2027 yet.

Andrea Stella has said repeatedly through July that McLaren’s plan is to close the gap to Mercedes this season, not next, describing the team as around two to three months behind on aerodynamic development and calling for more intensity in the upgrade programme rather than less.

He’s also made the broader case that continuing to chase upgrades now is what keeps a team competitive for the future, not a distraction from it.

Lando Norris‘s victory in Hungary added support to Stella’s plan, but McLaren actually challenging for the titles would require a major swing in the competitive order in the second half of the season.

McLaren’s own technical department has somewhat undercut Stella’s position, admitting that the car’s wheelbase was pitched deliberately short, a choice that came at the cost of floor size, and with it, the aerodynamic potential the current car can ever realistically unlock.

Solving that requires building a longer car, and that’s a 2027 job, not something achievable within this year’s package.

That reframes the case for McLaren shifting.

It’s no longer only an argument about diminishing returns on a title that’s realistically gone — third in the constructors’ standings, well behind a Mercedes squad that has looked like the benchmark for most of the year — it’s that some of what’s holding the car back this season literally cannot be fixed until 2027 regardless of how much development budget goes into it between now and December.

McLaren has been here before: last year, Stella made the call to wind down 2025 development early rather than match Red Bull‘s late-season upgrade rate, on the basis that a compromised 2026 car wasn’t worth it, even though it nearly cost it the drivers’ title.

Stella isn’t making that call yet this time, but by his own team’s admission, part of this year’s car is locked in place until 2027 arrives, which makes the argument for going harder on next year’s chassis rather than squeezing more from this one considerably harder to dismiss.

Red Bull

Of the four teams on this list, Red Bull’s position is the most explicit.

Team principal Laurent Mekies confirmed after the Hungarian Grand Prix that Red Bull will shift more of its resources toward the 2027 car once the summer break ends, accepting that further development of the RB22 will suffer as a result.

He was also honest about why: Red Bull isn’t in title contention this year, and the maths is different from 2025, when an aggressive late-season push on the old car very nearly delivered Max Verstappen a fifth championship — at the direct cost of a delayed start to this year’s campaign.

Mekies has been clear he doesn’t want to repeat that trade-off, and it’s not difficult to understand why, with Red Bull nowhere near contending for victories consistently.

The team already knows what it costs to over-invest in the current car at the expense of the next one and, with the titles well out of reach, there is no big reason to use resources to improve the RB22.

There’s also a driver-retention angle worth considering.

Verstappen has said his focus is on the team’s performance rather than his contract, and that Red Bull remains where he wants to be — but patience has limits, and a visible, well-resourced 2027 programme is a more persuasive argument for staying than another six months of chasing a car that clearly isn’t going to win a title.

The question is whether Verstappen is ready to go a full year without a win and still believe that things will change in 2027.

Williams

Williams’ case is almost as clean, with an added layer of internal tension after the Grove squad has become the leading candidate for the biggest disappointment of the year.

After a strong 2025, everything was in place to make a leap forward and complete the team’s transition under James Vowles.

Instead, Williams has taken a massive step backwards and has spent the first half of the season making little to no progress.

After a chastening Hungarian GP weekend, Vowles admitted the real priority now is getting the team’s fundamentals right for 2027 and beyond, rather than continuing to chase incremental gains this season.

That’s a team principal effectively conceding the point. What makes it more interesting is that his own driver got there first.

Carlos Sainz said in Hungary that he didn’t think Williams’ planned Baku upgrade would be enough to fight for points, and that the team should simply focus on 2027.

That’s a notably blunt assessment for a driver to give about his own team’s in-progress development plan, and one that sits awkwardly next to Vowles’ insistence that Baku will bring a genuinely major step.

Williams may end up proving Sainz wrong. But when your own driver is publicly writing off an upgrade before it’s landed, it’s a reasonable question whether the team is fully aligned on where its remaining budget should go.

Aston Martin

Aston Martin is a slightly different case: less a team that should start shifting to 2027 and more one that’s already started and should lean further in.

Despite introducing a huge upgrade in Hungary, Adrian Newey confirmed in July that the team is in the early research stages of the 2027 car, working through the big architectural decisions – engine position, chassis layout, suspension concepts – with the explicit goal of releasing next year’s car to production much earlier than this year’s, so the team isn’t scrambling under the same time pressure again.

That’s a meaningful head-start for a team that essentially had to write its season off the first time the car took the track for the first time, such was the magnitude of its problems.

But Aston Martin hasn’t actually pulled the trigger on abandoning 2026 – the team’s biggest upgrade package of the season was introduced in Hungary and Honda‘s revised power unit will follow at Zandvoort this weekend.

Given how compromised this year’s car has been — Newey has previously acknowledged the AMR26 programme was hurt by delays dating back to how late it reached the wind tunnel — the argument here is that Aston Martin’s dual-track approach should tip further toward 2027 than it currently has.

The early architectural work is the right approach. The remaining 2026 upgrade budget might be better spent finishing that job properly than squeezing another point or two out of a car that was compromised from the start.