TIL #92: Into The Unknown
The mystery and apprehension around the 2026 regulations
The Installation Lap is a weekly Substack column dedicated to helping Americans develop a deeper appreciation for Formula 1.
Of all the things about Formula 1 that are odd, peculiar, or downright bizarre as compared to other global sports, the one thing that leaps out at newer fans is F1’s penchant for changing the rules. The last time F1 changed its rules or formula was in 2022. That regulation change was the biggest change since 2014. 2022 saw the return of ground effects cars for the first time since 1977—ie, cars that derive their downforce primarily from air flow interacting with the floor of the car. The rules are set to change again in 2026, and this time, the changes will be massive.
The 2014 rule change was big because it introduced the turbo—hybrid engine. 2022 was significant because it changed how cars generate and utilize their downforce. The 2026 rule change will be massive because both the aerodynamics and engines of the cars will change. This distinction is important because every time there is a regulation change in F1, it is advertised as being “big.” Secondly, this rule change is in fact big because so much about the cars is changing, and there are tremendous opportunities afoot for a proper, lottery-style shake-up of the grid and its competitive order.
If you’re running late for work and don’t have time for The Installation Lap today, I’ll give you the big takeaway on the 2026 regulation change right now:
Absolutely nobody knows what’s going to happen.
Formula 1 is a complex and highly technical sport. With this inherent complexity comes continual trade-offs and compromises. All decisions about what changes to make to a car come with a slate of reasons that the proposed change could help or hurt the car’s performance. As Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff said when they realized their 2022 car was not going to be fighting for a championship, “There are no silver bullets in Formula 1.” In addition to the natural complexity arising from such a massive change to the cars, the FIA has been altering and amending the rules as it conducts further research and learns more about what these new cars might be like. Moreover, teams have been planning, designing, and beginning to build engines and other bits for these new cars, and in doing so are raising more questions and concerns about the nature of these new cars. The things the teams are seeing in their own work are being fed back to the FIA, who have been making changes and adjustments to the rules. The 2026 rule changes appear to have left everyone in F1 baffled about what will happen when the cars hit the track.
The short version of what is happening here goes like this: The cars are getting new power units. Right now, all F1 cars are running 1.6-liter V6 turbo-hybrid engines. That will stay the same for 2026. The changes to the engine will include components, the ratio of electricity to internal combustion power, and the type of fuel.
The current engines harvest electricity from the internal combustion engine (ICE) through heat and kinetic energy. This is accomplished through what you may have heard referred to as the MGU-K and the MGU-H. Motor generator unit, “K” for kinetic and “H” for heat. In 2026, F1 will be getting rid of the MGU-H.
Currently, the cars are utilizing a maximum of 150kW of electric output from the battery. That equates to about 200 horsepower. In 2026, the electric output will increase to 350kW or 469bhp.
The current ICEs produce about 750bhp. Combined with the battery output, current Formula 1 cars generate approximately 1,000 bhp.
So the new 2026 rules have the ratio of electric power to ICE power shifting to 400kW of power from the ICE and 350kW from the battery. The cars will still generate around 1000bhp, they will just be accomplishing it with a different mix of combustion and electric power. Easy enough, right? So what’s the big deal? We will get to that in a bit.
Thus far, we’ve got the removal of the MGU-H and a different mix of power sources. The third engine change for 2026 is the introduction of bio-waste-derived fuels. Will this be a Back To The Future-esque scene of engineers dropping banana peels and spent beer cans into the engine? That’s a trick question. This is F1; therefore, the answer must be more complicated.
At the moment, both F2 and F3 are operating on 100% sustainable fuels. Bruno Michel, the CEO of F2 and F3, has been running this experiment in those categories for a few years now. He likes the results.
“It’s been going very, very well. We started this partnership with Aramco a few years ago, started with a 55% sustainable fuel, and it was part of the plan to make sure we were arriving at 100% normally in 2026.
“But because of the fantastic job Aramco has been doing, we’ve been able to anticipate it and do it this season, which has been a great thing.”
This new biofuel will be made from sources such as non-food bio-sources (like agricultural or forestry waste), genuine waste sources (like municipal waste), or direct air capture. The key idea here is that F1 engines, and indeed any conventional engine, would require no meaningful modifications to run this biofuel. You can simply pour it into the gas tank and go.
The aerodynamic changes arriving for 2026 begin with the size and shape of the cars themselves. The 2026 F1 cars will be slightly smaller than the current cars. Not small enough to stop drivers and fans complaining about the size of the cars, which have gotten very large indeed, but still, smaller. The new cars will be 100mm narrower and 200mm shorter. That equates to about 4 inches narrower and 8 inches shorter. The 2026 cars will also be dropping a bit of weight; something on the order of 66 pounds lighter. The cars, we are dipping into the meaningful aero changes now, will also have 30% less downforce and 55% less drag.
Those numbers are approximate. These changes to downforce and drag take us straight into the oldest battle in F1 — engineers vs. the rules. The rules aim for 30% less downforce, and currently, every engineer in every F1 team is searching, hunting, and scrutinizing the rules and their own designs to claw back as much of that downforce as physics allows. This is the reason why every time Formula 1 tries to increase overtaking, it ultimately doesn’t have the intended impact. We have witnessed this dynamic several times in this current season. The 2022 cars were specifically designed by Ross Brawn and his technical working group to ensure that they created much less dirty air, thus making it easier for one car to follow another closely without losing so much downforce. Yet, in 2025, we still have DRS trains, and drivers continue to complain about the dirty air and the inability to get close enough. At the same time, this year in particular, the cars are racing closer than they ever have. I’ve rarely ever seen time gaps that are less than a tenth of a second. And this year, we see hundredths and thousands separating cars in qualifying all the time. It’s just that things get more difficult in races. That doesn’t mean the 2026 cars won’t achieve their aims of creating better racing, but it does mean that the teams will be forever fighting against that goal.
For the FIA and fans of Formula 1, the ideal is a closely contested series with lots of overtaking and multiple teams and drivers battling it out for both titles. Conversely, every F1 team dreams of the easiest, most boring season ever. They want to rock up at each race, have their cars finish 1-2 with minimal effort, and never be challenged in any way by their rivals. This is the fundamental dichotomy of F1.
Let’s get back to these aero changes.
With the mild shrinking of car size and those reductions in drag and downforce, the FIA has also cooked up some new front wing and floor configurations.
The new front wings are designed to create a feature called in-wash. It has been a rare occasion when TIL has dipped into this airflow jargon because it is easy to get too deep into the weeds, and things get confusing. I’ll try to keep this brief and simple, but know this, dear reader: books have been written about this subject by PhDs who spend their days staring blankly into computer-rendered smoke and water models for decades on end. It is complicated.
The short version is this: Outwash is when teams use the front wing of the car, along with other little aero bits, to direct airflow out and away from the car, specifically the tires. In-wash, then, is the opposite. The FIA has tried to create a front wing specification that channels more air into and under the car. Easy enough.
The most significant aerodynamic liability in open-wheel racing is the tires. Spinning rubber tires are not aerodynamically efficient. Your road car is much more aerodynamically efficient than a Formula 1 car because the tires are covered, and your little car is shaped like an aspirin.
For F1 teams, pushing and channeling as much air as possible out and away from the car is the ideal way (within current rule sets) they would like to create downforce and manage airflow. So what’s the catch? The catch is that your car's outwash is the dirty air the car behind you hates. The more air channelled out and away from the car, the bigger the wall of turbulent, dirty air your car leaves in its wake. Thus making it harder for other cars to follow, more difficult to get close, and sometimes impossible to pass.
Another aero change for 2026 is the floor. Currently, the floors are the most powerful downforce-generating surface on the car. While F1 won’t be abandoning ground-effect floors entirely, the 2026 regulations will make the floors a much less important part of the aero package than we have seen to date.
The final bit of aero business for 2026 is moveable aerodynamics. Moveable aero was long forbidden in F1. Until, that is, the introduction of DRS in 2011. This part gets a little weird with the language —there will be no “DRS” for 2026. Except that there will be. In fact, we will be getting double the DRS, but F1 just won’t be calling it DRS anymore. Do you see how obnoxious these characters are? Everything has to be so complicated. At the moment, if you are within a second of the car ahead of you when you cross a DRS detection line on the track, you will have the ability to open your rear wing, thus reducing drag, and you can then hopefully have a shot at passing the car ahead of you. For 2026, there will no longer be a DRS detection line, and you will no longer have to be within one second of the car ahead. Moreover, instead of the rear wing opening to reduce drag, both the front and rear wings will open. At the moment, they are calling this “straight line mode.” Seemingly every other person you see in the F1 paddock is there for marketing purposes, and the best anyone could come up with is “straight line mode”? A missed opportunity.
To quickly summarize the changes we just went through, because we are getting ready to talk about everyone’s doubts and gripes around these new rules:
-New engines with a different split between electricity and ICE power.
-No more MGU-H
-New use of biofuels
-Slightly smaller cars
-Slightly lighter cars
-New front wing spec
-Simplified floors
-Moveable front and rear wing aero with no more DRS detection points
Great right? Easy enough. Why did we need 2000 words to get to a list that could have been a Substack note?
The reason this gets so complicated is that all of these changes to the cars interact with one another. It is the nature and degree of that interaction that leads us to the aforementioned moral of the story:
Absolutely nobody knows what’s going to happen.
Nobody knows with any certainty what racing in 2026 will be like. However, the teams and drivers have been getting hazy glimpses of the future as they build their cars, particularly as they work in the simulator. It is this simulator work that is the source of some of the concerns about the new regulations. Lance Stroll, usually tight-lipped with the media, has been one of the drivers sharing his thoughts on the 2026 regs.
"I have driven it in the sim, and that's why I'm a bit sad. It is a shame that in Formula 1, we're taking the path of electric energy, and we've had to take all the downforce off to support the battery power.
"It would just be fun to see some light, nimble, fast cars with lots of downforce, and just to simplify the whole thing a little bit, so less of an energy battery championship science project and more of a Formula 1 racing championship.”
Lance’s teammate, two-time World Champion Fernando Alonso, was a bit more circumspect about the new rules.
“I only did one day in the simulator, and it was difficult to really take any conclusions of that,” said Alonso.
“So, I will wait a little bit longer, or maybe even to test a real car, because sometimes in the simulator, you have a feeling, and then on the real car you have a different one.
“Yeah, it’s less performance than this year. Every time a racing driver tests something that is slower, [they] will never like [it]. But then we go in a rental car, with 12 horsepower, and we love it [laughs]. When we are all together, you know, and you fight and you win the race and it’s like you win the championship.
“So yeah, if next year you are fast, we will love the cars.”
Williams driver Alex Albon mentioned the cognitive load the drivers will face with the new engine and aero integration.
"It's difficult. It's difficult to drive. Technologically, the load on the driver is immensely high as well. It's quite important to know how to use the engine and the deployment, and you have to learn a different driving style. But it's part of the regulations. It's technology at the end of the day.”
Alex went on to say,
"There is a lot that the driver has to do. I don't think it will always purely come down to how good the driver is around the corner. A driver who's quite smart and can understand the system — and even abuse the system, understand how it works, and become efficient with it — they're going to find performance in that as well.”
These are the sort of quotes that have been drip, drip, dripping into public view. Drivers appear to be working hard to avoid speaking ill of the new rules while giving hints that they are not entirely sure or happy with the direction Formula 1 is headed.
It is worth noting here that Albon’s view on “a driver who’s quite smart” is one shared by many. There is a general feeling here that there could be huge opportunities for clever drivers to manage and manipulate these new systems to their advantage. To my mind, that instantly puts a wily old fox like Fernando Alonso in a stronger position. Folks like Max and Lewis could also be beneficiaries if this speculation comes to fruition.
It is at this point that I think it is helpful for fans to remember that F1 drivers are not normal people. They collectively possess a very different set of values regarding motorsport in general and Formula 1 in particular. This scale of values is the pinch of salt one needs to take when reading these quotes. For starters, drivers always want more speed, more power, and more grip. Any new rules that appear to tread on that holy trinity are instantly suspect. The fact of the matter is that while the new cars may not be easy or fun to drive, whichever team and driver wins races or championships with these new cars, they will suddenly be saying nice things into microphones about this new direction for F1. And whichever team ends up being last on the grid, they will hate these regulations. This is worth keeping in mind. Fernando was right; the drivers want more grip, more power, and more speed. However, the happiest we have ever seen Formula 1 drivers was when they were going 20mph in Lego F1 cars.
Here are Charles Leclerc’s feelings on the new regs after some early runs in the simulator.
“Let's say it's not the most enjoyable race car I've driven so far, but we are still in a moment where the project is relatively new,”
Charles had more to share on this,
“My hope relies on the fact that it will evolve quite a bit in the next few months, but I think it's no secret that I think the regulations for next year are going to be a lot, probably, less enjoyable for drivers to drive.
“So yeah, I'm not a big fan of it for now. But it's the way it is.
"At the end of the day I think there's a challenge, and I would like the challenge of maximizing a very different car to what it is at the moment. But do I enjoy it? Probably not.”
Charles was speaking to The Race here, and they asked him specifically if it was the lower downforce or the need for extreme energy harvesting that he didn’t like. Charles responded with this,
“It's just strange to... I just don't imagine yet how racing will look like, and how cool the overtaking will be next year with this new regulation.
“This is something that I know people, teams, and the FIA are aware of, and there's probably some work to be done on that. I don't know how much it will change from now on, though.”
We could go on in this vein for a while, but I’ll spare you the endless quotes. I think it’s safe to say the drivers are dubious, at best, about how these new rules will work on track in racing conditions.
One of the biggest concerns that has emerged from the driving and racing perspective is the aforementioned energy harvesting. Some months ago, rumors were floating around the paddock, as they do, that some of these simulator runs were showing that the new cars were running out of battery energy on longer straights (i.e., Monza or Baku). What teams were seeing was that not only would the battery deployment run out, but in doing so, drivers were required to downshift towards the end of the straights to keep the engine revs high so that they could harvest some more energy into and through the corners and have some electric power available for the following section of track.
The need to do this raised concerns about “unnatural” racing that could result from this. Will fast drivers in fast cars be gobbled up on the straights due to energy harvesting requirements? Could we have a situation where a particular car is super quick over one lap, but during the race, they slip down the order and are effectively helpless against other cars and drivers? The nightmare scenario here is that a driver could continually put their car on pole position and just as reliably finish far down the order on race day. This is the fear.
To combat this phenomenon, the FIA has introduced a ramp-down mode. This mode allows for a more predictable battery drain rate. It is also adjustable. For example, when teams arrive at Monza, the FIA could issue a Technical Directive stating that the ramp-down mode will allow drivers to reach full speed on the straight for seven seconds, allowing time for cars to reach the end of the straight without having to downshift. After seven seconds, battery energy will be exhausted and will need to be recharged. Those seven seconds of ramp down at Monza could be four seconds at another track, or ten seconds at another. As you might imagine, folks weren’t too happy about this.
Nikolas Tombazis, the FIA’s single-seater director, has spoken at length about this, though his quotes are often light on details. Speaking to Autosport, Tombazis addressed some of these concerns about excessive energy harvesting.
“What we don't want, is a situation where they have to lift off, for example, on the straights or anything like that. We will absolutely, categorically, make sure that they don't have to lift off in a particular area in order to do something with the energy or whatever. When they need to go faster, drivers will keep the pedal to the metal, as they say.”
Whether the FIA and the teams can make this happen remains to be seen. Remember, the new regulations are continually being tweaked and changed. This has been happening ever since the new rules were announced. In fact, a concern has emerged that this adjusting of the rules, should it continue into the 2026 season and beyond, could be its own problem. John Noble and Ed Straw from The Race recently did a deeper dive into the concerns around these 2026 regulations in a podcast. One point John Noble raised was that as cars hit the track and begin to race, a flood of Technical Directives, amendments, and judgments on legality could add to a sense of chaos and confusion surrounding these new rules.
This is a legitimate concern. As we discussed above, these Technical Directives could begin poking and prodding at that fundamental F1 dynamic between the FIA and the engineers. At what point does being clever and innovative turn into rule-breaking or cheating? How will it look to fans if that line between innovation and unfair advantage is being fought over and shifted throughout a season? After several years of close racing and a very rare power shift from an at first dominant Red Bull car to a now dominant McLaren, could the new rules stick us right back into F1’s historic trend of single-team domination following a rule change? Will everyone love the new rules if Mercedes, for example, shows up and finishes 1-2 in every race for the next three or four years? Not likely.
From all that we know, which is not much, it appears that 2026 will at the very least not be boring. It looks pretty likely that we could get a lot more of the on/off performance we have seen in this ground effects era, but perhaps exaggerated even further. Depending on how a team's engine works and how efficient it is, that team could dominate at a certain kind of track where there are enough hard braking zones to keep their battery charged up, allowing them to be super fast on the straights. Conversely, that same team could find themselves floundering at a track like Baku, where the city section of the track doesn’t offer lots of hard braking, making it difficult to charge the battery before getting onto F1’s longest straight at 1.37 miles.
In that hypothetical example, one could see the potential for some very exciting racing. And yet, depending on your perspective, one could also see a farcical championship fight where the lottery of track type determines the championship order.
It is also possible that a single team’s approach to reducing their car's weight to the 768kg limit could give them a competitive edge and allow them to win the whole shebang. John Noble from The Race mentioned weight explicitly in The Race’s podcast episode on these new regulations.
“Car wight is going to be an absolutely critical factor next season. And it’s not impossible we have a ’26 championship, after all the talk we have about power units and straight line mode, and manual override, and energy recovery and sustainable fuels, that the championship is won by the team that produces the lightest car because everyone is struggling to hit the weight limit. If someone’s found a way to do it and can get a car that’s twenty kilos less than somebody else, then that’s in effect, six-tenths of a second per lap. That’s a massive difference.”
That’s the ballgame in a nutshell.
Massive changes are on the horizon for Formula 1 in 2026. Changes in scope and scale that F1 has really never seen before. When the dust settles, it could be a world-altering technological innovation that wins the day. Or the championship could go to the team that does something as mundane as making their car the lightest.
What was the moral of this story again?
From TIL’s perspective, this all looks very exciting. We like seeing the teams this uncertain and unclear about what is going to happen. We embrace the chaos that these new regulations portend.
There is a very real chance that success in Formula 1 in 2026 could be distributed up and down the grid throughout the season instead of being hoarded by two or three top teams.
Aston Martin and Williams have been waiting for this moment for years, and see this change as their big opportunity to try and reach the top of the sport. Mercedes' engine department sees 2026 as their chance to re-establish their dominance, which ended in 2022 after a record-breaking eight consecutive years of glory. Audi and Cadillac have thrown themselves into the piranha club expressly because of the opportunities that exist within these new regulations.
Everyone in the paddock is dreaming of glory and yet waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Why?
Because with hundreds of millions of dollars being incinerated and engineers studying, designing, and working flat out, nobody can insulate themselves from the fundamental truth of the situation:
Nobody knows what is going to happen next year.
Isn’t that exciting?
