Although Formula 1 models itself as the pinnacle of technology in motorsport, the governing body polices the guardrails carefully to prevent car performance from getting out of hand. That’s why many of the innovative solutions to the latest set of technical regulations are being legislated out of existence next season or have already been banned.
This has been the first time in decades that both the engine and the chassis regulations have been radically overhauled. The cars are lighter and narrower, the power units even more vastly complicated to operate than before, owing to the near-50:50 split of output from the electrical motor and the internal combustion engine.
In any new set of rules, the most creative engineers will see opportunities. Some will head down the wrong path, others will learn from what their rivals are doing. Hence we are already seeing convergence as McLaren adopts the rotating wing concept pioneered by Ferrari and Red Bull.
The ‘Macarena’ wing
Seen first on Ferrari’s SF-26, though Red Bull had separately identified the opportunity and had a similar concept in the works, the ‘Macarena’ wing (so named by Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur) takes an extreme approach to defeating drag when F1’s new Straight Mode is available.
In 2011 F1 adopted the Drag Reduction System (DRS), in which a mechanism could flatten the rear wing’s upper plane in prescribed areas of the track. This has now been superseded by Straight Mode, in which the front wing’s upper planes flatten at the same time.
The Macarena wing takes advantage of the new wording of the regulations, which defines the speed of the transition into and out of Straight Mode (less than 0.4s), but not how the wing flap moves between open and closed.
Ferrari’s flap pivots backwards and has actuators built into the endplates, whereas the Red Bull and McLaren solutions pivot forwards and have a central actuator mechanism. McLaren freely admits that it had a ‘Why didn’t we think of that?’ moment when it saw these wings in testing, and immediately started working on its own version.
Other teams may yet follow, depending on their own development plans under F1’s stringent budget cap.
Circumventing electrical ramp-down
Among the well-publicised shortcomings of the new regulations is the constant need to recharge the battery through the lap – and the problem of what to do as it runs out of charge. Mindful of the potentially catastrophic effects of cars abruptly running out of power and slowing down suddenly, the FIA mandates a so-called ramp-down phase where the electrical output reduces in pre-determined stages (50 kilowatts per second) before the charge runs out.
At the beginning of this season, controversially, several teams using Mercedes and Red Bull power units were seen during qualifying to be triggering an emergency shutdown mode in the electrical motor, which bypasses the ramp-down phase. The FIA had seen this coming – sort of – by locking off the electrical motor for a 60-second period after the emergency shutdown was triggered.
But obviously the teams then circumvented this by using it at the end of their qualifying laps, since the lock-out period was irrelevant on a cool-down lap. Still, this practice was banned for safety reasons after the Japanese GP.
Mercedes then revived the trick legally via software. At circuits with a short run between the final corner and the timing line, it’s possible to deploy and harvest through the lap in such a way that the drivers can command maximum boost at the exit of the final corner and then lift off the throttle fractionally before the line, which defeats the ramp-down mode.
Getting this right requires a lot of optimisation and preparation in the simulator beforehand, and it’s understood that the drivers receive audio cues through their earpieces to get the timing right – something which will be familiar, since ‘bleeps’ have been used to guide optimal gearshift timings throughout the hybrid era.
Aston Martin’s B-spec car
Having brought next to no developments to its troubled AMR26 since the beginning of the season, Aston Martin rolled out what was in effect a B-spec car in Hungary. While the highly adventurous front suspension geometry was retained, this was a nose-to-tail update which included a new, lighter monocoque.
The engine and its ancillaries were carried over, though, since Honda isn’t introducing its upgraded power unit until Zandvoort. So the unusual location of the electrical motor, ahead of the engine (made at the behest of Adrian Newey for aerodynamic purposes early in development), will remain.
Ferrari’s flow-turning device
It may look like a crude flap above the exhaust, but Ferrari’s ‘flow-turning device’ caused great agitation in pre-season testing and prompted a tidy-up of next year’s technical regulations. Essentially it encourages hot air from the exhaust to flow towards the underside of the rear wing’s lower plane while also helping to energise the air exiting the central portion of the diffuser.
This aids downforce in two ways: by making the diffuser more effective, and accelerating the air under the rear wing to reduce the air pressure in that area.
Ferrari gets a greater benefit because it has sited its differential further back – to the maximum permitted 60mm behind the axle line to create an extra volume for the diffuser. This is fundamentally why the other teams were so enraged by Ferrari’s innovation – they could copy it to an extent by putting flaps over their own exhausts, but couldn’t exploit it fully without a full redesign of floor, diffuser and gearbox.
Mercedes’ diffuser extensions
As part of its Canadian Grand Prix upgrade, Mercedes brought a new floor with serrated extensions above the diffuser. Ferrari immediately complained on the grounds that it had proposed a similar concept to the FIA some months before and been told it was not legal.
The rules in this area are complex. Mercedes was taking advantage of a loophole in the wording permitting teams to use metal stays to prevent the floor flexing, and for them to be faired in to avoid sharp edges.
Ferrari eventually got its way by pointing out that permitting Mercedes’ design would open the way for other, more extreme interpretations, so the FIA issued a technical directive clamping down on the practice ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix.
‘Mouse holes’
Not so much an innovation as a new spin on an old idea last seen before the ground-effect cars of 2022-2023. A hole in the bodywork around the diffuser area is used to redirect some airflow from the exterior of the car to the diffuser’s inner surface, the aim being to energise the airflow through the diffuser.
One key reason for this is the mandatory inwashing bargeboards mounted ahead of the sidepods. The FIA introduced these with the aim of narrowing the car’s aerodynamic wake and therefore making overtaking easier.
But this means a lot of the turbulent wake from the front wheels and suspension, which previously the engineers would have tried to direct away from the car’s aerodynamic surfaces, is now passing along those surfaces and entering the underfloor area. The so-called mouse holes are just one element of a strategy to tidy the flow structure around the rear end of the car – not just through the diffuser but also in the floor area around the rear wheels to manage tyre ‘squirt’.
Rear-wing flap extensions and ‘ladders’
Another loophole exploit which has been banned for 2027 is the practice of extending the trailing edge of the rear wing and its supporting pillars with small Gurney flaps, which add downforce without exacting a huge toll in terms of drag. A separate but related development has been the so-called ‘ladder flaps’ deployed at high-downforce circuits such as Monaco.
These exploited a ‘legality box’ around the actuator which opens and closes the upper plane for Straight Mode. This box has now been tightened for 2027 to clamp down on some of the more over-the-top solutions, while still allowing some design freedoms.
