F1 teams predict new car designs will cause ‘chaos’ in Melbourne

Source : ABC NEWS

Formula 1 is back for 2026, and the cars are all sporting new looks.

But it won’t be just a fresh coat of paint on show at the Melbourne Grand Prix.

Former Renault engineer Chris Papadopoulos says this year features one of the biggest regulation changes since the sport’s inception.

“Tyres, aerodynamics, vehicle dimension and engine rules … so basically, just about everything on the car is changing,” he says.

The cars will be louder, slower on the corners and harder to handle, but more sustainable for the planet than previous designs.

Racing teams predict these tweaks may inject a healthy dose of “unpredictability and chaos” into the first race of the season.

So let’s take a look under the ‘hood’ at the science of F1 cars.

The basics of an F1 car

To make sense of the changes it’s important to understand the fundamentals of how an F1 car works.

Bradley Lord, the Mercedes F1 team representative, says an F1 car is fundamentally “the lightest, fastest, strongest, most potent road-going vehicle you could make”.

F1 cars can reach speeds of over 350 kilometres per hour and look a bit like a fighter plane on four wheels.

They still share several similarities with road cars including a power unit that uses both a battery and fuel-powered combustion engine, similar to hybrid vehicles.

But there are also more prominent features of an F1 car’s body like the front and rear wings, side pods, and diffuser (a ramp-shaped rear section).

These elements — especially the wings and floor of the car — work together to keep the car glued to the track instead of lifting off like a plane at high speeds.

This is managed through two key forces: drag and downforce.

Cars are streamlined to limit the amount of drag (air pushing against it) on straight parts of the track to go faster.

While on corners, they can increase drag and downforce (the force of air pushing the car to the ground) to give the tyres more grip.

The shapes, sizes, temperatures, and weights of all the car’s components are set by the governing body, the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA).

These technical rules mostly tell teams what they can’t do: cars and their engines can’t be bigger than certain sizes, and wings can’t move in a certain way.

F1 car design is an evolutionary arms race where teams try to find the best engineering solution to regulations, according to Mr Papadopoulos, who is now the managing director of Australian racing team Volante Rosso.

A louder experience

One of the first things spectators will notice this year is the cars will sound different.

“They’re a bit louder and a bit, I’d sort of say throatier. They growl a bit more,” Mr Lord says.

This is because the heat motor generator unit, a heavy and complex piece that acts like a silencer on cars, is gone.

Even with the increase in volume, cars may become quieter again as teams continue to develop them.

Mr Papadopoulos says this is due to engineers finding new ways to be efficient at harnessing energy.

Focus on sustainability

A nosier car doesn’t mean it’s worse for the environment.

F1 wants to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2030, and for the first time, cars will use energy from a battery and a V6 engine equally.

Teams must also use synthetic fuel this year with a lower carbon dioxide emissions rate over its lifetime.

Mr Lord says it’s taken a long time to develop Mercedes’s fuel, with its design stage beginning in 2022 alongside the engine.

“[The new fuel] can achieve a greenhouse gas emissions reduction of 65 per cent roughly, versus the previous 10 per cent ethanol fuel that we were using last year,” he says.

The new regulations allow batteries to be about three times larger.

The batteries in F1 cars are rechargeable from the motion of the back wheels under braking.

“You can use the motor as a generator unit to pump up the battery, and then you can redeploy that energy on acceleration,” Mr Papadopoulos says.

However, the regulations limit how much energy can be recovered during a lap, meaning the teams can’t run the battery flat out every single lap.

“So it’s going to add an element of sort of high speed chess to how the drivers battle on track,” says Mr Lord.

Cars still quick but slower lap times expected

Lap times may be slightly slower this year due to design constraints producing less downforce and drivers braking more to regain energy for their battery.

“[But] in pure acceleration terms, they are quicker. They’re incredibly impressive when you see them coming out of the corners at full power,” Mr Lord says.

The cars can accelerate faster on the straights due to bigger battery capacity, which allows drivers to release more energy.

However, the cars will have 30 per cent less downforce compared to last year.

This means they will need to go slower in the corners so they don’t lose grip and slide.

Mr Lord says the cars are “sliding a little bit more in the corners” so look “more fun and entertaining for the drivers”.

Why will cars be harder to control?

Former Williams engineer Sammy Diasinos says one of the biggest changes contributing to a lack of downforce is the shape of the car’s floor.

“The floor has to be much simpler relative to the previous generation cars, which had hugely complex floors that generated a lot of downforce by having a carefully contoured floor very close to the ground,” he says.

This year, the cars will be higher off the ground, which will force more air underneath the car and increase downforce.

Mr Lord says as a result, they won’t bash into the ground as they had done the past four years.

This is a well-known issue for the last set of cars, says Dr Diasinos, who is now a lecturer at Macquarie University.

“A lot of drivers in the previous generation cars complained about how uncomfortable it was for them,” he says.

The previous system that helped with generating downforce has been removed in favour of “active aerodynamics”, where both the front and rear wings move.

The cars have a straight-line mode at the push of a button to limit drag, opening both front and rear wings to have a gap.

And a corner mode will automatically kick-in when braking, giving a boost of downforce and grip as the wings shut.

Expect a little ‘chaos’ at the Melbourne GP

In the lead-up to the new season, Mr Lord says the teams are unsure of how they will perform against each other.

“Simply because we’re all still learning and the learning curve is very, very high. So it’s going to be quite exciting.”