Formula 1 has had its fair share of scare stories about the new 2026 car rules. From concerns about ‘Frankenstein’ machines, to drivers needing to change down gears on the straights, and then alarm at some simulator tests where cars were spinning out on the straights, it has not been smooth sailing to get where we are today.

But with the new rules now having been announced – although there will likely be some further tweaks – there is a sense from those who have framed them that those early worries have been addressed. So rather than F1 fans needing to fear that what is coming from 2026 could be bad for the show, there is actually some optimism that things will be improved.

The reset of chassis rules has also opened up the opportunity to address some mistakes that were made with the current ground effect challengers. Beyond the fact that today’s cars are too heavy, they are also too ride-height critical, and are getting increasingly sensitive to the dirty air that the all-new rules for 2022 were supposed to have eradicated.

All three factors have played their part in limiting the ability of cars to follow each other close enough for good racing. And this issue has been at the forefront of efforts to ensure that the 2026 regulations are fit for purpose in delivering a more exciting F1.

The FIA’s head of aerodynamics Jason Somerville said: «The main goal of the 2026 aero rules is really to focus on re-establishing following car performance. We want great racing; we want to ensure that the cars can race closely. The 2026 rules are an opportunity for us to reset the baseline level of the car so that they can race well together.»

The end result is cars that are going to be smaller and lighter – around 30kg less than now – but more critically, with aerodynamics that are much less prone to being manipulated by teams to move away from the original intention of better racing.

A clear focus has been made on improving the ability of cars to follow each other in 2026

Photo by: FIA

The FIA says it has dug deep to understand what teams did to alter the wake of their cars in recent years to bring back the outwash characteristic that has helped trigger the latest dirty air problem. Speaking to Autosport, the FIA’s single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis said that the simulation figures for the 2026 cars were improved over how things were for the start of 2022.

«The new rules and baseline spec, their wake characteristics are significantly better than the start of 2022,» he said. «So, they are starting off far better than in any other simulations we’ve done.

«We believe we’ve got a handle on what teams could do to degrade this as part of their performance development and know where the levers were. So, I’m expecting the ability to race closer to be significantly better.»

He added: «We have learned a lot from the last couple of years. While the cars are still better now than they were in 2021, they are definitely nowhere near as good as they were in the beginning of 2022.

«Certainly, some of the objectives set for 2022 have been degraded, that’s a fact. But we have understood a lot about the underlying reasons and believe that we can avoid a similar degradation for the new regulations. I’m quite confident of that.»

But it is not just the difficulties of cars following each other closely that have proved problematic for the spectacle since 2022.

One consequence of the fact that the current generation of cars is incredibly sensitive to ride heights is that it has been difficult for teams to get totally on top of things, which has served to open up a gap in the grid. Even the once-dominant Mercedes squad is still battling with what is needed to get the most out of the current rules set.

For 2026, changes to the underfloor have been aimed at deliberately widening the performance window for the cars so they are no longer operating in such a tiny window of rear ride height operation.

Widening the performance envelope of the 2026 cars will help teams like Mercedes that have struggled to get its cars in the sweet spot

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Tombazis said: «Here too we have learned quite a lot. We have been working on the philosophy of the floor, which is going to have a less strong diffuser and is going to be less dependent on being very close to the ground.

«We expect the operating conditions of the cars to be in a more moderate rear ride height and therefore to not have that issue».

Frankenstein car fears

The creation of the 2026 cars has not been without controversy, as teams have voiced concerns about the way things appear to be heading.

Last year Red Bull said it was worried about the risk of ‘Frankenstein cars’ that had been compromised so much because of the energy deployment characteristics of the new hybrid engines that will rely on battery power much more than before.

PLUS: The key ingredients changing as F1’s 2026 engine war shapes up

More recently, some simulator tests of new active aero triggered concerning results after experiments of just having the rear wing move proved unworkable. The FIA says that the final version of rules that have been agreed has addressed both these issues.

«We carried out a huge amount of work on energy management and a lot of these scare stories were fairly premature,» explained Tombazis.

«We finalised the power unit regulations in August of 2022, in order for the power unit manufacturers to be able to start designing and developing power units, especially the newcomers.

«At the time, we carried out some basic simulations and knew what the main issues were and what had to be solved. While we hadn’t ticked every single box, we knew that there were solutions for the various topics. More work was needed, to decide between multiple options at our disposal.

Tombazis is confident that the FIA can lay to rest concerns about the 2026 cars performance

Photo by: Mark Sutton

«This created a period when a lot of people thought ‘the cars will downshift on the straight’, or ‘reach top speed in the middle of the straight and then drop off’ and so on. So, to sort out all of that I think we’ve done a reasonable job together with teams, not by ourselves, to simulate and to define all the energy management side. I am confident it’s now okay.»

On the recent active aero worries, Tombazis added: «We did some tests in order to see whether the rear wing adjustment by itself could be okay or not and concluded that it could be too unbalanced. So, the front and the rear wings have to be adjusted together.»

The end result should be, according to Tombazis, a car that is not a backwards step.

«The cars have overall more power,» he pointed out. «So faster acceleration out of the corners, and either similar or higher top speeds overall, with no significant rollover of top speed on the straight.

«Cornering speeds are going to go down a bit, due to the lower downforce. So overall: lower cornering speed, higher straight-line speed and harder braking.»

In fact, there is very much a sense that 2026 offers a chance for F1 to make up for what it missed with the current rules set.

As Tombazis said: «We believe we made a step towards closer racing in 2022. But there were also things we got wrong, and we’re trying to get it completely right now.»

Will the rules revamp deliver the improvements in racing that everybody wants to see?

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Somehow, the news that Red Bull has re-signed Sergio Perez for another two seasons, taking his tenure at the team to six years, is not a surprise. But perhaps it should be, given the Mexican’s performances alongside Max Verstappen.

A case could be made for it being the wrong move for Red Bull and, indeed, Formula 1, so let’s make it.

Any neutral fan wants the top seats to be taken by the best drivers. It stands to reason you’d want to have as much competition at the front as possible. And from a team’s point of view, you normally want to score as heavily with both cars as possible. Constructors’ championship points mean, quite literally, prizes.

Red Bull has had a dominant enough car that it hasn’t had to worry about this since the ground effect rules arrived in 2022. Famously, Verstappen would have won the constructors’ crown last year on his own.

But recent evidence suggests the field is catching up – Ferrari is just 24 points behind in the constructors’ standings – and Red Bull might not have that luxury in future. Given the high quality of everything else Red Bull does, it seems a little strange to have that chink in its armour.

For those feeling we’re being harsh on Perez, a popular figure who earned a chance in a frontrunning team after years of performing strongly in the midfield, let’s look at some of the facts.

Perez hasn’t had a glittering start to the season and currently sits fifth in the standings heading to Montreal

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Firstly, on the supertimes matrix, Perez is the worst-performing driver compared to his team-mate in 2024 apart from Logan Sargeant at Williams.

Supertimes are based on the fastest single lap by each driver at each race weekend, expressed as a percentage of the fastest single lap overall (100.000%) and averaged over the season. In other words, it’s a measure of raw pace:

Fastest-slowest supertimes gap

Some will argue that Verstappen is a tough benchmark and, seeing as the Dutchman is already becoming one of F1’s greats, that’s true. But this overlooks two things.

The first is that top teams tend to employ top drivers; you’re always going to come up against the best at the front and Perez is not alone in having a tough colleague.

Perez hasn’t won a race since Baku last year, and missed out on a golden opportunity at Miami in 2023 to Verstappen

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

The other is that no driver, however brilliant, can take a car faster around a circuit than it can go. The very best might get to 99% but they can’t defy physics; the job of the very good driver against a great one is to get as close as possible.

Perez’s gap to Verstappen on raw speed has also been pretty consistent. This isn’t about one of the much-discussed ‘Perez off his game’ moments. In 2021 he was 0.7% behind on average across the season, in 2022 0.545% and in 2023 0.761%. These are big gaps in a modern F1 context.

For comparison, Valtteri Bottas was 0.116% behind Lewis Hamilton across their five seasons together, while in 2018 Daniel Ricciardo was 0.138% behind Verstappen. Alex Albon, a far less experienced F1 driver than Perez, was 0.784% behind Verstappen in 2020 and he lost his Red Bull drive…

Perez scored 48% of Verstappen’s total in 2021, a year when Red Bull arguably had a marginally better car than Mercedes and won the drivers’ championship but lost the constructors’ crown

You could argue that raw speed isn’t Perez’s greatest strength, that he’s better at the races. But even there he can rarely get close to an unhindered Verstappen, who has proved better at maintaining tyre life while lapping quickly, something that was previously considered a Perez strength.

At the start of 2022, Autosport took on the challenge of finding the best number two drivers in F1 history. During the course of that research, we picked out three classes of team-mate based on their percentage of their number one’s points score.

PLUS: Finding F1’s greatest number two driver

If a driver scored 80% or more of their team leader, that tended to mean a team actually had two equal number ones or at least a ‘number 1.5’ close enough to give the lead driver a headache.

As fans, this is the sort of combination we most want to see, but it can be problematic for teams, as most famously seen with Nigel Mansell and Nelson Piquet at Williams, and Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost at McLaren.

Drivers scoring 55-79% tend to be ideal as useful number two drivers for a leading team. Think Bottas or Rubens Barrichello.

Bottas got closer to Hamilton’s points tally in 2021 than Perez did to Verstappen, which was crucial in Mercedes taking the constructors’ championship that year

Photo by: Mark Sutton

Those managing 55% or less are not doing enough, unreliability and misfortune aside, and can cost a team a constructors’ title.

Perez scored 48% of Verstappen’s total in 2021, a year when Red Bull arguably had a marginally better car than Mercedes and won the drivers’ championship but lost the constructors’ crown. Bottas scored 58% of Hamilton’s total, which made the difference.

Perez improved to 67% in 2022, fell to 50% against an admittedly remarkable score from Verstappen last year, and is currently on 63%. Across their time together at Red Bull, Perez has racked up 887 points compared to Verstappen’s 1593.5. That’s just under 56%, perilously close to dropping into the danger zone.

In a wider context, F1 also needs as many competitive drivers at the front as it can get. That was this writer’s frustration during Kimi Raikkonen’s second stint at Ferrari, where he was consistently the sixth-best performer across the top three teams. Charles Leclerc almost immediately showed that Sebastian Vettel wasn’t unbeatable at Ferrari when he arrived in 2019.

When one team is dominating, as Red Bull has for the past two years, it makes a big difference if the two drivers in the best car are evenly matched. McLaren’s domination in the late-1980s was still fascinating thanks to the duel between Senna and Prost, while Nico Rosberg was close enough to Hamilton across 2014-16 to at least mean that the result of each race wasn’t a foregone conclusion. The gap between the two Red Bulls since the start of 2022 has undoubtedly made F1 less exciting.

None of that is Red Bull’s concern, of course. But what it should be concerned about is making sure it has all bases covered and its second seat has been a problem since Ricciardo left at the end of 2018.

Red Bull’s junior programme, which has done so much for motorsport, hasn’t quite produced a suitable replacement, though it’s probably fair to say Pierre Gasly and Albon have become more complete performers since they left the senior team.

This isn’t to say Perez shouldn’t be an F1 driver. Indeed, his knowledge of Red Bull and experience as a six-time race winner in his 265 starts could be invaluable to one of the teams further down the grid, but we’ve now seen enough to know he’s not quite a topliner.

Perez has rarely been able to match Verstappen in his time at Red Bull, allowing his team-mate a clear path to glory

So, who should Red Bull have gone for? For a team with the money and dynamism it has shown in the past, it’s surprising it hasn’t made more of an effort to go and get another big name, such as Verstappen’s mate Lando Norris. Or gone for Carlos Sainz, the best driver currently available.

There are even some left-field options, such as Yuki Tsunoda, given his fine performances against RB team-mate Ricciardo, or Esteban Ocon, though he has an even more tumultuous past with Verstappen than Sainz.

Keeping Verstappen happy is, of course, a primary concern. Red Bull knows that, even if it produces a merely competitive car, Verstappen will have it at or near the front, which might be important in a post-Adrian Newey/post-Honda era.

Red Bull is clearly banking on keeping Verstappen despite all the recent turmoil, but even that might not be enough to ensure lucrative constructors’ championship successes

But it could be in real trouble if he decides to go elsewhere. Could Perez really lead the team?

Given the fact he failed to finish second in the 2022 points race and is currently fifth, surely not. So Red Bull is clearly banking on keeping Verstappen despite all the recent turmoil, but even that might not be enough to ensure lucrative constructors’ championship successes in 2025-26. Either way, Red Bull has left itself vulnerable.

McLaren bent over backwards to keep Senna in the early 1990s – some argued to the detriment of car development such were his wage demands – but he jumped ship to Williams as soon as he could. Even with a young Mika Hakkinen in the wings, McLaren didn’t even win another race for three years…

Could Red Bull depend on Perez if Verstappen did depart?