2026 F1 Cars - General Thread

[wuzak]

I’ve long thought this. If the minimum weight was allowed to be 600kg including driver, the cars MIGHT be lighter because they MIGHT choose to remove a metre from the middle of the car. It will however remain a contest measured by who made the right choices at the start of the design process. Get the jump at the start and continue to keep the lead.

They're not going to save 200kg by cutting a chunk out of the wheelbase.

For 2026 the Power Unit minimum weight is 150kg (ICE, turbo, MGUK, etc.) and the Energy Store minimum weight is 35kg.

The current driver minimum weight is 80kg.

The current tyre and wheel package weighs ~74kg.

The Halo, by itself, weighs ~10kg.

That means to get to 600kg the rest of the car must be no more than:

600 - 150 - 35 - 80 - 74 - 10 = 251kg.

In that you have to have a gearbox (8 speeds currently), mandatory side impact structures, chassis to pass rigorous impact testing, the chassis, bodywork, cooling system for the ICE, intercooler system for the turbo, coolers for the ES and MGUK, brakes, suspension, etc.

The fact that most of today's cars are missing paint to make it down to the 798kg minimum weight would suggest that getting too much lighter will be difficult.

[wuzak]

Just like to add that the 2014 cars were substantially smaller, and had a minimum weight of less than 700kg.

But they didn't have the halo, 18" wheels and tyres, or the current safety requirements.

[feni_remmen]

I’ve long thought this. If the minimum weight was allowed to be 600kg including driver, the cars MIGHT be lighter because they MIGHT choose to remove a metre from the middle of the car. It will however remain a contest measured by who made the right choices at the start of the design process. Get the jump at the start and continue to keep the lead.

They're not going to save 200kg by cutting a chunk out of the wheelbase.

For 2026 the Power Unit minimum weight is 150kg (ICE, turbo, MGUK, etc.) and the Energy Store minimum weight is 35kg.

The current driver minimum weight is 80kg.

The current tyre and wheel package weighs ~74kg.

The Halo, by itself, weighs ~10kg.

That means to get to 600kg the rest of the car must be no more than:

600 - 150 - 35 - 80 - 74 - 10 = 251kg.

In that you have to have a gearbox (8 speeds currently), mandatory side impact structures, chassis to pass rigorous impact testing, the chassis, bodywork, cooling system for the ICE, intercooler system for the turbo, coolers for the ES and MGUK, brakes, suspension, etc.

The fact that most of today's cars are missing paint to make it down to the 798kg minimum weight would suggest that getting too much lighter will be difficult.

Sorry to not be more specific. I was just making a generalization implying that shortening the car by a metre will be a great way to get down to a given weight. I do appreciate your point. Unfortunately a bunch of rules exist within the confines of the modern rules package, meaning the current weight seems hard to get around, but they are all compounding on each other. I’m not suggesting anything that most of us aren’t familiar with. All good.

[wuzak]

The rules allow a maximum wheelbase of 3,600mm.

Pretty much all of them are at, or close to, the limit.

Shorter wheelbases would certainly have made getting down to the weight limit easier, but clearly the aerodynamic advantages of the longer wheelbase outweigh the advantages of lighter weight.

[r85]

I saw a mention of the beam wing being among the active aero parts. What reason would there be for it to move aside from maybe reducing/increasing some downforce? I always thought it's more crucial to the airflow coming out of the diffuser than acting as a mini rear wing.

[wuzak]

I saw a mention of the beam wing being among the active aero parts. What reason would there be for it to move aside from maybe reducing/increasing some downforce? I always thought it's more crucial to the airflow coming out of the diffuser than acting as a mini rear wing.

More to reduce drag when downforce not required.

The 2026 PUs are going to be much weaker than the current PUs.

[mzso]

I would be surprised if they make them any smaller than an F2 car, though a move to F2 dimensions (1.9m width and 5.2m length) and F2 tyres (i.e., the old 2016 sizes but with 725mm overall diameter) would be sensible and not make too much difference IMO.




In the 1980's with driver's feet in front of the front axle? This seems unrealistic when this is no longer allowed and when an F2 car is now 5.2m long and already looks much smaller than an F1 car.

Also in the 90s, and 2000s for a while.

The rule came in for 1988.

https://www.f1technical.net/articles/26

I was talking about car length, not the rule. Which only got obscene far more recently.

BTW, that rule is meaningless. The feet being behind the suspension, doesn't accomplish much, if anything. What's relevant is the strength of the monocoque and the crumple zone in the nose.

[mzso]

The fact that most of today's cars are missing paint to make it down to the 798kg minimum weight would suggest that getting too much lighter will be difficult.

Maybe extensive use of nanotube composites would allow substantial weight saves?

[Just_a_fan]

Also in the 90s, and 2000s for a while.

The rule came in for 1988.

https://www.f1technical.net/articles/26

I was talking about car length, not the rule. Which only got obscene far more recently.

BTW, that rule is meaningless. The feet being behind the suspension, doesn't accomplish much, if anything. What's relevant is the strength of the monocoque and the crumple zone in the nose.

It's not just crumpling, it's also shearing. If the drivers feet are stuck out of the tub and rely on the nose cone for protection and the nose cone gets sheared off, what then for the feet? Not good.

Even where the feet are inside the tub, they are still at risk. See Kubica's crash in Canada, for example:



If his feet had been projecting out in to the nose cone (because the nose cone passed a crash test), he'd have been competing against Zanardi in Paralympian sports.

[mzso]

It's not just crumpling, it's also shearing. If the drivers feet are stuck out of the tub and rely on the nose cone for protection and the nose cone gets sheared off, what then for the feet? Not good.

Even where the feet are inside the tub, they are still at risk. See Kubica's crash in Canada, for example

If his feet had been projecting out in to the nose cone (because the nose cone passed a crash test), he'd have been competing against Zanardi in Paralympian sports.

You missed the point. The drivers feet wouldn't and shouldn't stick out of the moncoque. That's dumb. (I don't know if it happened in the past)
The rule often mentioned says the driver fee can't exren forward the suspension mountings. Which seems rather meaningless.

As for shearing: If the nose is sheared from some huge force, the car is not likely to crash frontally into anything, it would certainly spin like crazy. Also, the Kubica crash is not relevant. The nose wasn't sheared off it, was destroyed by impact force.

[Just_a_fan]

It's not just crumpling, it's also shearing. If the drivers feet are stuck out of the tub and rely on the nose cone for protection and the nose cone gets sheared off, what then for the feet? Not good.

Even where the feet are inside the tub, they are still at risk. See Kubica's crash in Canada, for example

If his feet had been projecting out in to the nose cone (because the nose cone passed a crash test), he'd have been competing against Zanardi in Paralympian sports.

You missed the point. The drivers feet wouldn't and shouldn't stick out of the moncoque. That's dumb. (I don't know if it happened in the past)
The rule often mentioned says the driver fee can't exren forward the suspension mountings. Which seems rather meaningless.

As for shearing: If the nose is sheared from some huge force, the car is not likely to crash frontally into anything, it would certainly spin like crazy. Also, the Kubica crash is not relevant. The nose wasn't sheared off it, was destroyed by impact force.

The point about the Kubica incident is that the front of the tub was badly damaged thus partially exposing his feet. And that with some of the energy having been absorbed by damage to the nose cone and the front suspension.

You want the cars to be shorter - to do that means reducing some combination of wheelbase and front/rear overhangs. Reducing the front overhang naturally puts the driver's feet nearer to any point of impact and reduces the amount of crash structure length available to deal with the energy. That means both the front of the tub is more at risk and the forces applied to the driver will be higher - shorter distance to absorb energy means higher acceleration.

So the only sensible way to reduce overall length is by reducing wheelbase. That's where any changes should be made.

[AR3-GP]

The rule often mentioned says the driver fee can't exren forward the suspension mountings. Which seems rather meaningless.

I wouldn't call it meaningless. Although the suspension arms are designed to fail before they pierce the monocoque, stranger things have happened.

[Rodak]

Here's a pretty interesting discussion on weight reduction from 2022:
https://the-race.com/formula-1/why-2022 ... an-be-cut/

[wuzak]

Also in the 90s, and 2000s for a while.

The rule came in for 1988.

https://www.f1technical.net/articles/26

I was talking about car length, not the rule. Which only got obscene far more recently.

BTW, that rule is meaningless. The feet being behind the suspension, doesn't accomplish much, if anything. What's relevant is the strength of the monocoque and the crumple zone in the nose.

If the driver is moved forward so that his feet are ahead of the front axle line then the crash structure will be moved forward as well, so that the nose would be longer ahead of the front wheels than now.

[Rodak]

The fact that most of today's cars are missing paint to make it down to the 798kg minimum weight would suggest that getting too much lighter will be difficult.

Maybe extensive use of nanotube composites would allow substantial weight saves?

F1 teams are not on the bleeding edge of technology, they don't have the money or means to develop new technologies, rather they use systems already developed by others; in the case of carbon fiber, the aircraft industry. I seriously doubt you are going to find much of a weight reduction as resin is a major weight component of composite structures. When we did wet layups with graphite we weighed the resin and used bleed cloth to obviate excesses; that's why prepreg is so useful. Still, with prepreg one also uses bleed cloth.