Possible solutions to improve the 2026 Engine Regulations

[fourmula1]

I think the tires are being overlooked as still being a limiting factor to any formula. The question, is anyone even capable of producing a tire that can be fast, pushed hard, have steady degradation, but not over-heat and get destroyed? If it is possible that is they key. It will close the entire field. So much of the past decades is tire management and is a huge gap between top and bottom teams. If that can be improved we would have some incredible racing in this new formula especially once performance starts to converge.

[bananapeel23]

I think the tires are being overlooked as still being a limiting factor to any formula. The question, is anyone even capable of producing a tire that can be fast, pushed hard, have steady degradation, but not over-heat and get destroyed? If it is possible that is they key. It will close the entire field. So much of the past decades is tire management and is a huge gap between top and bottom teams. If that can be improved we would have some incredible racing in this new formula especially once performance starts to converge.

It’s extremely difficult to have steady degradation when the tyre keeps losing mass, which keeps focusing the same amount of energy into an ever smaller amount of rubber, resulting in overheating and even more deg.

Making a tyre that degrades consistently is going to be extremely difficult. The tyres are mostly fine as they are.

What definitely should be done, however, is a return to 13 inch wheels, or at least 15 inch ones. The move to 18 inch wheels was purely cosmetic and absolutely perplexing, since Pirelli allegedly wanted tyres more similar in profile to road car tyres, but then decided to slap massive black wheel covers on the wheels, obscuring the low profile of the (also black) tyres.

The result? About 14kg of additional unsprung mass compared to 13 inch wheels, along with a loss of sidewall flexibility resulting in 1.5-2 seconds of lost laptime on average.

But this has nothing with the engines to do. Getting rid of 14kg of unsprung mass, or nearly 2% of overall car weight would probably do a lot for these power units though.

[langedweil]

The move to 18 inch wheels was purely cosmetic and absolutely perplexing, since Pirelli allegedly wanted tyres more similar in profile to road car tyres

Yeah, I totally agree that was silly.
How road relevant were 405 slick tires?

Getting rid of 14kg of unsprung mass, or nearly 2% of overall car weight would probably do a lot for these power units though.

Well, for the cars as a whole I'd say; free and simple weight loss.

I love my truck's balloon-tires, but mainly for bumps, holes and dirt grip ... so that's entirely different.

[the EDGE]

The move to 18 inch wheels was purely cosmetic and absolutely perplexing, since Pirelli allegedly wanted tyres more similar in profile to road car tyres

Yeah, I totally agree that was silly.
How road relevant were 405 slick tires?

Getting rid of 14kg of unsprung mass, or nearly 2% of overall car weight would probably do a lot for these power units though.

Well, for the cars as a whole I'd say; free and simple weight loss.

I love my truck's balloon-tires, but mainly for bumps, holes and dirt grip ... so that's entirely different.

What in F1 is road relevant???

The PUs certainly aren't, in what world would you pre-program your engine to cut your power to the wheels at certain points in your journey? or an engine you had to replace every few thousand miles? And the chassis certainly isn't either, In what world would you want downforce, on speed-limited roads? In what world would you 'not' want ABS or stability control on a road

[JordanMugen]

The question, is anyone even capable of producing a tire that can be fast, pushed hard, have steady degradation, but not over-heat and get destroyed? If it is possible that is they key.

Does it matter if they can? Pirelli and Bridgestone tendered for 2025-2027, and Bridgestone were rejected and Pirelli was selected. Hankook contested the 2021-2023, revised to 2022-2024, tender and was similarly rejected in favour of Pirelli.

The result? About 14kg of additional unsprung mass compared to 13 inch wheels, along with a loss of sidewall flexibility resulting in 1.5-2 seconds of lost laptime on average.

This is tyre chat not engine chat but a lot of this conventional wisdom is just plain wrong. On a dry tarmac circuit, the gain in lateral grip from low profile tyres often more than offsets the lower inertia and gain in longitudinal grip of high profile tyres, giving a net gain in lap time. Super Touring competitors didn't all adopt 19" low profile tyres because they are dumb... (Super Touring had a totally free choice of rim diameter, the only rule was the overall outer diameter of the tyre.)

And F1 cars already had low profile 15" front tyres in the 1960s and 1970s...

Notice how the profile of that front tyre, in 1971, is basically exactly the same as the profile of a 2026 front tyre!

[Waz]

My assumption is that the cars software will decide to super clip based off of distance into a lap, meaning that if the end of the straight is 2000m into a lap, super clipping would happen at an pre optimized distance (say 1600m to 1900m) depending on the track and harvesting needs. Is this a true assumption?

The teams are not using GPS to operate this system. So any distance algorithm would have to count revolutions of the wheels. You need some redundancies because if driver goes off track in T1 or there is wheel spin or lockup then the system would go out of sync with the circuit. A lot of other parameters like throttle shape, braking events, speed, battery level and so on can be used to try and reinforce the location tracking.

It seems to be Ai powered and updates live, each lap. Because we have already seen that any mistakes or wheelspin DOES put the system out of sync with location.

It's a big gripe of Charles in Qualifying. That if he pushes harder, the deployment doesn't correspond properly.

It's less obvious in the race because it will be corrected after a few corners, maybe a lap or so.

Edit: by Ai powered, I don't mean the nonsense that Joe Public uses.

[Ozan]

they need to let ICE make more power, maybe increase fuel flow rate or let them develop more on ICE side

[Sevach]

https://www.motorsport.com/f1/news/the- ... /10809046/

A lot of talk on how the new engines ruined qualifying.

[bananapeel23]

It's a big gripe of Charles in Qualifying. That if he pushes harder, the deployment doesn't correspond properly.

In this case I think it was more so that any snap oversteer requires you to slow down, which wastes the battery charge you used to accelerate out of the corner, which keeps punishing you for the entire length of the straight.

In Australia and China it appears to have been about bugs in the deployment caused by lifting due to snaps, but here it appears to be a pure lack of energy, which isn’t as bad in my opinion, even if it obviosuly sucks that you can’t corner your way out of mistakes.

[gearboxtrouble]

After watching the qualifying highlights I don't think these regs (ie the 50/50 split) can be saved. The engines do not deserve to be on the grid and are the worst to ever be called F1 engines in my 35 years watching the sport. They actively punish drivers for pushing to the limit of the car in corners which creates a reverse meritocracy - the ideal driver for these regs is an algo that programmatically optimizes the energy management. The drivers do not have full control of the speed of the car which makes their whole job as drivers less meaningful. They need to salvage what they can by banning harvesting outside of braking events and boosting the ICE to compensate even if that means more fuel and heavier cars. I'm guessing a 80/20 split would do the job at all tracks. For 26 they just need to nerf the deployment at every track to the point that full throttle = max power. This might mean F2 speeds at places like Monza and Vegas but at least it will be a sport again. There is still enough time to save 27 by changing the regs to bring back 800hp ICEs.

[V10FURY]

After watching the qualifying highlights I don't think these regs (ie the 50/50 split) can be saved. The engines do not deserve to be on the grid and are the worst to ever be called F1 engines in my 35 years watching the sport. They actively punish drivers for pushing to the limit of the car in corners which creates a reverse meritocracy - the ideal driver for these regs is an algo that programmatically optimizes the energy management. The drivers do not have full control of the speed of the car which makes their whole job as drivers less meaningful. They need to salvage what they can by banning harvesting outside of braking events and boosting the ICE to compensate even if that means more fuel and heavier cars. I'm guessing a 80/20 split would do the job at all tracks. For 26 they just need to nerf the deployment at every track to the point that full throttle = max power. This might mean F2 speeds at places like Monza and Vegas but at least it will be a sport again. There is still enough time to save 27 by changing the regs to bring back 800hp ICEs.

The issue is they went to these stupid rules to entice 3 more manufacturers into the sport: Honda, Cadillac and Audi. So far only Audi seems to have done a halfway decent job of building a car and PU. Honda have totally screwed the pooch and have produced a giant turd burger of an engine for Aston Martin. Cadillac wisely just bought the Ferrari PU so they are not technically an engine partner , just a new Haas.

As for this dumb Formula they have come up with , I think the aero , weights, size and tires are all fine. The engine formula is a complete disaster on the other hand and needs immediate attention. The easiest fix that could help this formula until they change it completely to normally aspirated V-8’s again in 2029 is to lower the electrical output to 200kw , allow 350kw recharging, add 50kw back to the ICE with more revs and fuel flow. Also enlarge the stupid battery to 8 milijules instead of the pathetic 4.
Then they can run flat out most of the time. No road car depletes its electric energy in 8 seconds. This ridiculous adherence to cars on the road must have something in common with Formula 1 is so out dated and foolish.

Running new synthetic fuels is fine and a good idea to push that technology. Running a 350kw electric motor with a tiny 4 millijule battery is beyond idiotic. 3 years ago everyone involved in the technical side of F1 agreed these rules were an absolute disaster. They were 100% correct.

My recommendation for the next formula would be: 3 liter V-8 engines for 2029, 16:1 A/F ratio, 15,000 rev limit, synthetic fuels , no fuel flow limit, zero hybrid crap. 5 engine per season limit before penalty. Of course this will never happen.

[Ferry]

Also enlarge the stupid battery to 8 milijules instead of the pathetic 4.

I'd make it a billion times bigger than that.

[bananapeel23]

My recommendation for the next formula would be: 3 liter V-8 engines for 2029, 16:1 A/F ratio, 15,000 rev limit, synthetic fuels , no fuel flow limit, zero hybrid crap. 5 engine per season limit before penalty. Of course this will never happen.

So like a ~110 kg PU putting out 800 horsepower while hauling like 180 kg of fuel. Combined with awful torque because NA and no ERS for additional torque. The lack of ERS also requires a return to DRS and boring passes. This is made even worse by capping revs to a measly 15000 RPM, meaning they won’t even be particularly fun to listen to.

If you suggest NA, revs should be unlimited and the displacement should be fairly small to encourage low weight. Capping revs and increasing displacement just removes the best avenue for engine development, since the engines would be limited primarily by the amount of air they can get into the cylinder. More revs is the best way around that, so power is most easily improved by increasing revs.

I mean I’m against full NA in general, but high displacement, low rev NA is particularly dumb due to having all of the drawbacks and none of the advantages. If you want full NA it should be a small displacement, fuel flow limited (albeit a high limit, like 140 kg/hr), uncapped rev V8 or V10.

That creates different development paths, an efficiency incentive in the form of combustion efficiency and a lot of noise from high revs. What you propose is something worse than the gimped and rev-capped 3L V10 that Toro Rosso was allowed to use in 2006.

[Ozan]

2 liter v8+Turbo +syntetic fuels (no limit on fuel flow rate)+ hybrid system like today's but more battery capacity

[FNTC]

Increase the fuel flow to get more ICE power and reduce the MGU-K output to compensate. Give them as much power as needed to be able to still finish the race when starting with full fuel tanks. This can be done without any mechanical changes.