Future
Dan Fallows: How to nail an F1 rules reset
by Dan Fallows
8min read
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In the latest exclusive column from former Red Bull and Aston Martin Formula 1 aerodynamicist Dan Fallows, he looks at how teams will be preparing for the new era of F1 in 2026 - and draws from his own experience of working with drivers such as Max Verstappen and Fernando Alonso.
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As we leave the summer break, fans and teams are looking forward to getting back to racing, but how will Formula 1's technical departments be feeling about 2026?
Building an F1 car for the new season is always an exciting but stressful time, and that stress will be really ramping up now. With an impending rule change of the size and complexity of the 2026 one, how do the engineers prepare? What are the targets set for the teams, and how do they make sure they start the new season with a competitive package?
The truth is that no team is truly starting afresh. The modern F1 car has to have the familiar configuration of suspension, open wheels, carbon fibre chassis and even the rearward power unit layout. That defines many of the design parameters before they even start, and many others refine the design even further.
Rarely, drivers can be more effusive but usually they are less, like Max Verstappen, who usually concluded that every new car "feels fine" - even ones which would go on to win world championships.
3D render of a 2026 F1 car with straightline mode engaged. All 3D renders courtesy of Just FormulaCar
Safety considerations - crash structures, anti-intrusion panels and the like - also prevent teams from deviating too far from the norm. But I have always seen the positive side of this; you can take the learnings of previous years and apply those to the new car on the parts you do know about; that way you can focus creative minds on the parts you don't yet know about.
But that's not to understate the magnitude of the task of developing a whole new package. In 2009, the many years of aerodynamic refinement were practically thrown away, with new, wider front wings, far fewer additional bodywork devices and more restrictions on the big downforce-producing surfaces. That required an entire rethink about what a 'good' car looks like from an aerodynamic perspective.
Our approach at Red Bull was one I still advocate to this day: get the basics right. By that I mean, make sure the aerodynamic behaviour of the car is as predictable, stable and consistent as possible.
That means careful observation of the results coming out of the windtunnel and CFD to search for issues such as flow structures being overstressed and prone to breaking down. That might mean a wing element which is close to stall or a vortex which is dissipating in an undesirable way.
The new windtunnel at Aston Martin’s Silverstone headquarters
Keeping ride height and wind sensitivity within ‘acceptable’ parameters is also very important, although the process of defining what’s ‘acceptable’ can be complex and require good collaborative work with vehicle dynamics experts.
The key to competitiveness is giving your engineers a small number of key targets. For the composite and mechanical designers, the one they most worry about (after reliability) is weight. For 2026, this will be very problematic as cars need to be 30 kilograms lighter than this year but with ever more stringent (and heavy) safety requirements.
To achieve the weight targets, a careful eye will need to be kept on the weight of every single component and assembly on the car. Every extra kg costs vital tenths of a second.
For the aerodynamicists, they need to know how aerodynamically efficient the car needs to be - usually expressed as L/D, the total downforce divided by the car's drag, or lift to drag ratio.
Red Bull devised a sophisticated method of deriving the best target efficiency for the 2022 regulations, based on offline and driver-in-loop simulations and, importantly, extrapolating the current downforce numbers early in the development process to where they were likely to be.
How do we know if we have a great car on our hands? The honest answer is, we don't.
Red Bull dominated with its 2022 RB18 F1 car that took the drivers’ and constructors’ championships
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The result was a high efficiency target by normal standards, but the fact that they were this ambitious is partly why the cars (the RB18 and RB19) dominated for nearly two years. It is an easy mistake to set efficiency targets at a car's inception, when downforce levels are relatively low, and then fail to update them as the gains accrue.
A car with more downforce will spend less time in the corners, and therefore, the overall efficiency of the car will need to increase as time goes on. It is important that teams keep these numbers under review, or they can find themselves making uncomfortable set-up choices come the first race.
For 2026 there are also the corner and straightline modes to consider, meaning that traditional efficiency is not enough. To measure aerodynamic efficiency, we need to consider downforce in the straightline mode with the wings in their design position and the drag mainly in the corner mode with the wings moved.
3D render of the rear wing opening on a 2026 F1 car in corner mode
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In my opinion, it is easy to get carried away with setting too many targets, even though many teams set and track them. The best cars I have been involved with have all come from teams that are well organised, communicate well, take time to be creative and embrace failure along the way.
If those ingredients are in place, the gains will follow. No one needs to be constantly reminded that they are falling behind some arbitrary target. Better for the senior leaders to ensure the engineers have everything they need and then trust in the process.
With experience you get a feel for how a car's development is progressing. In developing the RB9 for 2013, for example, I remember every week in the windtunnel seeming to come out with more improvements; every research study seemed to throw up something interesting, even though we had started the process relatively late.
We knew the car would be good before it was even built, and it proved to be the case, dominating the season with 13 wins. Nevertheless, it is important to ensure you keep a handle on how a car is developing by tracking the right metrics.
Of course, to have a competitive car, it doesn't just need to be stable and predictable to drive - it can't just have a good amount of efficient downforce and deliver that potential through the tyres in all conditions. Critically, it needs to be better than everyone else's car. F1, as with all motorsport, is a relative game - you can't just do a great job, you have to do the best job.
Brawn GP shocked F1 when it won the titles in 2009 - when a new ruleset was implemented
But how do we know if we have a great car on our hands? The honest answer is, we don't. I have gone into seasons where we felt more confident than other seasons but there is still no guarantee. That feeling is often based on nothing more than the fact that the performance gains have been steady through the preceding year.
The biggest upheavals in regulations I have experienced have been in 2009, 2014 and then most recently in 2022. On all of those occasions, we took the approach that we should concentrate less on what other teams might be doing and more on making the best car we could.
All good intentions - but inevitably rumours swirl around the paddock. We hear that one team has broken a major downforce milestone, another has found insane amounts of power from its new power unit... Although we know to take these nuggets with a pinch of salt, you can't help but feel a sense of panic if your numbers are some way behind.
We are already starting to hear rumours about how the power unit manufacturers compare against each other...
Dan Fallows watches on as Fernando Alonso exits the garage. Fallows served as the team’s technical director from 2022 to late 2024
Most often, it is only when the car first turns a wheel that you start to get a sense of where it is.
Fernando Alonso memorably drove the Aston Martin AMR23 for the first time in Silverstone for its shakedown - a car that went on to claim eight podiums that year - and his first reaction was, "This car is fun to drive!", which was taken as a good sign.
Rarely, drivers can be more effusive but usually they are less, like Max Verstappen, who usually concluded that every new car "feels fine" - even ones which would go on to win world championships.
Fallows with race winner Max Verstappen (centre) and third-place finisher Daniel Ricciardo (right) at the 2017 Malaysian Grand Prix
Teams will have their best models of the cars for the drivers to test in the simulator before the real car runs, but the drivers and engineers tend to view these results with caution. Optimism from good simulation results can turn into disappointment if the results don't correlate well.
We are already starting to hear rumours about how the power unit manufacturers compare against each other. There will be similar talk by the end of the year about which chassis are likely to be competitive come the start of next season. But, as always, we will have to wait until race day to find out the truth.
In the meantime, the teams will all be hoping that, by achieving the targets they set themselves, they will be giving themselves a great start to the new regulations era of 2026.
