F1's 2026 development ban: how FIA stops teams from cheating

The sliding scale of Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions (ATR) allows teams that are lower down in the constructors’ championship to have more development time – through wind tunnel and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) runs – than those higher up, and plays a big role in how the January 1 deadline is being policed.

“How do we know that they’re not cheating? That is through two ways. One is we have the enforcement of the ATR regulations. We have an auditing team, and this auditing team visits the teams periodically and teams also have to submit a declaration of their wind tunnel and CFD. So we have a list of all the wind tunnel runs and all the CFD runs that a team carries out.

“They must save all CFD data for a year or a couple of years after it’s done, so we can inspect it any time. We can say ‘Run 10053, can we see what the data was?’ and likewise for the wind tunnel data they must have photographic evidence of every wind tunnel run. There’s a camera that takes a photo of each model, and if it’s something as big as a 2026 car versus a 2024 car, it would be fairly obvious.

“And there’s a logger of the wind tunnel that permanently measures wind speed, when a wind tunnel run starts, when it finishes etc. So we know exactly when they are doing wind tunnel runs and we have the photographic log of whatever model is in the tunnel at any point in time.

“So as a result of that, and the declarations, and our random visits to the factory – which we don’t give advance notice of – we can make sure they’re not fibbing.

“In addition to that, one should consider that something as large-scale as a blatant cheat in terms of starting a 2026 program illicitly or whatever, the number of people who would need to know in a company is pretty large. You couldn’t just hide it and keep it between three people.

“The consequences of such a thing would be so huge that I think it would take a very brave, or very stupid, or both, team to decide they’re going to flaunt that. Because teams lose personnel, they go to other rivals, not everyone in a team is always happy, or happy to participate in a cheat.

“So history shows quite a few things that have put teams in trouble have originated from the whistleblowers who say ‘You know what? We were doing X’ or whatever. So I do also think that’s also an additional safety net so that teams won’t do something funny.”

When it comes to matters that the FIA has to police, Tombazis views the development work ban as one of the easier areas, and believes it would constitute “a grave offence” if someone was to flaunt the regulations.

The governing body also has relevant experience after introducing a similar ban ahead of the 2022 regulations being introduced, with COVID delaying their implementation by a year. Since then, the FIA has been more specific in terms of stopping any development of any components or anything that could be disguised as generic work on other projects that would have a clear impact on an F1 car.

That’s not to say the teams don’t have some knowledge of the new regulations already, though, with the FIA often asking them to be involved in carrying out research and experiments to help with the development of the rules.

When work is opened up, a technical directive is sent that specifies the problems that need investigating, and giving a set number of simulations that can be carried out for that purpose. Teams then have to tell the FIA about the work they plan on doing, so it can either be approved or revised at the governing body’s request.

Despite the work being outside the normal CFD allowances, not every team has the resource to take on every project. So all of the data also has to be shared by the team to ensure there are no advantages being gained from that knowledge, with certain results communicated to the entire grid.

“I’m confident the deadline will work. Famous last words!” Nikolas Tombazis

Acknowledging the different set-ups at different teams, Tombazis says there are varying levels of scrutiny when it then comes to monitoring the work that is being carried out. Most attention is paid to wind tunnels that are used by several teams, which could — in theory — pool their data, leaving them additional allowance for extra testing.

“It would be where teams share facilities where we pay more attention,” he says. “Clearly for teams that are fairly independent, like for example Alpine, who don’t share facilities with anybody, clearly the level of control doesn’t need to be as high as for teams that do share facilities.

“On the other hand, as much as we would like to have 10 independent teams, 10 wind tunnels and so on, we also want to be realistic and pragmatic about teams potentially sharing facilities. A modern wind tunnel would cost maybe €70/80/90m, and we don’t think it would be a fair constraint on teams to all have to have a wind tunnel when it’s quite a big financial burden.”

The costs involved might be limited compared to the past by the financial regulations, but teams will always look for other ways of gaining an advantage. That has previously involved spending more time rather than just money, diverting resources away from current seasons to try and make a leap during a regulation change.

And that’s exactly why the 1 January 2025 deadline is in place. Much like the budget cap, it’s designed to save teams from themselves and give them all a more level playing field to work within.

No longer do they have to choose whether to write-off a current season to prioritise new regulations that might be multiple years away, and instead they can focus on trying to be as performant as possible both now and in the future, safe in the knowledge that nobody else is able to get a head-start on them.

Trusting in the FIA’s protocols is central to that peace of mind within the teams, who need to be confident that anyone trying to start work early will be caught, and that it’s not worth the risk of doing so themselves. And Tombazis has full faith that the monitoring process is robust.

“I’m quite confident [the deadline will be effective],” Tombazis says. “There are a lot of things in my job that I am less confident about, or more worried about or lose more sleep over, but this one I find reasonably OK.

“Famous last words, maybe I’ll come back in January and say what an idiot I was! But I hope it’s the truth.”