F1 teams to sacrifice 2025 upgrades for 2026. Should they do the opposite?

Ferrari’s Fred Vasseur voiced similar sentiments late last season about how competitive the field currently is.

“I don’t remember a championship where you had four teams winning races, three teams still able to be champion two events before the end,” he said. “This kind of competition two races before the end. It’s not so often.

“I think it will be probably even better next year [2025], because we have a kind of convergence of performance the last two or three years. And this is good for F1, good for the championship. Then we will see about 2026…”

“Do you want to stay focused a little bit, or not at all, on 2025?”

Even before this year’s models have taken to the track teams have been putting much of their aero R&D focus into their 2026 projects. Exactly how they chose to balance their resources between the two parallel programmes will have a major impact on how this coming season unfolds.

“We will all be fully focused on 2026 quite early into the season,” said Vasseur. “I don’t want to go deep in detail, but I think we’ll do all the same the first two or three months. And it’s more by the end of March that we’ll have to take a decision. Do you want to stay focused a little bit, or not at all, on 2025?”

Aerodynamic research ban is lifted

January 2 was a hugely significant day for F1 teams as they were finally allowed to launch their aero research into their 2026 cars, weeks before their 2025 contenders had even run on track.

A very sensible rule designed in effect to protect them from themselves ensured that teams had hitherto not been able to carry out any CFD or wind tunnel work for 2026, other than some basic CFD research authorised and collated by the FIA as part of a joint effort to fine tune the regulations. The results were in turn shared between all the competitors ahead of the rules being tweaked and signed off.

Stopping teams from starting work early on a future rules set wouldn’t have been possible a few years ago. However, in these days of strict FIA aerodynamic testing restrictions the governing body monitors everything that happens in wind tunnels so closely that it would have been impossible for teams to conduct their own 2026 aero work on the sly.

Up until January 1 teams could focus entirely on their 2025 projects, and throw everything at them. And with no rule changes there was a fine dividing line between work for 2024 and ’25 cars, which is why some teams were bringing new parts to the track until the final race last year.

The challenge they all now face is how to split their resources between the two parallel projects for the remainder of the season. It’s a conundrum that they face every season, but it’s one that is always more complicated when major rule changes are coming, and you need to front-load the work on the following year’s car.

The wind tunnel shuffle

There was nothing to stop them working on the mechanical aspects of 2026 prior to January 2, other than the fact that the FIA financial regulations and budget cap keep a lid on head counts, and thus any personnel looking at 2026 had to be diverted from 2025.

That in turn impacted team decisions regarding how much mechanical stuff was carried over or modified for this season – including the chassis – and some will have changed more than others.

And as Horner noted, the 2026 rule changes are perhaps the most significant we’ve ever seen, with a new power unit package adding to the complications.

Teams will have employed different strategies in terms of the details. However, the likelihood is that as of January 2 they all pressed the button right away with both CFD and the wind tunnel, initially using models based on what they were able to do offline within the rules, and what was learned from the earlier limited FIA CFD research work.

Those initial efforts would have been focused on finding a correlation between the two research platforms, and to obtain an initial burst of data. While that was being studied – as of now, essentially – work could then resume in parallel on their 2025 projects, both to finalise an initial Bahrain testing spec and to develop updates scheduled for race one in Australia and the races that follow.

The Sakhir test will in turn generate real world data that will feed back into the 2025 CFD and tunnel programmes, and at that stage 2026 will again temporarily take a back seat. Teams will swap the two models in and out of the tunnel for a few weeks or months before at some stage deciding that the 2026 will be the sole focus of all efforts.

“Like every team in the grid, we’re faced with a difficult decision as to how much focus you put on the 2025 car, and how much focus you put on the 2026 car,” Racing Bulls chief technical officer Tim Goss noted in Abu Dhabi.

“And at the moment the way Jody [Egginton, technical director] and I are splitting it up, Jody is concentrating on the 2025 car, I’m concentrated on the 2026 car. And in terms of our aerodynamic development, we’ll blend things over from one car to the to the other.

“We will have CFD running, we will have a ’26 car in the wind tunnel, like I’m sure every other team will do, because you want to first look at it, and then we’ll continue working on the 2025 car.

“We’ve got our own decisions on when we’re going to blend from one to the other. And to some extent, as you’d expect, it’s going to be a bit dependent on how successful the 2025 car is at the start of the season.

“It’s a huge rule change, just in every respect, a new ICE [internal combustion engine], it’s a new ERS [energy recovery system], so the powertrain is all new, the aerodynamics are all new. It’s one of the biggest rule changes we’ve had in F1. You can’t expect to go into that lightly, as I’m sure every team is thinking.”

All of this will happen against the background of changes to the technical structures within many teams that will see 2026 become the main focus attention of key incoming personnel, with Goss himself just one example.

The highest profile hiring is at Aston Martin where, after his arrival at the start of March, Adrian Newey will keep an eye on 2025 but will obviously devote most of his attention to 2026.

New designer boosts McLaren’s 2025 chances

Other teams also built new structures and headhunted in readiness for the challenge of 2026 – for example McLaren. Chief designer Rob Marshall already played a key role in last year’s success, but the real fruits are further down the line.

“Rob came with a wealth of experience, knowledge from a technical point of view, with a reputation from this point of view,” Andrea Stella said last year of the former RBR man.

“And I have to say that working with him myself, the other technical directors, the entire technical team, if anything, we have been impressed even more than what we expected. Because of these qualities, like the knowledge of how you design a car, especially from a car layout point of view.

“And this is very important for 2025, and this will be very important for 2026. It was really a good idea to get Rob, because he’s doing all the work in terms of layout for ‘25-’26, and we did miss this kind of role at McLaren before.”

When to switch focus to the 2026 car?

The received wisdom is that everyone will make the switch to 2026 early, and at more or less the same time, with a July deadline for signing off on the chassis and gearbox one of the key parameters.

But what if you are bold enough to continue to put a little more effort into ongoing R&D for this year, put the 2025 model back into the tunnel now and then, and delay the 100% switch to 2026?

Imagine a theoretical scenario where McLaren, Ferrari, Red Bull and Mercedes (or some combination of two or three or them) are more or less equal in performance and on points come May/June this season.

A 2025 title in the bag is worth the same those on offer in 2026 or 2027

The team that keeps its 2025 aero programme at least partially going and thus brings new aero parts to its car in the latter part of this season, while others have frozen their specs, could reap the rewards.

When that decision in turn is made in turn also ties in to a team’s position in the F1 aerodynamic testing restriction (ATR) rankings, based until the end of June on the 2024 World Championship positions.

Winners McLaren can conduct less aero work than Ferrari, Red Bull, Mercedes, Aston Martin and Alpine, in that order.

One could thus argue that of the big four Mercedes currently has more margin with which to continue to deploy resources to its 2025 car for longer than others (although the ATR league table will be reset in July, based on the order after the Austrian GP).

Then there’s the question of power units, which will have a huge impact on overall performance in 2026.

If you sincerely believe that you will have a top-rank power unit in 2026 do you go all out on aero in order to fully exploit that advantage, and guarantee that you have an overall winning package?

Or will it perhaps give you the confidence to devote more aero resources to 2025, on the basis that if your car lags behind initially in 2026, the power unit will make up the difference?

The opposite scenario is that if you fear your power unit will be behind the opposition at the start of 2026 do you go all out on the chassis and aero side in order to compensate? Or do you accept that 2026 is going to be a dead loss, and therefore put more into 2025 –and in essence bank some success while you can?

One could argue that of the big four, the team most at risk of dropping the ball in 2026 is Red Bull, on the basis that its in-house power unit project had a standing start, and that on balance Honda, Mercedes and Ferrari should be better off, given their respective knowledge of hybrid technology.

In contrast Red Bull knows that it has a winning Honda power unit in 2025. Therefore should the Milton Keynes team put all the R&D aero resources it can spare into the 2025 car in an effort to secure a fifth title for Max Verstappen?

The other reason to hang back a bit on 2026 is that you can wait and see what everyone else does and what works, and not waste too much effort going down blind alleys. In other words let your rivals do the donkey work…

All of this may sound a little simplistic, and of course the decision process within each team will obviously be far more layered and complex than we can imagine. However, the basic principle of grabbing your chance when it’s within your grasp is valid. A 2025 title in the bag is worth the same those on offer in 2026 or 2027.

An intriguing precedent was provided by BMW Sauber a few years ago, in the Robert Kubica/Nick Heidfeld days. At one point the team had a car capable of landing poles and winning races, and in the eyes of many, even to challenge for the title.

However, the management had a fixed schedule for success. It said that the following year was the right time to go for the title, and thus that’s where all R&D efforts went. Much to Kubica’s frustration the-then current car was not developed, and the short-term opportunity was squandered. And then before you knew it BMW was gone from F1 anyway…