Ironically, a lot of this is only relevant until... this Sunday. After Sunday, the F1 season is over, and 2026 cars will be very different.
2026 cars will have less downforce and less drag (closer to Indycar) but also "active" aerodynamics (elements on both the front and rear wings can flatten on-demand to reduce drag, or raise to produce more downforce) and a hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower than the current 85/15 split for F1 cars or 80/20 for Indycars.
F1 next year will probably be chaos because there are so many different aspects that teams may have gotten wrong in development.
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There are some inaccuracies though regardless. I am pretty sure that teams do not go through multiple sets of brake pads in a weekend. They last several races, no different than Indycar.
> hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower
Fun fact, at those ratios it would make a lot of sense to use an electric continuous variable transmission (eCVT) - connect the engine and the motor with a planetary gear set to the wheels, done. The electric motor spins backwards when going slow and forward when going fast. Those eCVTs can be lighter, more efficient an deliver more power across the entire range. But they're illegal in F1 - because they make the car sound boring.
> But they're illegal in F1 - because they make the car sound boring.
I can confirm, my CMAX has an eCVT, and the engine noises are boring. Either it's off, or it's running in a pretty limited range, you can get a bit of fun rev increasing noises if you drive it just right... but mostly boring. My 81 VW Vanagon is much more fun to drive even if it's objectively worse at everything in terms of acceleration, top speed, wheel slip, etc; although the turning circle on the cmax is garbage, so the vanagon wins there. The VW makes fun sounds as you go from low rpm to redline several times as you work through the gears, and the cmax is just droning along.
How Toyota's eCVT transmission works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppyK3ZlUbtM (Nerd snipe warning: the Weber Auto channel is brilliant and has lessons about all kinds of transmission and engine types).
When it comes to something like F1 I think it's OK for efficiency to not be the top priority. Road vehicles absolutely should be as light and efficient as possible with strict limits on pollution (including noise). But it's OK for society to have a few things like F1 that are just for fun. We just don't want everyone to be driving F1 cars around their neighbourhoods or have an F1 race every week.
I think the F1 teams would all switch to racing versions of those transmissions the second they would be allowed to do so.
The efficiency gains wouldn't even be important in comparison (until you start bringing significantly less fuel than your opponents), but just the reduction in weight and size (important for aero considerations) would be worth it. Also, the power gains from always running the ICE (and its turbo) at the perfect sweet spot in the power curve would be a giant advantage in racing.
Yeah, but a huge part of F1 is the sound. It's iconic in the true sense of the word. I can totally understand them wanting to protect it as part of the brand. Enthusiasts might be into other types of motor racing, but F1 sounds fast. Everyone understands that.
Definitely, but the weight of the fuel doesn’t matter that much and they allowed quite a bit of fuel. Cars wouldn’t gain much by being twice as efficient if they were any slower.
Right now we're in a stage of the current regs where 5 manufacturers can be within tenths of a second of each other in qualifying, and the other 5 are not that far out. Five different teams have gone away with the technical regulations, gone into completely different factories, wind tunnels and simulator setups, some of them have bought in components like engines and suspension but basically have had to build and test everything else and work out all the aero across the wings and floor, and come out over a 5km track to be within meters of each other.
If you think about that a bit, it's kind of crazy and mad.
But it also means to shake things up you need to throw the dice again. It's like this generation has evolved to find the peak apex design and configuration for each and every circuit to the point where teams with more limited resources can now get competitive (yay for Williams last week!), and it's time for a new generation.
I agree next year could be chaos. I think teams that have been consistently applying discipline and consistency will continue to do well (Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes), those that are catching on will continue to rise (William, Haas), and those who haven't realised that's the name of the game yet (Ferrari, Alpine), will continue their passion-fuelled mismanaged decline. The new players (Audi taking on Sauber, Cadillac), are going to be interesting to watch.
But within 5 years, everyone will be back to within a few tenths of each other over a 5km circuit, and we'll probably need to go again...
I think the big failure of formula e was the way they failed to promote pit replaceable battery packs.
It is debatable how much motorsport tech trickles down to improve our daily motor tech, I think this was much more the case early on and now days the sport tech is so rarefied it does not help us much. But mass market electric cars are still fairly new and I think that sporting competitiveness can do a lot of good here. The big one that was missed were easy to replace generic battery packs.
But I also think the biggest failure in f1 was the removal of refueling, so what do I know?
footnote: in nascar it was the five bold lugnuts, the pit stops with five bolt lugnuts were absolutely gorgeous compared to the single bolt they use now... and we wept.
I don't follow F1 at all, but I do see references to it a ton more than I ever used to, so I assume it is surging in popularity.
Why would they make such drastic changes for 2026? Is it to intentionally shake things up and make it more interesting? If so, I love that that is something they are willing to do. Most pro sports are pretty traditional and change quit slowly. Even the fastest changing league (in my opinion), the NBA, still changes quite slowly.
Interestingly there are discussions about moving back to having the majority of the power from IC engines as soon as the end of the decade, with synthetic fuels. Personally I can’t wait.
I would like that too, but it's highly unlikely to happen since Audi and GM just entered the engine making business in F1 for the start of 2026 and they invested shit tonne of millions into engine R&D specifically for the new turbo-V6 regulations, so moving the goalposts again so soon would just rug-pull their investments, and such the FIA assured them the new regulations are gonna stay for a while. Bummer.
What's happening with synthetic fuels? I read while back Porsche investing in factories to produce but that was a few years ago, is it a bit of snake oil wrt to it's alleged green credentials or simply can't scale at an acceptable cost?
The World Endurance Championship has been using synthetic fuels since 2022 from TotalEnergies (https://competition.totalenergies.com/en/auto/endurance/wec/...), there's also Sustain (https://sustain-fuels.com/) in the UK as well who seem to be growing reasonably well but are a mix of sustainable & fossil fuels. There's some variability of how green they are, you still need to burn something so there's going to be emissions as well but they've been validated in the motorsport labs as being viable and they're starting to make their way to consumers.
> Z-mode means the front and rear wings are closed which generates more downforce for the corners. In X-mode, the drivers can open the flaps which will reduce drag and increase speed.
Driver-controlled aero has the potential to be way more interesting than the strictly-limited current DRS implementation.
The most interesting DRS era was in 2011-2012 when drivers could operate it (almost) anywhere they wanted in practice and qualifying. There was an element of risk in how early you could open it exiting a corner, and we saw real mistakes from drivers pushing that limit.
More driver controls leads to more opportunities for talented drivers to make a difference, which leads to a better sports product.
The problem with DRS is the zones and only being able to use it when close behind another car. My understanding is the X-Mode can be used pretty much anywhere and anytime.
I think the cars reflect pretty well the intended ethos and "vibes" of both competitions. Indycar still feels a bit like "dudes racing cars" while F1 has become a corporate hi-tech extravaganza.
Both have their appeal, but I feel Indy produces better actual racing for the spectator despite being slower and less refined technically. I do watch both.
The best comparison I can think of is that in a Indycar race, it's every driver against each other, meanwhile in Formula 1 you can feel it's the whole team that's actually taking part in the race, and the car on track is just the tip of the iceberg of the process.
They put a few full NASCAR races recorded solely from a drivers perspective up on youtube every once in a while. I never appreciated that sport until I started watching those. It's far more brutal and compact than I ever had expected with the shift in perspective making all the difference. It's "dudes racing for their lives."
Some of the most racing fun I've had in video games was actually NASCAR games.
The whole race was constant jostling for position. There was almost always someone within a car length/width, and zero room for error. From what I've seen on TV and YT, it seemed pretty spot on.
Unfortunately I was also bad at driving with a PS2 controller so I was the danger on the track.
In general the driver's perspective has always seemed underused to me. In F1 at least (where the cars are insanely stiff), unless there are overtakes in progress, watching from the trackside cameras just looks like cars driving round a track. Whereas from the driver's view you can see the car reacting to the track and the driver reacting to the car.
People complain a lot that the TV coverage spends too long on the driver's girlfriends. For me I think it spends too long looking at the cars (from the outside)!
I guess part of this is just that the image quality from onboards is not so sleek. But if it was up to me I think like 60-70% of the airtime would be from onboard.
I once got free tickets to a race (DTM, German touring cars), and to be honest I don't know why people go to them. You saw a small section of the track, and occasionally cars whizzed by. No idea who was in the lead, who was behind, or what was happening in the race in general. Much better to watch on TV.
Sounds like a killer app for VR- observing from the driver's perspective, being able to switch to whoever you want. How many cameras are in those cars I wonder?
They have a lot of cameras and they offer a paid service where you can stream from any driver's onboard. Unfortunately this is out of sync with the main broadcast which kinda kills its value for me...
I think VR would make most people sick as it's a very bumpy view.
the corporate hi-tech "extravaganza" has only come recently with its rise in US popularity. While you are not wrong I think thats just one part of the sport. Indycar is just racing and strategy. F1 is technical development, racing, strategy, and team performance. I like both but while I find the racing better in Indy, I follow F1 much more closely because I really enjoy the technical side of the sport. I also think 10 teams (soon to be 11) and 20 drivers (soon to be 22) that race in every race makes it easier to stay invested throughout the season.
Interesting.. I agree on the description but my experience was opposite. I enjoyed F1 much more, though I really enjoy all the technical stats and talks with the teams/engineers that develop the cars and find it to be an equal part of the whole thing as the actual racing itself.
Honestly after going down to the local circle track to watch the Legend cars, modified , Whelen and actual honest to God GM B-bodies from the 80s, along with other open wheel and general cool shit, it's not hard IMO to find (and be directly involved in) actual racing than watch "NASCAR" Cup series or F1. Legend cars on a road track in particular kind of takes me back to watching the super bike races (which were about as real and hardcore actual racing as you'll get) at Mid Ohio.
At the 2025 Indy 500 they had Tom Brady driving laps in an Indy car engaged in banter witb the broadcast team up before the race started. Then a US military propaganda moment flying Blackhawk helos over the track to titillate their target audience.
I think the GP poster was referring to the actual race, and not the peripheral parts of the event -- I don't know much about racing in general, but even with the extra "propaganda" you mention, they didn't seem disingenuous
I followed Indycar this past season, watched nearly every race and had planned on attending a race but then didn't make the trip. I'm not sure what Indycar is trying to be, tbh. The Indy 500 is a spectacle, the rest of the season is not nearly as interesting. There's some good racing, but F1 is more technically interesting and maybe better overall. NASCAR is boring as hell, just stage-managed bullshit like pro wrestling and I have not followed it in over 20 years.
Used to be a big Formula 1 fan as a kid, growing up in Niki Lauda's home town (of 2000 people). Formula 1 lost it when they moved away from the V10. And when they started putting kids in the cockpit instead of real men.
I think they lost it when they started dictating what kind of engines teams can use. Just limit the max fuel flow, and then let the teams go wild. Want to use a gas turbine? Go for it!
The "kids" are on average a lot better at driving than most of the "adults" of 30 years ago. Pay drivers barely exist anymore, and even e.g. Stroll is not bad compared to the pay drivers of decades past, who were genuinely terrible.
V10s are overrated. They sound nice, yes, but ask the drivers who have actually driven them and they actually prefer the V6T hybrids in a lot of ways. It turns out that actually sitting inches away from the V10 with the associated noise and vibrations kinda sucks.
The table lists F1 cars as having "Carbon fiber brake calipers".
This is glaringly incorrect. All current brake calipers are machined from aluminum, specifically Aluminum-Lithium or Aluminum-Copper alloys. There is a rule denoting bulk elasticity modulus limit on brake calipers of 80 GPa, which was set just at that to allow the more exotic Lithium Aluminum alloys but to dis-allow Titanium alloys or anything else stiffer (There was experimentation with Titanium calipers in the past.)
Absolutely no calipers are made from composites, CF, graphite, or otherwise.
Discs are Carbon-carbon.
This is the last season with Renault as a F1 engine manufacturer. Their team (Alpine) will use Mercedes engine from 2026.
There will be many changes next year. Audi enters as manufacturer with its own team (they bought Sauber.) The two Red Bull teams will use their own Red Bull engine, with the help of Ford. Honda will power Aston Martin. The new Cadillac team will use Ferrari engines and build its own engine for 2028.
For what it's worth, the most entertaining circuit racing in the world happens at grassroots level featuring slow, cheap cars that permit a lot of drafting.
The faster the cars get, in the main, the less overtaking occurs.
Watching a winner of 80+ NASCAR races ride along for a hot lap of the Australian Bathurst 1000 course is fairly entertaining ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLkLtBkUVuo
Yes, this year's Bathurst finale was quite the spectacle if you haven't seen it!
But while Supercars can be entertaining, they are in some ways a faster version of the categories I'm describing - they don't have much downforce and not that much mechanical grip either, so they're pretty slow in corners even if they are respectably fast in a straight line.
Spectacle, for some, isn't about the speed alone, it's also about risk and skill.
The bare minimum of downforce and grip in tight corners on a mountain pushes the skill requirement to, uhhh, over 9000.
I used to spend hours every day at 252 km/hr (156 miles/hr) 80m above the ground. That got dull fast as it was in dead straight headings for 20km or so at a time.
( Did have to keep an eye out for birds taking off over lakes, power lines, etc. though )
I think that an ideal race league would use WRC-inspired homologation rules and little else (except for some safety features)
Any chassis size. Whatever aero you want. Any engine size/configuration. The only constraint is that it needs to be something you can put into production.
we’d get to see a Cambrian explosion of weird race car variants that would make race day strategizing wild. and we’d really get to showcase cool creative engineering. And we’d eventually see the benefits of that engineering trickle down into normal production cars we all drive
It's been done. Look up the Can-Am series. At best, it would last a couple of years until the cars got way too fast for the tracks, and the manufacturers were no longer prepared to invest in it because there was no commercial return in it for them.
The idea that there is any significant relationship between what makes a good production car, even a sports car, and a racing car was always dubious and today is frankly nonsensical.
The way to make a car fast round a race track basically comes down to the amount of downforce it can produce, and the power of the engine. Downforce is almost completely irrelevant to road driving, as taking corners fast enough to generate cornering forces of over 1G is frankly suicidal on the road.
As for engines, aside from the fact that the internal combustion engine is doomed in road transport (despite what the current administration thinks), producing an engine with performance that exceeds what even good drivers are capable of handling without electronics doing the job for them was solved at least 20 years ago, and continues to be a solved problem despite tightening of emissions standards.
In any case, while lighter, smaller, lower cars remain the preferred option for motorsport applications, all anyhbody wants to actually buy, particularly in the United States, is gargantuan SUVs and pickup trucks, which makes any application of motorsport technology for the road moot.
It’s easy for a manufacturer to make a couple hand crafted cars with insane specs. But by requiring homologous, it adds a unique kind of restriction where it’s a car that they have to be able and willing to make at scale. That requires buy-in from industrial engineers as well as business/marketing folks
Edited to add: just learned that homologation doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it did. So my parent thread should have been about “sec-style homologation” specifically and not just “homologation” generally. The idea is that you need to have a car built in production in order to be homologated
There is no power-network in existence, not in the medium-to-long term, that would allow tens of millions of cars (mauve hundreds of millions if we talk at the continent-wide level) to get all electric, the physics isn’t there and it won’t be. You’re correct though, it could be that the next US administration will try to copy the bureaucrats here in Europe and try to go the let’s-ban-the-petrol-engine route, which would, in practice, mean that only the well-to-do consumers (like most of the users on this forum) will be able to still have personal cars.
There’s no power network that holds capacity for the chance of future demand. They add capacity as the demand increases, because the money comes in to pay for it.
These AI datacenters right now are a prime example. They needed more power, and suddenly they’re building it for them.
> Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.
Quote on that? A developed country like the US has problems even now, see California (with the yearly fires there) or Texas. And how do you solve the "last-mile" connections without regularly starting fires everywhere? (on account of all those higher-voltage thingies being closer to residential units).
The 15-25% of demand number is pretty similar to the number I've seen in multiple places. Furthermore, cars have an economic lifespan of approximately 20 years, so that increase in demand will take place over a couple of decades.
Furthermore, if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity. This typically occurs between midnight and about 5-6am, and in areas with a lot of solar, during the middle of the day. This is already widely implemented, with utilities in many jurisdictions offering things like EV charging time-of-use tariffs, and customers with rooftop solar systems (which are much cheaper in, say, Australia, than they are in the USA) installing smart chargers which are configured to run when they have a surplus of electricity from their home solar systems. This will ensure that EVs are making use of the existing grid, rather than increasing peak demand and requiring new grid infrastructure.
Furthermore, "vehicle to grid" systems can allow EVs to feed electricity back into the grid at peak times (with their owners getting paid for this service).
Given all of the above, while EVs will contribute to an overall increase in demand for electricity, they will do so in such a way as to minimise the need for extra infrastructure, and they will do so slowly enough as to allow such infrastructure to be built.
> if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity.
Like I said, this EV mania is targeting the well-off middle-classes, those that “are always smart about it”. The populist backlash against all this is well-warranted,
I guarantee none of those "100% EV" people have experienced winter in Montana, or summer for that matter. Even the Dakotas are not EV friendly. It's more of a city thing. Go nuts in the city--I'm all for EVs in certain applications.
I favor little regulation and tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions, 100 kg of this kind of gasoline per race, do whatever you want.
Any chassis size is probably not a good idea because cars collide with each other and they must do it safely. So maybe rules should define a box that cars must fit into, with the parts that get in touch with other cars at given places and with given shapes. Example: we don't want spear like nose cones at the same height of the heads of drivers of other cars. No halo can protect against that.
The problem with little regulation is that manufactures will be frightened to enter because it's easy to have a championship in which the one with the bright idea wins all the races and the other ones are scattered 2, 5, 6, 7 seconds behind.
> The reason these series always get compared is because Indy’s tight rules make it less compelling while F1’s more open rules make it less competitive.
I'm new to racing, but can you elaborate on this? How are F1's rules "open"? They seem just about as strict if not more so than IndyCar to me? At least I don't think IndyCar has "ahead at the apex" rules?
> In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Screw "Grill the Grid" or whatever nonsense they're doing on YouTube now; let's see the F1 grid do a rally.
There are technical regulations and sporting regulations. I'm not very familiar with IndyCar anymore but my feeling is that F1 got stricter on technical regulation but IndyCar is even stricter: only one chassis and more standard parts. However F1 sporting regulations seems to be tighter. The classic clash between Villeneuve and Arnoux in 1979 would be unthinkable now. Not only they would be black flagged and stopped for a GP but no driver would even think about doing those kind of overtaking attempts.
The biggest difference that stood out to me was that the fuel compositions are almost exactly opposite; 85/15 ethanol/gasoline for Indy and 10/90 for F1.
I was able to find plenty of articles saying that next year F1 will move to a "100% sustainable fuel", but none that actually mentioned the composition. Is it likely to move closer to the make-up of the Indy fuel?
> An IndyCar is heavier than a Formula 1 car: while a Formula 1 car weighs 1759 pounds / 798 kg including the driver, an IndyCar weighs 1700 pounds / 771 kg on road and street courses, excluding the driver.
The statement implies an assumption that the drivers weigh / mass more than 59 lbs. / 27 kg, as they are included in the first measurement, but not the second. This is a reasonable assumption, as even Indycar drivers are all adult males, and none are small enough to weigh / mass less than that.
Up until the late '80s-early '90s cars and rules were rather similar, and drivers like Andretti or Mansell were able to move between categories with relative ease.
I'd say that the rift become apparent in '94, after the safety changes introduced due to Senna's Death and the massive shift in pilot training brought by Michael Schumacher.
The Indy 500 was actually part of the official Formula 1 calendar from 1950 to 1960, though the two series diverged after that.
Some Indy features (refueling, changing tires even if they didn't have a puncture, safety cars) got adopted by F1 through the 1980s, specially as F1 started to lose audience to the American series in the early 1990s.
True, but that's kind of a good thing as a fan. Cheap tickets, and you get to wander around the paddock as they prep the cars before the race, even with a regular ticket. That level of access in F1 is not possible for regular people.
Its so interesting that the difference between Indy and F1 in terms of lap times is objectively marginal but subjectively extreme.
I would have guessed given the extreme cost difference between them there would have been a significant gap (like 30 seconds) but the fact that it’s only a few seconds difference is surprising.
I'm not sure it is objectively marginal. At Circuit of the Americas where they have both raced recently the difference in lap time is about 10 seconds. That doesn't sound like a lot but is close to 10% of the lap. The F1 race is 56 laps so by the end an Indycar is going to be 5 or 6 laps down. Throw in the fact an Indycar can't do 56 laps without refueling and it might be closer to 7 laps. In motorsport that is extreme
Getting faster is hard and expensive really. You can be pretty cheap and still be quite fast.
On other side, F1 has for very long time kept speeds down when new innovative ways to gain it has been discovered. For some reason I can not understand drivers and spectators dying in accidents is bad look for the sport... As such it really is not best we could technically do.
I love F1 (Give my boy Lando his WDC!), but I wouldn't mind a more unhinged version without human drivers, at least not in the cockpit. Not going to happen because ones and zeros can't sell expensive watches like F1 drivers.
If you haven't seen it, there's actually been a couple races of autonomously controlled formula-type cars at the Abu Dhabi circuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9LLZ5mb5cA
making a car go fast on a straight bit of road is relatively cheap. making a car take a corner a couple tenths of a second faster is very expensive. and there's only so many corners in a lap. add up those tenths - that's your few seconds of difference!
Ironically, a lot of this is only relevant until... this Sunday. After Sunday, the F1 season is over, and 2026 cars will be very different.
2026 cars will have less downforce and less drag (closer to Indycar) but also "active" aerodynamics (elements on both the front and rear wings can flatten on-demand to reduce drag, or raise to produce more downforce) and a hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower than the current 85/15 split for F1 cars or 80/20 for Indycars.
F1 next year will probably be chaos because there are so many different aspects that teams may have gotten wrong in development.
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There are some inaccuracies though regardless. I am pretty sure that teams do not go through multiple sets of brake pads in a weekend. They last several races, no different than Indycar.
> hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower
Fun fact, at those ratios it would make a lot of sense to use an electric continuous variable transmission (eCVT) - connect the engine and the motor with a planetary gear set to the wheels, done. The electric motor spins backwards when going slow and forward when going fast. Those eCVTs can be lighter, more efficient an deliver more power across the entire range. But they're illegal in F1 - because they make the car sound boring.
> But they're illegal in F1 - because they make the car sound boring.
I can confirm, my CMAX has an eCVT, and the engine noises are boring. Either it's off, or it's running in a pretty limited range, you can get a bit of fun rev increasing noises if you drive it just right... but mostly boring. My 81 VW Vanagon is much more fun to drive even if it's objectively worse at everything in terms of acceleration, top speed, wheel slip, etc; although the turning circle on the cmax is garbage, so the vanagon wins there. The VW makes fun sounds as you go from low rpm to redline several times as you work through the gears, and the cmax is just droning along.
> My 81 VW Vanagon is much more fun to drive even if...
Yes! I drive the snot out of my mom's '81 Vanagon when I was back in high school. I need one in my life again... Lol
How Toyota's eCVT transmission works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppyK3ZlUbtM (Nerd snipe warning: the Weber Auto channel is brilliant and has lessons about all kinds of transmission and engine types).
When it comes to something like F1 I think it's OK for efficiency to not be the top priority. Road vehicles absolutely should be as light and efficient as possible with strict limits on pollution (including noise). But it's OK for society to have a few things like F1 that are just for fun. We just don't want everyone to be driving F1 cars around their neighbourhoods or have an F1 race every week.
I think the F1 teams would all switch to racing versions of those transmissions the second they would be allowed to do so.
The efficiency gains wouldn't even be important in comparison (until you start bringing significantly less fuel than your opponents), but just the reduction in weight and size (important for aero considerations) would be worth it. Also, the power gains from always running the ICE (and its turbo) at the perfect sweet spot in the power curve would be a giant advantage in racing.
Correct, it has been done and got shutdown immediately.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_FW15C
Mercedes is running with a CVT again for some years
By rule, all F1 teams have to use a sequential gearbox. It is section 9.7.1 of Technical regulations:
9.7.1 The number of forward gear ratios must be 8. Continuously variable transmission systems are not permitted.
They are not.
Yeah, but a huge part of F1 is the sound. It's iconic in the true sense of the word. I can totally understand them wanting to protect it as part of the brand. Enthusiasts might be into other types of motor racing, but F1 sounds fast. Everyone understands that.
Well, they could add speakers that make vroom-vroom noises.
I believe F1 cars are actually incredibly efficient.
You can only take so much fuel and fuel is also weight. You can only win if you use the available fuel to propel you forwards efficiently.
Definitely, but the weight of the fuel doesn’t matter that much and they allowed quite a bit of fuel. Cars wouldn’t gain much by being twice as efficient if they were any slower.
Right now we're in a stage of the current regs where 5 manufacturers can be within tenths of a second of each other in qualifying, and the other 5 are not that far out. Five different teams have gone away with the technical regulations, gone into completely different factories, wind tunnels and simulator setups, some of them have bought in components like engines and suspension but basically have had to build and test everything else and work out all the aero across the wings and floor, and come out over a 5km track to be within meters of each other.
If you think about that a bit, it's kind of crazy and mad.
But it also means to shake things up you need to throw the dice again. It's like this generation has evolved to find the peak apex design and configuration for each and every circuit to the point where teams with more limited resources can now get competitive (yay for Williams last week!), and it's time for a new generation.
I agree next year could be chaos. I think teams that have been consistently applying discipline and consistency will continue to do well (Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes), those that are catching on will continue to rise (William, Haas), and those who haven't realised that's the name of the game yet (Ferrari, Alpine), will continue their passion-fuelled mismanaged decline. The new players (Audi taking on Sauber, Cadillac), are going to be interesting to watch.
But within 5 years, everyone will be back to within a few tenths of each other over a 5km circuit, and we'll probably need to go again...
And Formula E comes with its 4the generation, becoming closer to actual F1, but with more acceleration
I think the big failure of formula e was the way they failed to promote pit replaceable battery packs.
It is debatable how much motorsport tech trickles down to improve our daily motor tech, I think this was much more the case early on and now days the sport tech is so rarefied it does not help us much. But mass market electric cars are still fairly new and I think that sporting competitiveness can do a lot of good here. The big one that was missed were easy to replace generic battery packs.
But I also think the biggest failure in f1 was the removal of refueling, so what do I know?
footnote: in nascar it was the five bold lugnuts, the pit stops with five bolt lugnuts were absolutely gorgeous compared to the single bolt they use now... and we wept.
The failure of Formula E is that they don't have F1TV or some similar convenient streaming platform, and they leaned too hard into gimmicks.
I don't follow F1 at all, but I do see references to it a ton more than I ever used to, so I assume it is surging in popularity.
Why would they make such drastic changes for 2026? Is it to intentionally shake things up and make it more interesting? If so, I love that that is something they are willing to do. Most pro sports are pretty traditional and change quit slowly. Even the fastest changing league (in my opinion), the NBA, still changes quite slowly.
Interestingly there are discussions about moving back to having the majority of the power from IC engines as soon as the end of the decade, with synthetic fuels. Personally I can’t wait.
I would like that too, but it's highly unlikely to happen since Audi and GM just entered the engine making business in F1 for the start of 2026 and they invested shit tonne of millions into engine R&D specifically for the new turbo-V6 regulations, so moving the goalposts again so soon would just rug-pull their investments, and such the FIA assured them the new regulations are gonna stay for a while. Bummer.
What's happening with synthetic fuels? I read while back Porsche investing in factories to produce but that was a few years ago, is it a bit of snake oil wrt to it's alleged green credentials or simply can't scale at an acceptable cost?
The World Endurance Championship has been using synthetic fuels since 2022 from TotalEnergies (https://competition.totalenergies.com/en/auto/endurance/wec/...), there's also Sustain (https://sustain-fuels.com/) in the UK as well who seem to be growing reasonably well but are a mix of sustainable & fossil fuels. There's some variability of how green they are, you still need to burn something so there's going to be emissions as well but they've been validated in the motorsport labs as being viable and they're starting to make their way to consumers.
Shame they're getting rid of the MGU-H just when it's starting to roll out in production road cars (the latest 911, specifically).
Also the end of DRS. Good riddance.
Not really.
> Z-mode means the front and rear wings are closed which generates more downforce for the corners. In X-mode, the drivers can open the flaps which will reduce drag and increase speed.
Driver-controlled aero has the potential to be way more interesting than the strictly-limited current DRS implementation.
The most interesting DRS era was in 2011-2012 when drivers could operate it (almost) anywhere they wanted in practice and qualifying. There was an element of risk in how early you could open it exiting a corner, and we saw real mistakes from drivers pushing that limit.
More driver controls leads to more opportunities for talented drivers to make a difference, which leads to a better sports product.
The problem with DRS is the zones and only being able to use it when close behind another car. My understanding is the X-Mode can be used pretty much anywhere and anytime.
Sure, but it's no longer about a gap to the car in front.
I think the cars reflect pretty well the intended ethos and "vibes" of both competitions. Indycar still feels a bit like "dudes racing cars" while F1 has become a corporate hi-tech extravaganza.
Both have their appeal, but I feel Indy produces better actual racing for the spectator despite being slower and less refined technically. I do watch both.
The best comparison I can think of is that in a Indycar race, it's every driver against each other, meanwhile in Formula 1 you can feel it's the whole team that's actually taking part in the race, and the car on track is just the tip of the iceberg of the process.
They put a few full NASCAR races recorded solely from a drivers perspective up on youtube every once in a while. I never appreciated that sport until I started watching those. It's far more brutal and compact than I ever had expected with the shift in perspective making all the difference. It's "dudes racing for their lives."
Some of the most racing fun I've had in video games was actually NASCAR games.
The whole race was constant jostling for position. There was almost always someone within a car length/width, and zero room for error. From what I've seen on TV and YT, it seemed pretty spot on.
Unfortunately I was also bad at driving with a PS2 controller so I was the danger on the track.
In general the driver's perspective has always seemed underused to me. In F1 at least (where the cars are insanely stiff), unless there are overtakes in progress, watching from the trackside cameras just looks like cars driving round a track. Whereas from the driver's view you can see the car reacting to the track and the driver reacting to the car.
People complain a lot that the TV coverage spends too long on the driver's girlfriends. For me I think it spends too long looking at the cars (from the outside)!
I guess part of this is just that the image quality from onboards is not so sleek. But if it was up to me I think like 60-70% of the airtime would be from onboard.
I once got free tickets to a race (DTM, German touring cars), and to be honest I don't know why people go to them. You saw a small section of the track, and occasionally cars whizzed by. No idea who was in the lead, who was behind, or what was happening in the race in general. Much better to watch on TV.
Sounds like a killer app for VR- observing from the driver's perspective, being able to switch to whoever you want. How many cameras are in those cars I wonder?
If you have an Apple Vision Pro, you can. See https://www.lapz.io/, https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2024/10/02/this-in..., https://youtube.com/watch?v=Z9OlYcfLmTY
They have a lot of cameras and they offer a paid service where you can stream from any driver's onboard. Unfortunately this is out of sync with the main broadcast which kinda kills its value for me...
I think VR would make most people sick as it's a very bumpy view.
> unless there are overtakes in progress
I don't think F1 cars have overtaken each other since the 1990's.
If you want to see overtaking, stick to watching the Superbikes instead.
The poor advertisers don't get great exposure from the helmet cam shots, so we mostly get the boring, wide-angled shots instead on the broadcast.
the corporate hi-tech "extravaganza" has only come recently with its rise in US popularity. While you are not wrong I think thats just one part of the sport. Indycar is just racing and strategy. F1 is technical development, racing, strategy, and team performance. I like both but while I find the racing better in Indy, I follow F1 much more closely because I really enjoy the technical side of the sport. I also think 10 teams (soon to be 11) and 20 drivers (soon to be 22) that race in every race makes it easier to stay invested throughout the season.
Interesting.. I agree on the description but my experience was opposite. I enjoyed F1 much more, though I really enjoy all the technical stats and talks with the teams/engineers that develop the cars and find it to be an equal part of the whole thing as the actual racing itself.
Honestly after going down to the local circle track to watch the Legend cars, modified , Whelen and actual honest to God GM B-bodies from the 80s, along with other open wheel and general cool shit, it's not hard IMO to find (and be directly involved in) actual racing than watch "NASCAR" Cup series or F1. Legend cars on a road track in particular kind of takes me back to watching the super bike races (which were about as real and hardcore actual racing as you'll get) at Mid Ohio.
And MX-5 Cup is better than both!
Your take is disingenuous.
At the 2025 Indy 500 they had Tom Brady driving laps in an Indy car engaged in banter witb the broadcast team up before the race started. Then a US military propaganda moment flying Blackhawk helos over the track to titillate their target audience.
I think the GP poster was referring to the actual race, and not the peripheral parts of the event -- I don't know much about racing in general, but even with the extra "propaganda" you mention, they didn't seem disingenuous
I watch both here and there, not every race. Both Indy and F1 have very similar format with the "peripheral" parts.
OP had to have been referring to the "peripheral" parts of the race, as it's the only time celebs are trotted out.
They don't have Ja Rule calling the action during F1 races; they aren't getting Ja Rules input when there is a crash.
The celebrities are nowhere to be found during the actual F1 race.
I followed Indycar this past season, watched nearly every race and had planned on attending a race but then didn't make the trip. I'm not sure what Indycar is trying to be, tbh. The Indy 500 is a spectacle, the rest of the season is not nearly as interesting. There's some good racing, but F1 is more technically interesting and maybe better overall. NASCAR is boring as hell, just stage-managed bullshit like pro wrestling and I have not followed it in over 20 years.
Used to be a big Formula 1 fan as a kid, growing up in Niki Lauda's home town (of 2000 people). Formula 1 lost it when they moved away from the V10. And when they started putting kids in the cockpit instead of real men.
I think they lost it when they started dictating what kind of engines teams can use. Just limit the max fuel flow, and then let the teams go wild. Want to use a gas turbine? Go for it!
This! I have said this for years now. It would open up the sport to some real innovation.
The "kids" are on average a lot better at driving than most of the "adults" of 30 years ago. Pay drivers barely exist anymore, and even e.g. Stroll is not bad compared to the pay drivers of decades past, who were genuinely terrible.
V10s are overrated. They sound nice, yes, but ask the drivers who have actually driven them and they actually prefer the V6T hybrids in a lot of ways. It turns out that actually sitting inches away from the V10 with the associated noise and vibrations kinda sucks.
The table lists F1 cars as having "Carbon fiber brake calipers".
This is glaringly incorrect. All current brake calipers are machined from aluminum, specifically Aluminum-Lithium or Aluminum-Copper alloys. There is a rule denoting bulk elasticity modulus limit on brake calipers of 80 GPa, which was set just at that to allow the more exotic Lithium Aluminum alloys but to dis-allow Titanium alloys or anything else stiffer (There was experimentation with Titanium calipers in the past.)
Absolutely no calipers are made from composites, CF, graphite, or otherwise. Discs are Carbon-carbon.
This is the last season with Renault as a F1 engine manufacturer. Their team (Alpine) will use Mercedes engine from 2026.
There will be many changes next year. Audi enters as manufacturer with its own team (they bought Sauber.) The two Red Bull teams will use their own Red Bull engine, with the help of Ford. Honda will power Aston Martin. The new Cadillac team will use Ferrari engines and build its own engine for 2028.
The reason these series always get compared is because Indy’s tight rules make it less compelling while F1’s more open rules make it less competitive.
WEC (and IMSA a bit) solve those problems but they have so many drivers and teams that it takes a lot of dedication to follow along.
In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
For what it's worth, the most entertaining circuit racing in the world happens at grassroots level featuring slow, cheap cars that permit a lot of drafting.
The faster the cars get, in the main, the less overtaking occurs.
Watching a winner of 80+ NASCAR races ride along for a hot lap of the Australian Bathurst 1000 course is fairly entertaining ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kLkLtBkUVuo
V8 Supercars on Mount Panorama don't disappoint.
Course map and lap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANALNcF7QrI
Yes, this year's Bathurst finale was quite the spectacle if you haven't seen it!
But while Supercars can be entertaining, they are in some ways a faster version of the categories I'm describing - they don't have much downforce and not that much mechanical grip either, so they're pretty slow in corners even if they are respectably fast in a straight line.
Spectacle, for some, isn't about the speed alone, it's also about risk and skill.
The bare minimum of downforce and grip in tight corners on a mountain pushes the skill requirement to, uhhh, over 9000.
I used to spend hours every day at 252 km/hr (156 miles/hr) 80m above the ground. That got dull fast as it was in dead straight headings for 20km or so at a time.
( Did have to keep an eye out for birds taking off over lakes, power lines, etc. though )
I think that an ideal race league would use WRC-inspired homologation rules and little else (except for some safety features)
Any chassis size. Whatever aero you want. Any engine size/configuration. The only constraint is that it needs to be something you can put into production.
we’d get to see a Cambrian explosion of weird race car variants that would make race day strategizing wild. and we’d really get to showcase cool creative engineering. And we’d eventually see the benefits of that engineering trickle down into normal production cars we all drive
It's been done. Look up the Can-Am series. At best, it would last a couple of years until the cars got way too fast for the tracks, and the manufacturers were no longer prepared to invest in it because there was no commercial return in it for them.
The idea that there is any significant relationship between what makes a good production car, even a sports car, and a racing car was always dubious and today is frankly nonsensical.
The way to make a car fast round a race track basically comes down to the amount of downforce it can produce, and the power of the engine. Downforce is almost completely irrelevant to road driving, as taking corners fast enough to generate cornering forces of over 1G is frankly suicidal on the road.
As for engines, aside from the fact that the internal combustion engine is doomed in road transport (despite what the current administration thinks), producing an engine with performance that exceeds what even good drivers are capable of handling without electronics doing the job for them was solved at least 20 years ago, and continues to be a solved problem despite tightening of emissions standards.
In any case, while lighter, smaller, lower cars remain the preferred option for motorsport applications, all anyhbody wants to actually buy, particularly in the United States, is gargantuan SUVs and pickup trucks, which makes any application of motorsport technology for the road moot.
I didn’t think can-am cars were homologated?
It’s easy for a manufacturer to make a couple hand crafted cars with insane specs. But by requiring homologous, it adds a unique kind of restriction where it’s a car that they have to be able and willing to make at scale. That requires buy-in from industrial engineers as well as business/marketing folks
Edited to add: just learned that homologation doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it did. So my parent thread should have been about “sec-style homologation” specifically and not just “homologation” generally. The idea is that you need to have a car built in production in order to be homologated
The old Group A touring cars of the 1980s and early 90s are perhaps closer to what you’re thinking of.
Nissan built the R32 Skyline GT-R and killed the category (and birthed a legend in the process, admittedly).
There is no power-network in existence, not in the medium-to-long term, that would allow tens of millions of cars (mauve hundreds of millions if we talk at the continent-wide level) to get all electric, the physics isn’t there and it won’t be. You’re correct though, it could be that the next US administration will try to copy the bureaucrats here in Europe and try to go the let’s-ban-the-petrol-engine route, which would, in practice, mean that only the well-to-do consumers (like most of the users on this forum) will be able to still have personal cars.
There’s no power network that holds capacity for the chance of future demand. They add capacity as the demand increases, because the money comes in to pay for it.
These AI datacenters right now are a prime example. They needed more power, and suddenly they’re building it for them.
Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.
These are vehicles which most can schedule their charging to take advantage of low electricity prices and therefore low demand.
The uprating needed is quite insignificant.
> Electrifying the transportation sector is generally seen as a 15-25% increase in grid demand.
Quote on that? A developed country like the US has problems even now, see California (with the yearly fires there) or Texas. And how do you solve the "last-mile" connections without regularly starting fires everywhere? (on account of all those higher-voltage thingies being closer to residential units).
The 15-25% of demand number is pretty similar to the number I've seen in multiple places. Furthermore, cars have an economic lifespan of approximately 20 years, so that increase in demand will take place over a couple of decades.
Furthermore, if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity. This typically occurs between midnight and about 5-6am, and in areas with a lot of solar, during the middle of the day. This is already widely implemented, with utilities in many jurisdictions offering things like EV charging time-of-use tariffs, and customers with rooftop solar systems (which are much cheaper in, say, Australia, than they are in the USA) installing smart chargers which are configured to run when they have a surplus of electricity from their home solar systems. This will ensure that EVs are making use of the existing grid, rather than increasing peak demand and requiring new grid infrastructure.
Furthermore, "vehicle to grid" systems can allow EVs to feed electricity back into the grid at peak times (with their owners getting paid for this service).
Given all of the above, while EVs will contribute to an overall increase in demand for electricity, they will do so in such a way as to minimise the need for extra infrastructure, and they will do so slowly enough as to allow such infrastructure to be built.
> if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity.
Like I said, this EV mania is targeting the well-off middle-classes, those that “are always smart about it”. The populist backlash against all this is well-warranted,
Most cars only drive a few miles each day. It's not that big of a challenge.
I guarantee none of those "100% EV" people have experienced winter in Montana, or summer for that matter. Even the Dakotas are not EV friendly. It's more of a city thing. Go nuts in the city--I'm all for EVs in certain applications.
I favor little regulation and tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions, 100 kg of this kind of gasoline per race, do whatever you want.
Any chassis size is probably not a good idea because cars collide with each other and they must do it safely. So maybe rules should define a box that cars must fit into, with the parts that get in touch with other cars at given places and with given shapes. Example: we don't want spear like nose cones at the same height of the heads of drivers of other cars. No halo can protect against that.
The problem with little regulation is that manufactures will be frightened to enter because it's easy to have a championship in which the one with the bright idea wins all the races and the other ones are scattered 2, 5, 6, 7 seconds behind.
We had something like that with the CanAm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can-Am
A lot of innovation and crazy designs.
> tight cost caps. Example: you get 100 millions
The effect of that in F1 was a huge increase in team profits and significant decrease in real wages for ordinary employees of those teams.
> The reason these series always get compared is because Indy’s tight rules make it less compelling while F1’s more open rules make it less competitive.
I'm new to racing, but can you elaborate on this? How are F1's rules "open"? They seem just about as strict if not more so than IndyCar to me? At least I don't think IndyCar has "ahead at the apex" rules?
> In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Screw "Grill the Grid" or whatever nonsense they're doing on YouTube now; let's see the F1 grid do a rally.
There are technical regulations and sporting regulations. I'm not very familiar with IndyCar anymore but my feeling is that F1 got stricter on technical regulation but IndyCar is even stricter: only one chassis and more standard parts. However F1 sporting regulations seems to be tighter. The classic clash between Villeneuve and Arnoux in 1979 would be unthinkable now. Not only they would be black flagged and stopped for a GP but no driver would even think about doing those kind of overtaking attempts.
Tangentially related would be Adrian Newey's memoir "How to build a car"; he talks about both F1 and Indy cars he worked on. ISBN 9780008196806
The biggest difference that stood out to me was that the fuel compositions are almost exactly opposite; 85/15 ethanol/gasoline for Indy and 10/90 for F1.
I was able to find plenty of articles saying that next year F1 will move to a "100% sustainable fuel", but none that actually mentioned the composition. Is it likely to move closer to the make-up of the Indy fuel?
Every engine supplier has their own fuel supplier contract so the fuels won't be completely identical.
> An IndyCar is heavier than a Formula 1 car: while a Formula 1 car weighs 1759 pounds / 798 kg including the driver, an IndyCar weighs 1700 pounds / 771 kg on road and street courses, excluding the driver.
This seems to contradict itself.
The statement implies an assumption that the drivers weigh / mass more than 59 lbs. / 27 kg, as they are included in the first measurement, but not the second. This is a reasonable assumption, as even Indycar drivers are all adult males, and none are small enough to weigh / mass less than that.
In the old Michel Vaillant comics the f1 and indy cars seem to be interchangeable, they compete in each other’s championships
Not sure if true given that it’s fiction, but they do seem to be based on reality
Up until the late '80s-early '90s cars and rules were rather similar, and drivers like Andretti or Mansell were able to move between categories with relative ease.
I'd say that the rift become apparent in '94, after the safety changes introduced due to Senna's Death and the massive shift in pilot training brought by Michael Schumacher.
The Indy 500 was actually part of the official Formula 1 calendar from 1950 to 1960, though the two series diverged after that.
Some Indy features (refueling, changing tires even if they didn't have a puncture, safety cars) got adopted by F1 through the 1980s, specially as F1 started to lose audience to the American series in the early 1990s.
There was a time when the Indy 500 was part of both the F1 and IndyCar championships (whatever they were called at the time).
IndyCar is one of the coolest competitions on earth that nobody cares about. Not just the 500, which is amazing, but the full calendar schedule.
True, but that's kind of a good thing as a fan. Cheap tickets, and you get to wander around the paddock as they prep the cars before the race, even with a regular ticket. That level of access in F1 is not possible for regular people.
Personally I can't get excited about oval circuits.
I attended the Long Beach and Laguna Seca races in 1995. Nothing in common with ovals except they were closed loop, just like Monte Carlo.
clutch your tinkle about it some more
Its so interesting that the difference between Indy and F1 in terms of lap times is objectively marginal but subjectively extreme.
I would have guessed given the extreme cost difference between them there would have been a significant gap (like 30 seconds) but the fact that it’s only a few seconds difference is surprising.
I'm not sure it is objectively marginal. At Circuit of the Americas where they have both raced recently the difference in lap time is about 10 seconds. That doesn't sound like a lot but is close to 10% of the lap. The F1 race is 56 laps so by the end an Indycar is going to be 5 or 6 laps down. Throw in the fact an Indycar can't do 56 laps without refueling and it might be closer to 7 laps. In motorsport that is extreme
Getting faster is hard and expensive really. You can be pretty cheap and still be quite fast.
On other side, F1 has for very long time kept speeds down when new innovative ways to gain it has been discovered. For some reason I can not understand drivers and spectators dying in accidents is bad look for the sport... As such it really is not best we could technically do.
I love F1 (Give my boy Lando his WDC!), but I wouldn't mind a more unhinged version without human drivers, at least not in the cockpit. Not going to happen because ones and zeros can't sell expensive watches like F1 drivers.
If you haven't seen it, there's actually been a couple races of autonomously controlled formula-type cars at the Abu Dhabi circuit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9LLZ5mb5cA
Not really. F1 regularly changes the rules to make the cars slower for safety reasons.
F1 is on a completely different level than IndyCar. The drivers are also on a different level compared to anything else.
making a car go fast on a straight bit of road is relatively cheap. making a car take a corner a couple tenths of a second faster is very expensive. and there's only so many corners in a lap. add up those tenths - that's your few seconds of difference!
All designed either in England or Italy though..