Reducing drag for greater straighline speed could be more important in F1 from 2026
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Exactly one hundred years ago, grand prix racing seemed to be on the verge of a technological revolution. Three incredibly original and far-sighted 1923 designs – from Benz, Bugatti and Voisin – appeared almost simultaneously, radically different to anything which had gone before and quite different from each other. Aerodynamics seemed to have suddenly come into vogue after years of conventional flat-fronted, open-wheeled cars with long bonnets covering their front-mounted engines, an open cockpit and tapered tail.
Benz produced the Tropfenwagen, an incredible mid-engined car with independent suspension for all four wheels. Both these features would be fundamental to huge increases in performance in years to come.
Bugatti introduced the Type 32, a car with the look of a beetle, the wheels enclosed within the bodywork, the cockpit down low behind a curved full-width slab of a bonnet. Behind the cockpit the bodywork tapered away to nothing within a very short distance. Low drag was the priority.
There is a wish from F1’s technical group to introduce active aerodynamics
Voisin’s C6 ‘Laboratoire’ was even more bizarre, with the front wheels out in the air in the conventional manner but the rears brought inside the bodywork, almost touching each other so narrow was their track. It had an extremely small frontal area and a radical wedge-fronted body shape. Remarkably, it was of monocoque construction 39 years before the Lotus 25 popularised the technique in F1.
They were all failures, bludgeoned into also-ran status by the massive power advantage of the very conventional-looking Fiat 805 with a less visible but more potent innovation: a supercharger. The advantage conferred by its 140bhp engine dwarfed any low-drag advantages of the 100bhp Bugatti, the 80bhp Benz or the 73bhp Voisin. So the very real value of aerodynamics was rather overlooked and these three cars came to be looked upon as design dead-ends, their real merit not appreciated until decades later. It set racing on a fairly dull technical course over the following few years, where the motor was all. Once grand prix racing’s brief art deco season was over the previous visual uniformity returned. The aero baby had been thrown out with the bathwater.
Ernest Friederich at the wheel of Bugatti’s Type 32 at Tours, 1923
Alamy
Voisin C6 ‘Laboratoire’
Benz-Tropfenwagen
Such is the prescriptive nature of modern F1 regulations that we’re never going to see such wild original solutions as those of a century ago. But looking ahead to 2026, for a formula still very much in the planning stage, that balance between power and aerodynamics has never been more relevant.
What has been generally agreed is that the hybrid motors are going to deploy as much as half their maximum power electrically rather than around 16% currently – and that the current ERS-h feature will be discontinued (for reasons of cost and simplification). The harvesting of the electrical power will all come from braking energy via the ERS-k. But there is also a wish – and it’s nothing more than that at the moment – from F1’s technical group to introduce active aerodynamics.
F1 could be set for significantly different cars in 2026, with the championship’s chief technical officer Pat Symonds revealing what might change
Active aero would potentially mean software-controlled retractable wings for maximum straightline speed but masses of downforce when needed into the braking areas and through the turns. There are potential problems with this in terms of maintaining recent progress in the raceability of the cars. DRS would obviously no longer work as there’d be no wing-derived downforce to dump on the straights and the downforce-damaging wake would still be there in the corners as the wings came back up. So active aero may remain forever just a notion, an ideal not quite achievable in combination with all the other demands of a formula.
But… it may not be necessary to throw out the baby with the bathwater. One often overlooked boon of the hybrids is how the power differences between two competing cars varies according to how much battery energy each has at any given moment. This plays its part in overtaking as the driver behind can induce the one in front to use up their electrical reserves over a few laps, briefly leaving the car ahead 160bhp bereft. But if that difference between battery deployment and no deployment were to be, say, 400bhp, however briefly, then the feasibility of overtaking would surely be enhanced.
In this way F1 may be able to use variability in power to enable active aerodynamics and if so, reducing the wings-retracted drag of the cars would assume far greater importance.
