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With the imminent arrival of the 2026 all-new technical regulations, Aston Martin’s Executive Director – Technical, Bob Bell conceded that it is a balancing act for the teams to split rescources between the current season and next year’s technical overhaul.
While the discussions about the all-new 2026 technical regulation usually focus on the new power units, there will be significant changes to aerodynamic configuration of the F1 cars as well.
With the arrival of the new power units that will feature a fifty-fifty ratio between the electric components and the internal combustion engine, the sport will introduce a host of aerodynamic changes. With these tweaks, the target is to make the cars more efficient and ensure they are able to perform similar lap-times to what we see now.
The primary tool to achieve this is ‘active’ aerodynamics. Previously banned – or, at least, heavily proscribed – in F1, it will allow the front and rear wings to be adjusted from corners to straights: opening to configure the car for less drag in a straight line, closing into the corners to provide more aerodynamic grip.
This aerodynamic reboot also serves as an opportunity to refine existing regulations. For 2026, the focus has been on reinforcing some of the concepts introduced in 2022 to promote better racing while getting rid of others that led to the cars being very uncomfortable to drive, most notably the ‘porpoising’ effect.
This effect is when cars aggressively bounce up and down through the range of their suspension travel, when airflow through contoured Venturi tunnels under the car first sucks them towards the track, and then stalls when the cars ground, in a process that repeats, like a porpoise skipping across the waves.
The new regulations remove the ‘ground-effect’ generating tunnels and return F1 cars to having flat undersides before a step into a conventional downforce-generating diffuser beneath the rear end.
Speaking of the current challenges, Aston Martin’s Executive Director – Technical, Bob Bell branded the situation as a “balancing act” as teams need to split their energies between the current season and next year’s all-new technical regulations.
“There is a balance to be struck between how you split resources for 2025 and 2026. This is never easy, irrespective of the regulations. The most important thing – probably – is 2026.
“This is the decision we took last year, and consequently, we carried over a lot of componentry from the AMR24 into the AMR25 so that we don’t have to spend a lot of time redesigning and remanufacturing components for what would be very marginal gains.
“The AMR25 is a completely renewed vehicle in aerodynamic terms – but the hardware under the skin, items that traditionally we would redesign – has been carried over. I suspect every team has taken a similar approach.
“We will also carefully manage the amount of in-season development we do – our resources are better allocated to 2026 because next year represents a far better opportunity for the team to progress up the competitive order,” Bell concluded.
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