Gary Anderson: Give engineers a chance to shine

The Red Bull Racing team, which has dominated the championship this season, has been quite vocal recently in its criticism of the regulations Formula 1 should move to in 2026. Gary Anderson, a former race car designer and now a technical expert for The Race, agrees that development could be headed in the wrong direction, but he has a very different argument.

Christian Horner, Red Bull team principal, and Max Verstappen, two-time world champion, criticize the new regulations, especially the part dealing with power plants, but they are probably pursuing their own interests.

I agree with Horner that Formula 1 is going in the wrong direction, but I explain this with completely different reasons.

Whenever there is a rule change, some teams see it as an opportunity to improve their performance, but the loudest voice is given by others – those who are leading under the current rules and don’t want these rules to change too radically.

Current regulations prescribe many restrictions. We can say that we were even lucky that Red Bull found some loopholes and were able to build such a fast car. But there were opportunities for everyone, you just had to find them, and Adrian Newey is a great master of this part.

Unsurprisingly, Horner is critical of the changes included in the 2026 regulations, mainly plans to increase the capacity of the hybrid part of the power plant from 120 kW to 350 kW. According to Toto Wolff, this may be due to doubts about the capabilities of the new engine division of Red Bull Powertrains.

This season, the difference in result between front runners and laggards is the smallest in many years. In recent months, several teams that have been modernizing their cars have decided to go in the direction of Red Bull, but some are stubbornly going their own way. And this leads to the machines having a lot of little external differences, which is great.

If the regulations are strictly prescriptive, there is simply nowhere to come up with an interesting magic solution. The speed of machines depends only on many nuances and work on the modernization of structures at the level of individual parts.

The days when someone could have a brilliant insight are long gone, because now the regulations even determine the materials from which even the most ordinary bolts can be made. But the problem is that the 2026 regulations will only get worse in this regard. We are quickly moving towards uniformity in Formula 1, although no one seems to want that.

But that’s exactly what it’s all about. There is no room for innovation in modern Formula 1, and if such brilliant designers as Colin Chapman, Gordon Murray or John Barnard were still working in championship teams, they would simply be tearing their hair out in frustration.

In my 50+ years in motorsport, I’ve witnessed many groundbreaking innovations, and many of them have been absolutely incredible. But now this is just not possible.

Sometimes these solutions worked, sometimes they didn’t, but at least there was a chance to develop and implement them, hoping to achieve superiority over rivals. If something like this appeared now, it would immediately be considered unacceptable. There is even a clause in the regulations that allows a team that has developed some new technology to use it for one season, after which it can be banned. All this does not contribute to the creative development of a new generation of engineers.

And now let’s move on to the most important thing, the changes that will take place in 2026 that Horner so criticizes.

The draft regulation on power plants has already been published and the essence is to make the restrictions even stricter. Everything will be so tightly regulated that we can get much the same picture as in 2014, when the championship first switched to 1.6-litre hybrid turbo engines – then one particular manufacturer did everything right, and others took a long time to catch up .

If power plant regulations were looser, it’s possible it would be the same, but at least we’d see a wider range of ideas proposed by different developers. Then it would become clear to everyone what is good and what is bad, and which direction of development should be chosen, so that Formula 1 will achieve its goals of improving energy efficiency in the future.

In Formula 1, the drivers and teams should be the protagonists and the power plants should play a subordinate role. If the task is to switch to environmentally neutral fuel, limit its consumption, or at least control the power of internal combustion engines, and also introduce a battery capacity limit, all this is good.

But allow manufacturers to achieve these goals in the way they see fit. Let them choose which motor generators they rely on, MGU-K or MGU-H, and which turbine design they prefer. Open the door to innovative solutions, give young engineers the opportunity to express themselves.

The same applies to the chassis. Let’s reduce the size of the car and the overall weight, and if it is small enough, this in itself will create a certain choice of approaches to the development of the chassis. It will only be necessary to continue crash testing and other checks to avoid a drop in safety standards.

Now the original concept of the chassis is actually given by Formula 1 itself or the FIA, and the same goes for the power plants. But this is a totally wrong approach. How can some of the people in these organizations who designed racing cars at some point in the past have a better understanding of the subject than the engineers and designers of the championship teams who now make Formula 1 vehicles and do so every day?

How nice would it be if the cars of the Formula 1 teams differ not only in color! F1 management need not be afraid of this.

What I am proposing is that thousands of clever engineers working in championship teams can directly influence power plant and chassis design to provide interesting solutions, the best of which will set promising directions for the development of the automotive sector as a whole.