Williams chief technical officer Pat Fry says that the 2026 Formula 1 technical regulations still need some fine-tuning. On Thursday the FIA released details of the rules as they currently stand despite some key topics still being under discussion with teams.
The regulations are due to be finalised and approved by the World Motor Sport Council at the end of this month. The new cars will feature movable front and rear wings in order to reduce drag on the straights.
They will also be 30kgs lighter than the current models, despite the overall weight of the power unit/battery increasing.
“It’s got its challenges,” Fry said when asked by this writer about the 2026 package. “I think aero-wise, I don’t think we’re a million miles off.
“Yes, it is very light on downforce at the moment, but it’s very easy to scale it slightly and get to somewhere which could be workable.
“I guess we engineers always moan about the restrictions, and how heavily prescribed it is. It is massively heavily prescribed.
“But again, that, I think it’s relatively straightforward. I guess the FIA have gone in, ‘this is what we want,’ written some rules, and you’ve got to give us some scope to actually adjust them.
“There’s quite a lot of flow structure challenges that we need some freedom to try and fix. But I think it’s more important that we try and keep the thing on track, so that we’re still closing in on something at the end of this month.”
Fry says that it will be difficult for teams to achieve the weight limit.
“There’s other challenges with the rules, particularly on the weight side of things,” he noted.
“We’ve got to make sure that the driver weight is sensible, and that we don’t compromise the heavier drivers, which was initially in there, then they backtracked on it. So we want to get that back.
“And the size of the weight challenge is absolutely massive. It’s quite a heavy power unit, battery pack, all of that side of things, it is a monumental challenge.
“The load tests are going up massively, so you’re going to have to add weight in. So that doesn’t come easily.”
Fry suggested that the weight limit was still a topic for discussion: “That is something where I think we need to be sensible and compromise.
“And it’s almost as if we’re driving blindly down, ‘well if we can make the car lighter, it will go quicker,’ and ignoring the fact that hardly anyone’s ever going to get anywhere close to it.
“And obviously, the closer you get, the more expensive it gets. So you almost need to come up with a target that is hard but achievable and then drive it down year after year afterwards. So have like an escalator or something to recover it.”
“The load tests are going up massively, so you’re going to have to add weight in. So that doesn’t come easily.”
Fry says there is still work to be done on the aero regulations, which have been honed after early simulations indicated that the cars would run out of electrical power on the straights.
“I think we just need to learn,” he said.
“It is obviously moving performance away from aero, but that’s all part of it, isn’t it?
“In terms of all the freedom you need to keep a car balanced for the different drag modes or something, it’s getting on workable. But again, we need to make sure we’ve actually got the flexibility there for that to be sensible.
“I think it’s not the disaster it was looking like right at the start. There were quite a few teams saying it was an absolute disaster. Yeah, it’s a challenge, but I wouldn’t say it’s a non-starter.”
