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Welcome back to Prime Tire, where today I’m enjoying just how good the new Formula 1 cars look now that they’ve almost all hit the track in testing.
And I’m remembering a time when lots of them looked very silly indeed.
I’m Alex, and Madeline Coleman will be along later.
Quirky
New cars look beautiful so far
We’ve now seen 10 of the 11 2026 Formula 1 cars. And the new designs just look BRILLIANT.
I’ll admit I was hesitant when the FIA first revealed the renders for the aerodynamic shapes of this era of car design — back at the 2024 Canadian GP. The surfaces were too flat, too … basic.
You also couldn’t tell the scale of the design, which is mainly aimed at making F1 cars smaller and lighter compared to the behemoths they became in the 2022-2025 era.
Now we can (mostly) see what F1 team designers have made of these rules, with only Williams yet to show off its new car. The others are all seriously impressive.
There’s something a bit mid-2000s about these wider, lower rear wings, and louvered, narrower front wings. They just look fast.
I think it’s the arrow-like shape the rules now require, from the back to the front of each car, with the boxy front-wing endplates and jarring carbon-fibre eyebrows (that ruined the lines of the 2022-2025 cars) removed.
All of this is a far cry from the 2014 season — the last time F1 was introducing new engines along with aerodynamic rule changes.
Back then, the aero changes were comparatively very small compared to the rules reset. But the tweaks had a rather more massive, and unfortunate, side effect.
Mark Thompson / Getty Images
Thanks to a quirk in a then-new rule that paired a high chassis with a very low nose top at the front end of each car, most of the 2014 designs featured ridiculous extended protrusions from their main nose sections, as shown in the above photo. These were the designs produced by McLaren, Williams, Force India, Red Bull, Toro Rosso, Manor, Lotus, Sauber and Caterham.
Red Bull’s design was the least offensive of this group, while Mercedes and Ferrari had flatter, more elegant solutions that avoided the nose protrusion entirely. Lotus’ twin nose approach actually looked more like elephant tusks of differing lengths.
But of the Toro Rosso and Force India approach, there was no hiding from it. Although some observers compared these extended noses to those seen in nature on anteaters or proboscis monkeys, these just looked like … a certain human appendage.
And UK sex toy and lingerie retailer Ann Summers was soon engaging in the sort of social media marketing that was mildly amusing back then, and is now so commonplace it’s lost all meaning. If it ever had any.
Very silly for a sport that takes itself extremely seriously.
Thankfully, the FIA changed the aero rules slightly again for 2015 and the noses basically went back to normal (although the Toro Rosso carried on looking weird for a couple of years). And, even better, when the 2022 car design era was first conceived, aesthetics were a primary consideration instead of the afterthought they’d long become in F1’s race to prioritize speed.
The 2026 design era is a refinement of that ruleset. No wonder the cars are looking so good immediately.
Now over to Madeline, for a chat with an F1 fan favorite.
Inside the Paddock with Madeline Coleman
Daniel Ricciardo walks and talks
Earlier this month, I did a walk-and-talk interview with Daniel Ricciardo while in Detroit for Ford’s season launch with Red Bull.
The Australian retired from racing in September and subsequently announced his new chapter includes working as a Ford Racing ambassador. When I spoke to Daniel in Detroit, he seemed to be in good spirits and happy about his choices.
Here’s what he said from my conversation with him, conducted only for Prime Tire readers(!):
Q: How is post-F1 life treating you? How are you finding things now that you’re done with racing?
A: It definitely took some time to get even-keeled or just find my balance with it all. But now, I’m very content with being where I am — living a less stressful life.
Q: Are you enjoying this new chapter, especially representing the Ford Raptor truck? I know that Raptor has been a vehicle that you’ve loved for years.
A: Yeah. I feel like now, because I was competing so long, there were days where I lost some love for racing, and now I’m able to just basically enjoy cars again, enjoy just having fun behind the wheel.
It’s not that I wasn’t (before), but I think it was definitely hard to just make it fun all the time when there’s millions of people watching and (you’re) trying to perform.
I’m more of a Raptor ambassador, so a little bit more off-road related, and that’s also something different for me. I’m not kind of confined to the four walls of a race track, so to speak.
So it’s a little bit more of an adventure. And, yeah, I like it.
Back to you, Alex.
Should F1 Tests Be Private?
Pros and cons of barred Barcelona business
F1 returned to action this week, but it all felt a bit odd, as the year’s opening test was held in private at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya track in northern Spain.
It was the first time in recent F1 eras that independent media and the fans have been shut out to quite this extent — at the behest of the teams, who organized the test.
We therefore decided to do things a bit differently with our coverage of an event those squads just didn’t want us to cover.
The reason why? The teams didn’t want a repeat of the additional embarrassment most of them suffered in 2014, when F1’s first hybrid engines were new and fragile, and their earlier failures left many cars regularly breaking down during that year’s first test at the Jerez track in southern Spain.
An industry that doesn’t tolerate failure soon got its act together, and the 2014 season opener in Australia went off as expected. And, in 2026, that fear proved largely unfounded.
Williams missed the Barcelona test and Aston Martin barely made it (and, indeed, broke down almost immediately when it finally ran for the first time on Thursday evening). This was due to delays in the car manufacturing stages for these squads.
But, as Luke Smith sagely pointed out here, the mileage totals accrued by the Haas, Mercedes and Red Bull teams straight out of the box on Monday in Barcelona (154, 151 and 108 laps respectively) showed this wasn’t Jerez 2014 all over again.
Back then, to quote Luke, “eight teams managed a combined total of 93 laps on the first day of running.” Absurd.
But we weren’t deterred by all that needless secrecy. We borrowed the intrepid and delightful Guillermo Rai from his day job, as The Athletic’s Real Madrid soccer correspondent, and sent him to the Barcelona circuit’s outskirts to see what he could from the closed test.
Turned out, it was quite a lot — including fans trying to break into the track, security and police clearing nearby viewing hills of other fans and photographers and some F1 cars breaking down on track in the far distance.
In the evening, Guillermo even got to know some F1 engineers, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, and they revealed they were baffled by the need for such secrecy overall.
Back at base, Luke and I debated the merits of holding the first testing in private in this story. We’re going to be doing plenty more of this type of article as 2026 properly gets going.
As part of it, we polled readers for their thoughts. The result was a resounding defeat for me, as my position of being “against” F1 testing being held in private scored only 43.7 percent compared to Luke’s “for” argument getting 56.3 percent of the vote.
Now, I’m not saying PT readers are more discerning than our lovely readers over on our website (and, of course, there will be plenty of crossover between both camps). But feel free to head to the poll and correct the course, please.
We all know more F1, and more accessible F1, is always better!
Outside the points
🏈 Madeline exclusively revealed that, as well as unveiling its first F1 car livery in a TV commercial during Super Bowl LX, Cadillac will show off its new colors with an intriguing stunt in NYC’s Times Square.
🏍 🏍 Alpine driver Pierre Gasly became an investor in the MotoGP team helmed by former Haas team boss Guenther Steiner, which is now controlled by several major U.S. investment companies.
🤷♂️ Williams team principal James Vowles explained why his team missed the Barcelona test. A lot of his answers were baffling.
🇪🇸 And Spanish tennis superstar Carlos Alcaraz celebrated reaching the 2026 Australian Open final by copying the celebration his compatriot Fernando Alonso deployed after the now-Aston Martin driver won the 2006 Japanese Grand Prix for Renault.
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