The differences between an IndyCar and a F1 car
openwheelworld.net
openwheelworld.net
2026 cars will have less downforce and less drag (closer to Indycar) but also "active" aerodynamics (elements on both the front and rear wings can flatten on-demand to reduce drag, or raise to produce more downforce) and a hybrid power unit closer to 50/50 split between ICE and electric horsepower than the current 85/15 split for F1 cars or 80/20 for Indycars.
F1 next year will probably be chaos because there are so many different aspects that teams may have gotten wrong in development.
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There are some inaccuracies though regardless. I am pretty sure that teams do not go through multiple sets of brake pads in a weekend. They last several races, no different than Indycar.
If you think about that a bit, it's kind of crazy and mad.
But it also means to shake things up you need to throw the dice again. It's like this generation has evolved to find the peak apex design and configuration for each and every circuit to the point where teams with more limited resources can now get competitive (yay for Williams last week!), and it's time for a new generation.
I agree next year could be chaos. I think teams that have been consistently applying discipline and consistency will continue to do well (Red Bull, McLaren, Mercedes), those that are catching on will continue to rise (William, Haas), and those who haven't realised that's the name of the game yet (Ferrari, Alpine), will continue their passion-fuelled mismanaged decline. The new players (Audi taking on Sauber, Cadillac), are going to be interesting to watch.
But within 5 years, everyone will be back to within a few tenths of each other over a 5km circuit, and we'll probably need to go again...
Fun fact, at those ratios it would make a lot of sense to use an electric continuous variable transmission (eCVT) - connect the engine and the motor with a planetary gear set to the wheels, done. The electric motor spins backwards when going slow and forward when going fast. Those eCVTs can be lighter, more efficient an deliver more power across the entire range. But they're illegal in F1 - because they make the car sound boring.
I can confirm, my CMAX has an eCVT, and the engine noises are boring. Either it's off, or it's running in a pretty limited range, you can get a bit of fun rev increasing noises if you drive it just right... but mostly boring. My 81 VW Vanagon is much more fun to drive even if it's objectively worse at everything in terms of acceleration, top speed, wheel slip, etc; although the turning circle on the cmax is garbage, so the vanagon wins there. The VW makes fun sounds as you go from low rpm to redline several times as you work through the gears, and the cmax is just droning along.
Yes! I drive the snot out of my mom's '81 Vanagon when I was back in high school. I need one in my life again... Lol
Mostly parts are available; although some things need creativity: federal EGR filters are unobtainable so people might EGR delete instead, rear side markers aren't available, so you have to use Mercedes G-Wagon parts (but they used to use Vanagon parts and scratch off the logos!), I had to adapt a crankcase ventilation valve from a different car because they don't make the ones for mine anymore. Also, headlight switches are available new, but the molds are wrong, so they break when installing (I found a used one, and added headlight relays to reduce the current going through the switch). Oh, and I'm in the second year of ownership, so I started getting fun problems where it runs ok at home but not on the road.
When it is running though, you almost have to drive the snot out of it... Otherwise it'll take an hour to get up to speed.
When it comes to something like F1 I think it's OK for efficiency to not be the top priority. Road vehicles absolutely should be as light and efficient as possible with strict limits on pollution (including noise). But it's OK for society to have a few things like F1 that are just for fun. We just don't want everyone to be driving F1 cars around their neighbourhoods or have an F1 race every week.
The efficiency gains wouldn't even be important in comparison (until you start bringing significantly less fuel than your opponents), but just the reduction in weight and size (important for aero considerations) would be worth it. Also, the power gains from always running the ICE (and its turbo) at the perfect sweet spot in the power curve would be a giant advantage in racing.
9.7.1 The number of forward gear ratios must be 8. Continuously variable transmission systems are not permitted.
And you could have typed this comment into notepad and saved it on a file on your desktop, but instead you shared it with a world that considers it irrelevant.
See? We all do useless things.
You can only take so much fuel and fuel is also weight. You can only win if you use the available fuel to propel you forwards efficiently.
Why would they make such drastic changes for 2026? Is it to intentionally shake things up and make it more interesting? If so, I love that that is something they are willing to do. Most pro sports are pretty traditional and change quit slowly. Even the fastest changing league (in my opinion), the NBA, still changes quite slowly.
All the regs changes since 2014 have mostly left the engines alone and changed only the aerodynamic rules, whereas 2026 combines a huge change to both engines and aerodynamic rules.
Part of the appeal of F1 is the constant technological development arms race aspect so it's not just that it shakes up the order but that it's pushing the arms race in a direction that manufacturers (e.g. Honda, Ford, Audi, Mercedes, GM) are interested in. The 50/50 hybrid split was aimed at attracting manufacturers and keeping them interested in the sport and it has been basically successful at doing so, so long as it doesn't turn into a disaster lol.
Active aerodynamics is controversial but somewhat necessary to make the 50/50 split work, because otherwise the cars would be too draggy.
It is debatable how much motorsport tech trickles down to improve our daily motor tech, I think this was much more the case early on and now days the sport tech is so rarefied it does not help us much. But mass market electric cars are still fairly new and I think that sporting competitiveness can do a lot of good here. The big one that was missed were easy to replace generic battery packs.
But I also think the biggest failure in f1 was the removal of refueling, so what do I know?
footnote: in nascar it was the five bold lugnuts, the pit stops with five bolt lugnuts were absolutely gorgeous compared to the single bolt they use now... and we wept.
I'm really looking forward to this weekend's F1 finale. Three drivers have a shot at the top three spots in the championship.
> Z-mode means the front and rear wings are closed which generates more downforce for the corners. In X-mode, the drivers can open the flaps which will reduce drag and increase speed.
The most interesting DRS era was in 2011-2012 when drivers could operate it (almost) anywhere they wanted in practice and qualifying. There was an element of risk in how early you could open it exiting a corner, and we saw real mistakes from drivers pushing that limit.
More driver controls leads to more opportunities for talented drivers to make a difference, which leads to a better sports product.
Both have their appeal, but I feel Indy produces better actual racing for the spectator despite being slower and less refined technically. I do watch both.
People complain a lot that the TV coverage spends too long on the driver's girlfriends. For me I think it spends too long looking at the cars (from the outside)!
I guess part of this is just that the image quality from onboards is not so sleek. But if it was up to me I think like 60-70% of the airtime would be from onboard.
I think VR would make most people sick as it's a very bumpy view.
I don't think F1 cars have overtaken each other since the 1990's.
If you want to see overtaking, stick to watching the Superbikes instead.
The whole race was constant jostling for position. There was almost always someone within a car length/width, and zero room for error. From what I've seen on TV and YT, it seemed pretty spot on.
Unfortunately I was also bad at driving with a PS2 controller so I was the danger on the track.
At the 2025 Indy 500 they had Tom Brady driving laps in an Indy car engaged in banter witb the broadcast team up before the race started. Then a US military propaganda moment flying Blackhawk helos over the track to titillate their target audience.
OP had to have been referring to the "peripheral" parts of the race, as it's the only time celebs are trotted out.
They don't have Ja Rule calling the action during F1 races; they aren't getting Ja Rules input when there is a crash.
The celebrities are nowhere to be found during the actual F1 race.
This is glaringly incorrect. All current brake calipers are machined from aluminum, specifically Aluminum-Lithium or Aluminum-Copper alloys. There is a rule denoting bulk elasticity modulus limit on brake calipers of 80 GPa, which was set just at that to allow the more exotic Lithium Aluminum alloys but to dis-allow Titanium alloys or anything else stiffer (There was experimentation with Titanium calipers in the past.)
Absolutely no calipers are made from composites, CF, graphite, or otherwise. Discs are Carbon-carbon.
There will be many changes next year. Audi enters as manufacturer with its own team (they bought Sauber.) The two Red Bull teams will use their own Red Bull engine, with the help of Ford. Honda will power Aston Martin. The new Cadillac team will use Ferrari engines and build its own engine for 2028.
WEC (and IMSA a bit) solve those problems but they have so many drivers and teams that it takes a lot of dedication to follow along.
In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
The faster the cars get, in the main, the less overtaking occurs.
V8 Supercars on Mount Panorama don't disappoint.
Course map and lap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANALNcF7QrI
But while Supercars can be entertaining, they are in some ways a faster version of the categories I'm describing - they don't have much downforce and not that much mechanical grip either, so they're pretty slow in corners even if they are respectably fast in a straight line.
The bare minimum of downforce and grip in tight corners on a mountain pushes the skill requirement to, uhhh, over 9000.
I used to spend hours every day at 252 km/hr (156 miles/hr) 80m above the ground. That got dull fast as it was in dead straight headings for 20km or so at a time.
( Did have to keep an eye out for birds taking off over lakes, power lines, etc. though )
Any chassis size. Whatever aero you want. Any engine size/configuration. The only constraint is that it needs to be something you can put into production.
we’d get to see a Cambrian explosion of weird race car variants that would make race day strategizing wild. and we’d really get to showcase cool creative engineering. And we’d eventually see the benefits of that engineering trickle down into normal production cars we all drive
The idea that there is any significant relationship between what makes a good production car, even a sports car, and a racing car was always dubious and today is frankly nonsensical.
The way to make a car fast round a race track basically comes down to the amount of downforce it can produce, and the power of the engine. Downforce is almost completely irrelevant to road driving, as taking corners fast enough to generate cornering forces of over 1G is frankly suicidal on the road.
As for engines, aside from the fact that the internal combustion engine is doomed in road transport (despite what the current administration thinks), producing an engine with performance that exceeds what even good drivers are capable of handling without electronics doing the job for them was solved at least 20 years ago, and continues to be a solved problem despite tightening of emissions standards.
In any case, while lighter, smaller, lower cars remain the preferred option for motorsport applications, all anyhbody wants to actually buy, particularly in the United States, is gargantuan SUVs and pickup trucks, which makes any application of motorsport technology for the road moot.
It’s easy for a manufacturer to make a couple hand crafted cars with insane specs. But by requiring homologous, it adds a unique kind of restriction where it’s a car that they have to be able and willing to make at scale. That requires buy-in from industrial engineers as well as business/marketing folks
Edited to add: just learned that homologation doesn’t mean exactly what I thought it did. So my parent thread should have been about “sec-style homologation” specifically and not just “homologation” generally. The idea is that you need to have a car built in production in order to be homologated
Nissan built the R32 Skyline GT-R and killed the category (and birthed a legend in the process, admittedly).
These are vehicles which most can schedule their charging to take advantage of low electricity prices and therefore low demand.
The uprating needed is quite insignificant.
Quote on that? A developed country like the US has problems even now, see California (with the yearly fires there) or Texas. And how do you solve the "last-mile" connections without regularly starting fires everywhere? (on account of all those higher-voltage thingies being closer to residential units).
Furthermore, if you're smart about it, you charge the vehicle at times when the grid is oversupplied with electricity. This typically occurs between midnight and about 5-6am, and in areas with a lot of solar, during the middle of the day. This is already widely implemented, with utilities in many jurisdictions offering things like EV charging time-of-use tariffs, and customers with rooftop solar systems (which are much cheaper in, say, Australia, than they are in the USA) installing smart chargers which are configured to run when they have a surplus of electricity from their home solar systems. This will ensure that EVs are making use of the existing grid, rather than increasing peak demand and requiring new grid infrastructure.
Furthermore, "vehicle to grid" systems can allow EVs to feed electricity back into the grid at peak times (with their owners getting paid for this service).
Given all of the above, while EVs will contribute to an overall increase in demand for electricity, they will do so in such a way as to minimise the need for extra infrastructure, and they will do so slowly enough as to allow such infrastructure to be built.
Like I said, this EV mania is targeting the well-off middle-classes, those that “are always smart about it”. The populist backlash against all this is well-warranted,
These AI datacenters right now are a prime example. They needed more power, and suddenly they’re building it for them.
Any chassis size is probably not a good idea because cars collide with each other and they must do it safely. So maybe rules should define a box that cars must fit into, with the parts that get in touch with other cars at given places and with given shapes. Example: we don't want spear like nose cones at the same height of the heads of drivers of other cars. No halo can protect against that.
The problem with little regulation is that manufactures will be frightened to enter because it's easy to have a championship in which the one with the bright idea wins all the races and the other ones are scattered 2, 5, 6, 7 seconds behind.
We had something like that with the CanAm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can-Am
A lot of innovation and crazy designs.
The effect of that in F1 was a huge increase in team profits and significant decrease in real wages for ordinary employees of those teams.
I'm new to racing, but can you elaborate on this? How are F1's rules "open"? They seem just about as strict if not more so than IndyCar to me? At least I don't think IndyCar has "ahead at the apex" rules?
> In the end you end up wondering if your favorites could hack it in the WRC.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. Screw "Grill the Grid" or whatever nonsense they're doing on YouTube now; let's see the F1 grid do a rally.
I was able to find plenty of articles saying that next year F1 will move to a "100% sustainable fuel", but none that actually mentioned the composition. Is it likely to move closer to the make-up of the Indy fuel?
I would have guessed given the extreme cost difference between them there would have been a significant gap (like 30 seconds) but the fact that it’s only a few seconds difference is surprising.
On other side, F1 has for very long time kept speeds down when new innovative ways to gain it has been discovered. For some reason I can not understand drivers and spectators dying in accidents is bad look for the sport... As such it really is not best we could technically do.
F1 is on a completely different level than IndyCar. The drivers are also on a different level compared to anything else.
This seems to contradict itself.
Not sure if true given that it’s fiction, but they do seem to be based on reality
I'd say that the rift become apparent in '94, after the safety changes introduced due to Senna's Death and the massive shift in pilot training brought by Michael Schumacher.
Some Indy features (refueling, changing tires even if they didn't have a puncture, safety cars) got adopted by F1 through the 1980s, specially as F1 started to lose audience to the American series in the early 1990s.