*This article was first published in Christophorus Magazine, issue 419, a Porsche magazine. Content has been edited for PMW.

Porsche Formula E pilots will have a new model, the 975 RSE, for the coming season. The Porsche Newsroom took a deep dive into the technical development of the Gen4 race car at the Weissach Development Centre

Nico Müller, Formula E factory driver since 2024, has dubbed the new Porsche 975 RSE race car “the Beast.” A maximum of 600kW (816ps), a top speed of 335km/h, and acceleration from 0km/h to 100km/h in 1.8 seconds – these values are enough to put a smile on any race car driver’s face.

Building on the success of the predecessor: The 99X Electric

The name alone, 975 RSE, pays tribute to Porsche Motorsport’s 75th anniversary this year. The groundwork was laid when Pascal Wehrlein clinched the world championship title for drivers in the 2023/2024 season. The Porsche Formula E team went on to win the manufacturers’ and teams’ championships one year later.

The Gen4 race cars represent consistent optimization of the earlier champion vehicles. They’ll enter the 2026/2027 racing season with big wings and plenty of downforce, for a design that’s visually closer to Formula 1, but more importantly will drastically improve grip for faster cornering.

“Formula E has become so fast in just around a decade that we now need aerodynamic downforce,” said Olivier Champenois, technical project leader Formula E at Porsche Motorsport. “But there’s no downforce without drag, which increases energy consumption. To further address this topic, we have two aero packages with different body components: a low-downforce package with less drag for racing and a high-downforce package with more downforce for qualifying, where energy consumption doesn’t matter. We’re talking about up to 150% more downforce than before.”

Visually like Formula 1, internally very different 

The Gen3 Evo 99X Electric powertrain achieves more than 97% efficiency, according to Porsche, compared with less than 55% for the previous generation of Formula 1 race cars. The efficiency is supported by regenerative braking, with energy recovered during deceleration and returned to the battery at rates of up to 700kW, helping the Porsche 975 RSE complete races lasting more than 45 minutes with a usable battery capacity of 51.25kWh.

In fact, the battery contains just around half the energy needed for the race at the starting line, which makes Formula E unique, Porsche says. In other words, it’s the most energy-efficient Formula race car, despite the new aerodynamics, which generate more downforce and are more susceptible to wind than before. “The 975 RSE produces 71% more peak power than its predecessor,” says Champenois.

Durability up, weight and costs down 

Formula E teams operate within energy limits set by the regulations, requiring developers and drivers to maximize efficiency during races. FIA-mandated standardized components also limit the scope for teams to improve performance through in-house development, with the Gen4 regulations retaining common chassis, aerodynamic components, tires and battery systems; as efficiency improves, factors such as weight, durability and cost have become more prominent development priorities.

“Although we’re developing more components in-house, the overall weight of our parts package could not increase by more than 5kg,” says Champenois. “But we were able to make many parts lighter.”

Race car development closely mirrors the development of production sports cars in terms of agility and the myriad demands. However, the cycles in racing are much shorter.

The engineers began with the powertrain of the final iteration of the Gen3 Evo vehicles. Porsche was able to incorporate elements developed in-house: the rear-axle electric motor, the transmission, the differentials, the driveshafts and other powertrain components at the rear axle, and cooling and chassis components at the rear. Not to mention all the operating software. The 975 RSE’s control units contain more than 1.5 million lines of code, broken down into well over a hundred individual modules, each of which fulfills a specific purpose.

A whole new level of recuperation

The software also controls, of course, the energy that the wheel feeds back into the battery when the brakes are applied. That is the key performance factor on the racecourse. Recuperating lots of energy ahead of curves allows you to go full power on the next straight. The 975 RSE’s permanent all-wheel drive supports recuperation power of up to 700kW. In fact, around 50% of the racing energy used by the new Formula E race car comes from recuperation.

The oil-cooled permanent magnet synchronous motor at the rear axle has proven to be a true recuperation marvel and can alone recover energy with power of up to 350kW. An electric motor with water jacket cooling offering the same performance values would have to be around 1.5 times larger.

A closely related version of the 975 RSE’s direct oil-cooling system is also used in the Cayenne Turbo Electric, highlighting technology transfer between Porsche’s racing and production programs. The collaboration also extends to the test benches at the Weissach Development Centre, where components for both road and race cars are evaluated.

From the test lab to reality 

Components undergo testing on the test bench when engineers want to assess their performance and durability before a complete vehicle is available. These components are integrated into the electronic loop, a digitally simulated vehicle environment.

This in-the-loop testing replaces components like control units and therefore enables testing in the lab, even if the physical vehicle exists only in fragments. The scope of this testing has further expanded with the new generation. “The Gen3 was already complex in its own right, but the Gen4 systems are much more so,” confirms Champenois. Due in part to new levels of freedom in calibrating and controlling the axle differentials. After all, every test scenario that can be reproduced on the test bench reduces development costs. The connection to series production is visible here, too.

But the test bench is not reality. Despite state-of-the-art digital tools, it still falls short of reality, which is what makes test-driving indispensable. This is especially true in racing. Nico Müller and Pascal Wehrlein have therefore been testing the 975 RSE on the racecourse since November 2025 – for final calibration of all the systems.

Fans will see the Gen4 car in competition from December 2026, when the Porsche Formula E team is set to field the 975 RSE with drivers Nico Müller and Pascal Wehrlein.

EXPLORE: Aston Martin’s Valen: a front-engined V12 supercar

The post Behind the scenes: Porsche 975 RSE Gen4 Formula E race car appeared first on Professional Motorsport World.

The Valen is clad in a full carbon-fiber body and powered by the brand’s 5.2-liter twin-turbocharged V12 engine with 850ps and 1000Nm of torque from just 2,500rpm. Combined with targeted hardware and extensive software calibration to steering, suspension and braking systems, Valen delivers a driver-focused configuration to match its raw performance, according to Aston Martin.

Aston Martin CEO Adrian Hallmark said, “The latest in a bloodline of limited-production special series models from our bespoke service, Q by Aston Martin, Valen’s world-beating performance required a design to capture the raw motion and unmatched output of our V12 powertrain. With more power, less weight and a spectacular soundtrack, the dramatic design is backed up by equally dramatic performance.”

The Valen features a sharper-shifting 8-speed ZF transmission, which uses race-proven shift strategies developed for Aston Martin’s Vantage GT4 race program, which has reduced Valen’s 0-60mph (96km/h) time to just 3.0 seconds. Top speed is electronically limited to 214mph (344km/h).

Aston Martin director of vehicle performance Simon Newton commented, “When your basis for a project is the world’s most powerful front-engined production car, you know you’re going to have fun. Valen channels the more overt dynamic purpose of a true sports car and amplifies that energy and focus to further unleash Valen’s potential. Everything we’ve done to the powertrain and chassis has been driven by the same objective: to intensify the character and capability to deliver a truly thrilling experience that’s accessible to all skill levels, but keen drivers will absolutely relish.”

To bring out the best from the V12 powertrain, the company adopts a performance drive mode philosophy: Sport, Sport+ and Track. Careful attention has also been paid to Valen’s throttle mapping, which changes according to drive mode.

The Valen also has weight savings of up to 110kg over the core V12 platform. This was achieved through lightweight motorsport-inspired materials, including carbon fiber, aluminum, titanium and magnesium. An optional lightweight pack featuring machined-from-solid aluminum suspension arms, knuckles and titanium chassis bolts makes a 16.9kg weight saving.

New lightweight magnesium wheels are fitted as standard. These are shod with Aston Martin-tuned Pirelli P Zero R (275/35 ZR21 front, 325/30 ZR21 rear) or P Zero Winter 2 tires (275/35 R21 front, 325/30 R21 rear).

A combination of major hardware changes and targeted software calibration adjustments to the ESP, dampers, steering, camber, and braking system delivers a marked character shift, giving Valen a unique dynamic signature.

Focused front and rear lateral stiffness delivers precise response and confident direction changes. Reduced roll and pitch motions to driver inputs increase the feeling of agility compared with the core V12 platform while preserving a playful handling balance for maximum enjoyment.

There was an intense development focus on the steering, tuned to deliver feel, connection and system stiffness through the chassis. Steering efforts have been tuned for response, allowing Valen to behave like a shorter, lighter car.

Valen also employs a solid-mounted rear subframe together with model-specific springs, helper springs and Bilstein DTX semi-active dampers. Steering calibration maximizes the feeling of agility and exploits the front-end’s limits of grip.

To ensure all points of contact between car and driver have cohesive feel and response, Valen’s brake booster maintains a firm pedal for exceptional precision and complete driver confidence, allowing precise modulation of the 410mm front and 360mm rear carbon ceramic brakes from high and low speeds.

The Valen features a lightweight titanium exhaust system. The system has been developed specifically for the vehicle and features new micro mufflers, ensuring compliance with homologation regulations. The quad exhaust system evokes the design language of a mid-engine hypercar, molded into the form of a front mid-engined supercar, with four tailpipes split between two upper and two lower. The upper exhaust exits are always open, with the lower exits valved, opening depending on drive mode.

Aston Martin EVP and chief creative officer Marek Reichman said, “Valen gave us the opportunity to explore and express more extreme emotions through a new form of language and surface treatment. As such, Valen is a significant departure from what has gone before, with sharply sculpted lines to reflect the aggressive dynamics, an attacking stance that emphasizes the front-engine rear-drive layout and a bespoke interior design that creates a more sporting cockpit environment. Valen is a provocative front-engined supercar exuding increased potency and sporting intent, yet still celebrating the elevated luxury, meticulous detailing and unmistakable design signatures expected of a flagship Aston Martin.”

The post Aston Martin’s Valen: a front-engined V12 supercar appeared first on Professional Motorsport World.

Lawrence Butcher looks at the development of the Mercedes-AMG One road-legal hybrid hypercar

One interesting point is that during the development of AMG One’s powertrain, there was minimal influence from the F1 side of HPP, despite the ongoing development of the racing PU. The ICE and associated systems were effectively frozen at the 2015 specification and later developments were not incorporated.

However, there was one key exception: the MGU-H. During the 2016 Formula 1 season, Lewis Hamilton suffered MGU-H failures at the Chinese and Russian grands prix. Those failures were traced to a turn-to-turn short, believed to be from a production difficulty in the winding process. “We had fundamentally made it very, very hard to make right,” says Allsopp. “We were too aggressive on the engineering and on how the coils were wound and interacting, so it was not a sufficiently robust, repeatable process.”

Using HPP’s comprehensive fault-management process, a thorough fault analysis followed each race failure, which extended to examining the behavior of everything associated with the motor, including the silicon carbide switches in the power electronics, their switching frequency and the potential effect of that on the coil insulation under extended running. Fundamental design changes were made for the 2017 season. When Allsopp took over the AMG One program, he was determined that the 275 production cars would carry the post-2016 design, not the unit that had failed in race conditions.

The battery pack has the same cell chemistry and design used in Formula 1, configured as the equivalent of four F1 battery modules in parallel. One significant difference from race use is that the AMG One must balance each of its cells on board.

In F1, the battery is removed from the car after each race and the voltage of each cell is checked and aligned. Clearly this is not practical for a road car, so the BMS needed its own balancing capability.

Bringing all the powertrain elements together from a software perspective, with full compliance to the required ASIL standards, was an undertaking in itself. “Looking at the complexity of the software, it was an area we underestimated,” says Allsopp. “We have the benefit in racing that the software is very open and we can architect solutions very quickly. With production controllers, it is not that simple.”

AMG One ended up running a blend of bespoke software solutions developed by HPP (and its partners) and standard road-car elements. Development engineer Adam Munday explains, “We did use some Bosch solutions where we maybe didn’t have the expertise – things like lambda sensor dew-point calculation and a lot of the OBD functions. They are areas where we are not experts, but for someone working on other road-car programs it’s a matter of adapting proven functions with some hardware-specific adjustments.”

The software integration required huge effort and coordination between the various parties within Mercedes, but the result was all of the control units working together harmoniously, tied in with a UI that would be familiar to any Mercedes road-car driver, and a powertrain operating to its full potential, reliably.

Hybrid development

The reliability requirements for the AMG One were rigorous: 5,000km between services and 50,000km between major powertrain services and refreshes. To put this in perspective, the 2015 PU had a total service life of around 5,000km.

Achieving these targets, not just for the powertrain but for the vehicle as a whole, required a blending of motorsport and production-car development approaches. In the motorsport world – particularly in F1, where track running is tightly limited – great reliance is placed on test-bench development, far more so than with road cars. For the AMG One, this entailed two dedicated test cells at Brixworth: one for calibration development, the other capable of full powertrain running, “Dyno seven was dedicated for AMG One use,” says Munday. “For durability running, it was especially useful to run the full car powertrain as a whole.”

Once an initial specification had been derived from the F1 PU, the team worked through multiple iterations, some more significant than others, to prove out each batch of changes. These test iterations “followed our F1 naming convention, starting with B1, 1.1, etc; we ended up at B2.3,” explains Munday.

Allsopp says of the project progression, “Dyno running moved to 24/7. In F1, we track our long-run progress against time. We have a well-defined profile and drive its delivery hour by hour, day by day, relentlessly. All I did was take the same engineering approaches we used in F1, clarified the mission and shared my honest assessment that in reality we were a long way off track versus where we need to be. We then built an aggressive plan and worked tirelessly as a team to get our heads above water.”

This intensive cycle of iteration and running ultimately led to a roadworthy powertrain, though there were nuances in the process, again highlighting how the high-pressure environment of F1 drives creative and concurrent thinking. “We created several phases, because there were some changes we could implement more quickly than others – for example, those related to the NVH and emissions challenges – so we packaged them in phases to prove out the durability of those changes in a controlled manner,” says Allsopp.

Importantly, a second dyno was available in parallel to focus purely on combustion development. This ability to run combustion and durability programs simultaneously was essential to the compressed timeline. However, what the dyno or simulation could not replicate exactly were the many edge cases that the car would be subjected to in customer hands.

Once mule cars became available, an intensive program of track and road testing began. This encompassed running across a range of conditions, from the European Alps to Portugal and Spain, enabling refinement of the powertrain calibration under real-world conditions. The track-testing element also flagged up potential reliability issues. For example, a weakness was found in the quill shaft connecting the front motors to the front-axle gearbox. Pushed to the limit on track, specifically when running over curbs, it produced oscillating loads that were not captured in any of the previous simulation models.

Elements such as cold-start performance, handling variations in fuel quality, and the full span of duty cycles from slow urban driving to sustained full-performance operation were all worked through, with the findings fed back to the test-bench work at Brixworth.

It was during this phase that the teams at HPP and AMG took their collaboration to a new level, blending elements of the race team’s approach with testing with road-car practice. The contrasts are worth noting. For all its heat of competition, F1 is a relatively controlled environment; the teams know where the cars will run and how the drivers are likely to drive them. The range of unknowns of road-car use were something of an alien environment. “There was quite a difference in expectation of what was done where,” says Allsopp, “and it was a really good conversation with AMG. We were challenging each other about what needed to be done, and actually the middle ground ended up being the right place.”

Bringing AMG One into reality was a protracted process. There’s was a reason no one had successfully tried to run an F1 powertrain on the road before: it’s unbelievably challenging. The first customer deliveries were not made until the end of 2022, which one might think would lead to dissatisfaction. But AMG did something unusual: it took its customers along for the ride. Rather than being shielded from the challenges of the project, customers were brought in early and given full visibility of the development process; they felt invested in it. “They became part of the journey and, later in the program, had great transparency of why there were delays and what we were doing about them. It gave them a unique experience,” says Allsopp.

It’s unlikely anyone is going to try anything similar to the AMG One any time soon; there are few manufacturers that could even contemplate such an undertaking. It was only by blending the huge resources of a company the size of Mercedes with the laser-focused mindset and almost unmatched engineering expertise of HPP in Brixworth that AMG One could become reality.

Related news, Mercedes-AMG One breaks its own lap record at the Nürburgring-Nordschleife

The post Tech Insider: Mercedes-AMG One – Part 2 appeared first on Professional Motorsport World.

Lawrence Butcher looks at the development of the Mercedes-AMG One road-legal hybrid hypercar

Until recently, no one had ever successfully built a road car around an F1 engine. There have been close tries, and engines from race cars have ended up fitted to road cars in modified form. Porsche’s Carrera GT took the base engine from the company’s RS Spyder LMP. Going the other way, BMW’s 1980s M12 F1 engine used a road-car block. But taking an unadulterated F1 engine and putting it in a road car had never been done, until Mercedes decided to do the unthinkable. The result? The AMG One.

The genesis of AMG One began in Mercedes’s dominant 2014 and 2015 Formula 1 seasons. The 1.6-liter V6 turbocharged hybrid power unit (PU) that powered Lewis Hamilton to consecutive Drivers’ World Championships was, by any measure, a generational piece of engineering. To celebrate and capitalize on this success, Mercedes and AMG began exploring the concept of a road-legal hypercar using the W06’s powertrain. The main questions: Was it even feasible and, if it were, how much of the F1 PU could survive the transition to the road intact?

Toward the end of 2015, a small group at Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains in Brixworth, UK – specifically what is now called the Advanced Technology group – began concept work, sketching out what changes would theoretically be required before the program formally launched in 2017.

Mercedes-AMG’s plan was to produce 275 cars, the highlight of which would be an essentially unmodified F1 PU: the 1.6-liter turbocharged V6 ICE, the MGU-H harvesting energy from the turbocharger, and the MGU-K recovering energy under braking from the rear axle, plus an additional pair of electric motors driving the front axle. The combined system would output over 1,000hp. Getting that package through European road-car homologation was far from easy and pushed even the team at HPP – a group well used to achieving the impossible – to the limit.

Powertrain preservation

Adam Allsopp, currently director of Advanced Technology at Mercedes AMG HPP, was deeply involved in the powertrain development. When the project began, he was engineering director on the Formula 1 program, but in 2018 he became increasingly engaged with the road car before becoming sole program lead in 2019. According to Allsopp, there was an almost single-minded pursuit of keeping the powertrain “pure” and only departing from the racing design where absolutely necessary.

“Wherever we were faced with difficult challenges, if the solution was going to move us away from what the regulation specified for that engine, that troubled me because it felt like we would be watering it down,” he recalls.

Changes to the fundamental ICE architecture were to be avoided wherever possible – a tall order, given that the F1 ICE was entirely optimized to produce maximum power and efficiency within the fuel-flow-limited constraints of the F1 regulations. From the oversquare bore to stroke ratio, injector position, spark plug location, intake port geometry and cam profile, everything was developed for top-end performance and efficiency. But AMG One would be a road car; it needed low-speed manners and, importantly, noise and emissions compliance.

The Advanced Technology team at HPP took the approach of augmentation rather than alteration. Where the F1 architecture created a problem, the team sought solutions that worked around the core design. “It was about protecting those attributes and then trying to work out how you enhance rather than remove,” says Allsopp.

The eventual addition of port fuel injection alongside the existing direct injection system is a prime example of that approach in action. Rather than revising the combustion chamber, port injection (coupled with some subtle changes to the intake port geometry) improved fuel atomization and mixture preparation at low speeds, and aided stabilization of combustion at idle and light load without touching the high-speed combustion strategy.

Also supporting low-speed running was a redesigned throttle, in which the original barrel throttles were replaced with more traditional butterflies. “At high speed, it’s still got the same combustion philosophy,” Allsopp says. The idea of implementing variable valve timing (banned in F1) was floated to reduce low-speed emissions. However, although this would undoubtedly have helped, it was rejected to protect the DNA of the ICE.

Another tool that could be called upon to help with low-speed emissions compliance was the MGU-K, used to load the engine at low RPM. By harvesting energy from the ICE and directing it into the battery at light throttle, the team could maintain engine load at a point where combustion quality was acceptable. A quirk of this approach is that AMG One will not run its combustion engine if the battery is full, because the MGU-K loading strategy requires somewhere for that harvested energy to go. “It sounds a bit weird and a little bit counterintuitive,” acknowledges Allsopp, “but really it was about using the tools at our disposal to work out how this over-constrained problem could be solved.”

Cold-start emissions were also addressed, partly through catalyst preheating using the car’s high-voltage electrical system, a solution made practical by the available battery capacity. What couldn’t be tackled at source was handled through exhaust aftertreatment.

Electrical hurdles

The purity of purpose applied to the ICE was carried over to the electric machines. Initially, the race- specification MGU-H and MGU-K were simply swapped into the production PU, with two MGU-Ks deployed on the front axle. However, the reality of producing a relatively large run of these motors and ensuring they were fit for road use presented a few challenges.

The rear-mounted MGU-K was kept exactly as on the race car, directly driving the crank. At the front, a pair of MGUs was packaged with reduction gears to create what is referred to as the MGU-Fs. The electric machines run at very high speed: 35,000rpm for the rear and around 50,000rpm at the front. The motors are oil cooled, with two separate cooling circuits; the rotor is cooled using engine oil (and gearbox oil at the front), and the stator by a second loop that also incorporates the inverters.

It was in the motors that one of the project’s biggest hurdles emerged: NVH. Jack Mowat-Maconochie, now head of supply chain for the Advanced Technology group, observes, “In 2018 we started the drive-by noise testing. We knew the engine to be loud, but the electric machines were incredibly loud as well.” So loud, in fact, that they would never pass muster for road use. A solution was needed, but the source of the noise needed to be pinpointed first.

It was established that there were two key culprits: the gears in the front-axle fixed-ratio gearbox, and the electrical characteristics of the electric motors. The first was relatively straightforward to overcome, with detail work on the micro- and macro-geometry of the gears bringing the noise within tolerable margins. A similar process had to be undertaken on the ICE, which features a gear-driven camtrain positioned directly behind the driver, and initially proved a little too aurally aggressive.

The electrical element of the noise problem proved more troublesome and required an almost total rework of the motor architecture. “I was fiercely against changing the motor,” says Allsopp, who felt that doing so would detract from the overall ethos of the car. But the decision was effectively made for the team: “It was actually some of the NVH experts from AMG who said, ‘Look, here’s the data. You might not want to do this, but you will not sell this car with this motor.’ It’s quite hard to argue with that.”

Again, the easy option would have been to move away from the constraints originally set by the regulations, transition to a larger-diameter motor, reduce the RPM and cut the power. Instead, HPP set about reengineering the motor to fulfill the same brief as the original, but in an NVH-compliant way.

The result was an electrical redesign within the same packaging space, moving from a six-slot to a 24-slot architecture, as well as changes such as replacing Litz wire with more conventional windings. Coupled with revised magnet selection, a revised casing and the gear improvements, the result was a system that retained the spirit of the F1 units while meeting the stringent road-car legality requirements.

The new electrical design was also transferred to the rear MGU-K. “They’re identical,” says mechanical engineer Mark Digby. “They use the same rotor, stator and winding setup. They’re just packaged in different external housings to connect to the engine block and front gearbox respectively.” The choice to maintain commonality front and rear was a pragmatic one. “It was done to try to maximize commonality, so we are not making lots of different types of rotors and stators, given we had to produce more than 900 of them,” notes Digby.

From an F1 perspective, a run of this volume counts as mass production and required HPP to find a more efficient manufacturing process than the painstaking, largely manual approach used on F1 PUs. To this end, the engine maker developed automated in-house production capability for the rotors and stators, enabling repeatable production of motors regardless of the quantity required. “We were hand-winding them initially, and that was just not sustainable,” recalls Digby.

Continued in part 2 … 

Related news, Mercedes-AMG One breaks its own lap record at the Nürburgring-Nordschleife

The post Tech Insider: Mercedes-AMG One – Part 1 appeared first on Professional Motorsport World.

* The original version of this article was published by Nissan Motor Corporation.

Nissan Formula E Team’s most important development tool isn’t the race car; it’s a state-of-the-art simulator helping to shape the team’s on-track success

Formula E race weekend. Over 9,000km from the circuit, a special ops team is working hard in the Nissan Formula E Team HQ in Paris, putting in vital and sustainable work to help drivers Oliver Rowland and Norman Nato secure more points in their pursuit of championship success.

Plenty about Formula E tallies beautifully with the advancing world of driver-in-the-loop simulators. The sport’s limited track testing time and its celebrated street circuits, which can’t be recced or rehearsed in any traditional sense, both ensure a state-of-the-art sim isn’t just desirable, it’s the bedrock of a successful team.

Tommaso Volpe, the managing director and team principal of the Nissan Formula E Team, explains, “With Formula E’s limited physical testing, the ability to run highly accurate simulations is crucial not only for race preparation but also for car and powertrain development. This new simulator is already helping us accelerate our engineering process, validate software and optimize the car long before we reach the circuit.”

A new dawn

The Dynisma DMG-1, installed at the Nissan Formula E Team HQ in 2025, helps combat the frenetic pace of a Formula E race weekend. Drivers Oliver Rowland and Norman Nato can walk each track with their engineers on the Friday morning ahead of practice, feeding vital information they pick up on surface or corner geometry changes – to which the series’ temporary city courses can be especially vulnerable – directly back to the team’s Paris base so that their race tactics can evolve via the sim ahead of the physical car running on track.

A pair of British drivers are at the heart of Nissan Formula E Team’s sim work. Reserve and development driver Sam Bird puts in race-preparation work in the weeks ahead of a Formula E round, refining team strategies. As race weekend approaches, rookie and simulator driver Abbi Pulling can work antisocial hours to reflect the shifting time zones of the Formula E calendar, with races in São Paulo, Sanya and Tokyo all nudging 6,000 miles (almost 10,000 kilometres) away as the crow flies.

Volpe says, “Our official driver wouldn’t be able to jump in the car and put together their performance without the job that has been done by our sim drivers; it acts as a work of screening as we discover the best way to approach each race.”

A state-of-the-art sim

Alongside Oliver, Abbi and Sam, the strong British connection in Nissan Formula E Team is galvanized by its Bristol-made racing simulator. The Dynisma DMG-1 is among the most advanced in the race series and a crucial component of both race preparation and future car development.

Dynisma’s DMG-1 allies an ultra-low-latency motion response (under 5ms) with high-bandwidth primary motion (up to 100Hz). This gives it the necessary precision and responsiveness for truly accurate setup work and engineering analysis.

This is vital in Formula E, when the nuances of powertrain system change between drive and regen needs to be precisely communicated to the driver. Any small shifts in the car’s balance are crucial for predicting its behavior through tight, twisting city courses where there’s typically zero margin for error. Curb strikes, weight transfer, vibrations and stability changes at the limit of grip are all essential cues for any sim driver.

Rowland comments, “In Formula E, we have very few test days and only two short practice sessions before qualifying, so what we achieve in the simulator is incredibly important. It helps us understand the track, prepare systems and arrive on race weekend ready to perform.”

Dorian Boisdron, the team director of Nissan Formula E Team, says, “The simulator is key not only to prepare for races but also to prepare our new cars. The DMG-1 is perfectly suited to our technical requirements, offering excellent realism and strong engineering support, in addition to our great working relationship with the Dynisma team, which helps us to progress quickly.”

Getting ready for GEN4

The Dynisma simulator forms a big part of GEN4 car development. The development of the GEN4 car’s dual motors and their active differentials is quicker and more informed thanks to the accuracy of the Dynisma DMG-1, helping to inform the engineering team’s decisions.

The fourth generation of Formula E race car represents a significant leap in performance, while permanent all-wheel drive and the debut of a power steering system ensure a major shift in driving dynamics over its predecessor. Preparation work on the sim is core to the sustainable progression of this thrilling new chapter for single-seater motorsport.

The race car delivers up to 600kW (816hp) in peak output, up from 350kW (476hp), enabling 0-62mph (0-100km) acceleration in 1.8 seconds and a top speed of 208mph (335km/h). According to the company, it is also the world’s first single-seat race car with permanent all-wheel drive.

Boisdron comments, “When you begin designing a new car, especially for GEN4, simulation comes first. You start with a sophisticated virtual model, but it is essential to put the driver in the loop as early as possible. The DMG-1 allows us to do that with confidence. Its realism and fidelity give us the best-possible chance of transferring performance from the virtual world to the track.

“The GEN4 car is very sophisticated. It is full of chassis systems and has the capacity to accurately control the motor. If you take it directly to the track, you have a low chance of quickly being in the performance ballpark; it requires so much track time. Preparation before each test means we are already in a good window to operate the car and as close to the peak of its performance as possible.”

A lasting legacy

Nissan has consistently embraced and celebrated the link between virtual and on-track performance, pioneering GT Academy in 2008 to bring gamers to the grid and prove talents fostered in a simulated world are directly transferable to the tarmac. Over five million entrants produced 21 winners, with podiums at the 24 Hours of Le Mans and race and championship wins at renowned events attesting their skills.

“It is exciting to see Nissan Formula E Team already gaining value from its new driving simulator,” Simon Holloway, Dynisma’s commercial director, concludes. “We are pleased to be working with Nissan Formula E Team as their official simulator partner and to support their preparations for GEN4, where advanced simulation will play a central role.”

EXPLORE: F1: Aeroelasticity in the age of active aerodynamics

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The wing of a Formula 1 car has one main job: create a pressure difference. Bernoulli’s equation explains how the pressure below the wing drops as its shape makes the air flow faster beneath it than above it. This lower pressure pulls the wing down and pushes the car into the ground. The extra downforce loads the tires, giving them more grip so the driver can go faster through corners. The wing’s purpose is to manage the load on the four contact patches, each about the size of a human hand, which are the only places where these 1,000hp cars touch the track. Everything the aerodynamicist, structural engineer and suspension designer does is focused on those four patches: increasing load when the car needs grip and easing it off smoothly when the car needs speed.

What the wing must now do

A wing that generates downforce also creates induced drag – the lift/drag ratio, which is the cost of redirecting airflow. At low speeds in corners, where tire load matters most, this trade-off is worth it. At high speeds, the reverse is true.

With the current rules, both the front and rear wings have movable elements. In straight-line mode (known as X-mode), these rotate to lower the angle of attack, which reduces downforce and, consequently, drag. In corner mode (also known as Y-mode), they move back to generate maximum downforce. Unlike older drag-reduction systems, moving both wings at once maintains balance between the front and rear, keeping tire loads more even and the car more stable.

“The magnitude of downforce defines the envelope the driver can explore, and it sets the outer limit of how fast they can go through a given corner,” explains former F1 aerodynamicist Jack Chilvers. “But what drivers are actually most sensitive to is balance. Where is the aerodynamic load sitting relative to the front axle versus the rear? In our experience, drivers prefer a slight front bias of just over 50% because it gives them the bite into the corner on entry. They want to feel the nose commit. So when you have a step change in the transition back to corner mode, it is not just the magnitude of the returning downforce that matters. The question is whether the front and rear returns occur at the same rate and in the same proportion. Any asymmetry in that transition shifts the balance at exactly the moment the driver needs most confidence in the car.”

The transition window lasts up to 400ms, which is the maximum allowed by the rules. During this time, the car’s total aerodynamic load changes substantially, and so does the load on the suspension. As the straight mode is engaged, the downforce drops, the suspension extends, the car rises and the ride height increases. When the wings switch back to corner mode, the aero pushes the car down again. Ride height is critical. As the gap between the floor and the ground changes, the speed of air under the car changes too, which affects the pressure drop and the center of pressure under the floor. If the car is pitching during this transition, the pressure field under the floor also changes, leading to fluctuating tire load and thus grip.

The structural consequence

As aerodynamic load increases, every wing will bend to a degree. This is normal for any elastic structure under stress, and it is a characteristic that can be made beneficial, particularly with a wing made from carbon composites. If a wing skin is designed so that bending and twisting are linked, it will twist as it bends under increased load. That twist alters the angle of attack as the leading edge rises relative to the trailing edge, reducing downforce and induced drag as the load increases.

In aeroelastic terms, this is known as washout: a deliberate structural response that reduces the aerodynamic loading on the wing as it deflects. The concept is not new. The first controlled application of structural washout was demonstratedin a high-performance aircraft called the X-29, which featured a forward-swept wing where fiber orientations in the composite skin were specifically arranged to induce nose- down twist under bending load, preventing aerodynamic divergence. The principle has been refined continuously since, and in Formula 1 it has been exploited for decades despite the best efforts of regulators to limit its effect.

The washout effect grows with the square of speed, so it happens most when it is most needed. Even in the era of active aerodynamics, harnessing this passive, speed-based structural response alongside the active system remains valuable. The moveable parts rotate when commanded, but the composite skin starts to unload the wing before that rotation is complete, smoothing the entire transition.

“If you go from straight-line mode back to corner mode, the car sees a large and rapid increase in downforce,” Chilvers notes. “The suspension is going to respond to that, and in extreme terms, it will try to slam the car down. As the cars  are pitch sensitive and ride-height sensitive, that load change does not just add grip; it shifts the peak pressure distribution beneath the floor as the ride height changes. If the composite structure softens that transition – as in, if the load builds more progressively before the full actuation arrives – you give the suspension a much more manageable input. The ride height settles rather than oscillates. And an oscillating ride height is an oscillating aero balance, which is the last thing a driver needs when they are already asking everything of the tires.”

The tire is where this all comes together. “Think about what that contact patch is being asked to absorb,” Chilvers continues. “You go from a relatively low-load condition in straight-line mode to full corner mode in 400ms. The tire has to respond to the increased vertical load while simultaneously generating lateral and longitudinal forces for braking and turn-in. That is a significant ask in a very short time. If the composite structure is doing any part of that work in advance, starting to bring the load back before the actuation fires, smoothing the gradient, then the tire has a more manageable transition. There is a meaningful difference between a load arriving as a wave and a load arriving as a wall.”

A team using this setup can also run the car lower during cornering. Because the passive aeroelastic response starts to unload the wing before the car reaches its highest straight- line speeds, there is less risk of the vehicle being pushed into the ground under peak load, which could wear through the required plank and risk disqualification. Running lower increases airflow velocity under the floor, deepens the pressure drop at the diffuser entry, and boosts downforce in corners, where grip matters most.

The material that makes it possible

Carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer is anisotropic, so its properties depend fundamentally on direction. A single unidirectional ply of intermediate-modulus carbon is more than 30 times stiffer along the fiber axis than across it, a degree of directionality that no metallic material approaches. But not all carbon-fiber material is selected for the same reason, and in a structure as load-complex as a front wing, that distinction matters considerably.

“From a fiber perspective, they generally fall into two categories,” explains Jamie Wheat, industry process expert at Dassault Systèmes and former head of FEA tools and strategy at Red Bull. “That’s stiffness-related or strength-related. Whether you’d use something like a T1000 or an M55J or M46J depends on the scenario you’re looking at.  In something like a front wing, in the strength-critical areas, you would use a strength-dominated fiber rather than a stiffness-dominated one. And in the areas where you want stiffness, and you’re not necessarily worried about strength, you would use the stiffness-dominated fibers. It’s not uncommon to mix and match depending on what  that region of the structure needs to do.”

Resin selection follows the same logic of matching the material to the environment. The front of the car runs cooler than the rear, and a resin system curing at 135°C provides a good balance between ease of manufacture and thermal resistance for most aerodynamic surfaces in free airflow. Components operating in higher-temperature regions – near brake ducts, for example – migrate to bismaleimide systems curing around 177°C, retaining stiffness where a standard epoxy would begin to soften.

The fibers themselves are delivered in pre-preg form: pre-impregnated with partially cured resin in controlled quantities. A front wing cannot be built from unidirectional (UD) tape alone. “You’ve got to have woven in there to take the shear loads, among other reasons,” Wheat notes. “Formula 1 teams have experience in terms of how many UDs in a stack they can use between woven layers, and they’ll stick to that relationship.” Woven fabrics in the 150-240g/m² range handle the complex, curved surfaces of aerodynamic components without misaligning the fibers. Spread-tow fabrics, where fiber tows are opened flat before weaving, to eliminate crimp, can achieve areal weights as low as 43g/m², meeting stiffness and coupling targets at reduced mass. Every gram saved can be redeployed as ballast, adjusting the car’s center of gravity and the front-to-rear tire load distribution.

Stack multiple plies at different angles, and the laminate’s mechanical character becomes a designed property. How it responds to forces and bending is described by three matrices: A for in-plane behavior, D for bending and B for the coupling between them. The bend-twist response that produces the washout effect is driven primarily by unbalanced laminates, which are those where the fiber angle distribution is not symmetric about the laminate’s reference axis, or by rotating the primary stiffness axis of the laminate relative to the wing’s own axis. This is a subtle but important distinction: it is not laminate asymmetry through the thickness that generates bend-twist coupling in the way most commonly understood, but rather the angular relationship between the dominant fibers and the structural axis of the wing. The bend-twist response emerges from the aggregate of every ply angle through the thickness, and particularly from the off-diagonal terms in the A and D matrices that arise when the laminate is unbalanced in this sense.

Designing the response

Choosing the right ply angles to achieve a target aeroelastic behavior is an optimization problem, and the simulation environment used to solve it has become considerably more capable than it once was. In the approach used by engineering teams today, CAD and structural simulation share a common data model, where a design change made in the geometry automatically propagates to the finite element model and reruns the analysis. What would previously have required a manual handoff between software packages now happens within a single connected environment, allowing engineers to iterate rapidly through laminate configurations and observe the structural consequence of each change in near real time.

The starting point for the structural simulation is the aerodynamic load field from CFD. A Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulation resolves the pressure distribution across every surface of the wing, including upper skin, lower skin and the slot regions between elements. That pressure field becomes the boundary condition for the finite element structural model. The solver calculates how the wing deflects, which updates the aerodynamic geometry, and the coupled simulation iterates until the airflow and structural solution converge. “The stiffness response of composites is fairly well defined,” Wheat notes. “It’s a complex material but it’s a fairly simplistic problem to solve. So if you’ve got confidence in either wind tunnel or CFD, then developing a wing to do something specific in terms of aeroelasticity should be relatively straightforward.”

The aerodynamicists, however, define the limits within which the composite engineer works. The wing’s external geometry, which is known as its wetted surface, belongs to the aerodynamics department, and changing it to suit the structural design is not generally an option. “So the only thing you can do is change the layup and the construction to incorporate the behavior at the load cases you’ve been given,” Wheat explains. “Typically, you would simulate several load cases, including high speed and low speed, to see what the wing does under those conditions, and then talk to the aerodynamicist about whether the level of back-on or back-off is what they’re looking for to change the aero balance between those two conditions.”

This back-and-forth between laminate engineer and aerodynamicist, mediated by a simulation environment that can predict the structural outcome of any laminate configuration, is how the wing’s aeroelastic response is arrived at. Optimization tools within the simulation environment can automate the exploration of laminate configurations against target displacement outputs, and AI-assisted design tools allow engineers to visualize the impact of design decisions in near real time, compressing an iterative process that once took weeks into something that can be explored in hours. Studies using this approach on F1-scale rear wings have confirmed that extension-shear coupled laminates, optimized through lamination parameters using response surface methodology, produce measurable induced drag reduction at high speed while cornering downforce is maintained at low speed, and that the gradient of the load change matters as much as its magnitude.

From model to measurement

Simulation establishes that the design is physically coherent. Wind-tunnel testing confirms that the structure built to the specification behaves as the model predicted, in a real aerodynamic environment where material variability, manufacturing tolerances and changing airflow are all present. But the confidence in the simulation itself has to be earned before either of those steps can be trusted.

That confidence begins with material characterization. “Teams would do specimen testing, developing their own material samples, and they might do batch-to-batch variation tests to calibrate materials,” Wheat notes. “If you’re trying to do anything complex, like coupling bend and twist, you would produce specific test items and take those ideas forward at a relatively small scale before moving to larger components.” The mechanical properties extracted from those specimen tests become the material data embedded in the simulation model. When the model predicts one behavior and the physical part delivers another, the investigation that follows is about understanding which assumption was wrong, not simply adjusting the design. “You’d want to know why there was a difference, rather than just reacting,” Wheat observes. “If you understand where the differences come from, you have a chance of capturing the same differences next time.”

Wind-tunnel testing contributes a great deal to the aerodynamic development of a Formula 1 wing, but its role in validating aeroelastic behavior specifically is more limited than it might appear. Tunnel testing is limited to 60% scale models and wind speeds up to 180km/h, meaning it is extremely difficult to simultaneously match both the aerodynamic load distribution and the structural stiffness of the full-size part. A component that replicates the scaled aerodynamic geometry will not replicate the scaled structural response, and a component tuned to match the stiffness scaling will compromise the aerodynamic fidelity. In practice, the parts that go into the tunnel are often machined aluminum or 3D-printed components rather than hand-laminated carbon, both for the speed of production that wind-tunnel testing demands and because a fully laminated composite part built to the correct ply schedule would be too slow and costly to manufacture at the pace of tunnel development cycles.

What the tunnel does deliver with confidence is the aerodynamic force data, including lift, drag and pitching moment across the speed range, along with the pressure distribution that feeds back into the coupled CFD-FEM model. That data is invaluable for refining the aerodynamic load field the structural model is working from. The structural response itself is validated through a different and more fragmented process.

Pre-season testing provides the most direct window into real full-size composite wing behavior under realistic aerodynamic loads, and it is here, with the car running at track speeds on representative surfaces, that teams can observe actual deflection behavior and compare it against simulation predictions. Strain gauges and on-car measurement systems capture load and deformation data that the simulation environment can then be correlated against. The result is not a single clean validation event but an iterative process of simulation, track observation and model refinement that builds confidence in the coupled CFD-FEM approach over time and across development cycles.

The manufactured wing

The aeroelastic response depends on the lamination parameters, and the lamination parameters are only realized if the finished wing matches the designed ply angles. A consistent angular error across several plies shifts the coupling terms in B and D away from their targets, changing the passive twist response and delivering a load gradient that the suspension was not set up to manage.

Plies are cut to net shape by CNC machines from digital flat-pattern data and hand-laminated into female composite tooling under clean-room conditions, often with the aid of laser projections for positioning, with vacuum de-bulking applied at intervals to consolidate each stage. The autoclave typically cures the part at around 7 bar at the specified resin temperature, achieving a fiber volume fraction of 55-65%. Sandwich constructions where thin CFRP skins are formed over aluminum or Nomex honeycomb cores are processed in staged cure cycles, with the outer skin cured at full autoclave pressure and subsequent stages at lower pressures that the core can tolerate.

Precision on placement

The simulation environment extends into this manufacturing process. Producibility analysis tools allow engineers to simulate how fibers actually orient themselves during a hand layup on complex-curved tooling, identifying where fiber paths deviate from the theoretical and what that deviation does to the structural properties the model specifies.

“We have the capability of simulating a hand layup component and looking at where the fibers actually go rather than the theoretical,” Wheat explains. “While the person in the clean room must make it as you’ve simulated it, that reliance is managed through close collaboration between the laminator, the composite designer and the simulation engineer, working together in real time on the shop floor. Where the layup deviates from the simulation, the conversation between those three disciplines resolves it on the spot, feeding the adjustment back into the model so that the as-built part and the predicted behavior remain aligned.

“It is a genuinely collective process, and the fidelity of the finished wing to its designed aeroelastic response depends as much on that collaboration as it does on the quality of the simulation or the skill of the individual laminator. Whenmaterial calibration is thorough and that collaborative discipline is maintained through the layup, the simulation earns its status as a reliable design instrument, and any remaining discrepancy between predicted and physical behavior points the engineering team toward a specific and addressable cause rather than an unexplained gap.”

The system thinking behind the wing

When the wing is fitted to the car, it becomes part of a system where aerodynamic surfaces, suspension and tires all work together to manage the vertical load on the tire contact patch. The wing creates this load, the suspension transfers and adjusts it, and the tire converts it into grip, which lets the car change speed and direction quickly.

The active system switches the wing between modes. The composite skin begins that transition on its own, smoothing the load before the actuated elements have finished moving. The suspension accommodates this gradual input and keeps ride height more stable, maintaining a consistent pressure field beneath the floor. With a load that rises and falls as a wave rather than a wall, the tire holds its grip and gives the driver confidence to go faster.

The wing tips tell their own part of the story. “The wing tips can twist back and drop away at speed, and it’s not just about the load on the wing itself,” Chilvers notes. “The vortex shedding position changes with the wing geometry. As the tip twists and the center of pressure shifts, the shed vortex weakens because the load that generates it has decreased. A weaker, repositioned vortex at high speed that strengthens and returns to position as the car slows into a corner is a passive aerodynamic response to operating conditions, built entirely into how the composite was constructed.”

Everything from fiber type and resin chemistry to ply angles, lamination parameters, coupled CFD-FEM optimization and wind-tunnel validation is made with the goal of ensuring the wing delivers load to the tires as consistently and controllably as possible at every moment of every lap. The simulation environment that connects every step of that process, from first design intent to validated physical behavior, is what makes the aspiration achievable in the development timescales Formula 1 demands. “The key,” Wheat says, “is always learning and capturing the engineering knowledge that comes out of that process, so it’s accessible when regulations change, when the design evolves and when the next set of problems needs to be solved.” In the end, a Formula 1 wing is a tire load management system, built from carbon and resin and tested in the digital world long before it turns a wheel, and oriented precisely to give the driver the confidence that the car will respond exactly as needed, right when it’s needed.

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In Formula 1, engineering, reliability and performance are inseparable. Even relatively small components can determine whether a car finishes a race. In some cases, a single component failure can end a race instantly. One such example is the sealing system in the hydraulic actuator of the limited-slip differential used in modern F1 drivetrains.

The limited-slip differential clutch pack plays a central role in torque distribution across the rear axle. By controlling the difference in wheel speed between the rear wheels, the system maximizes traction and stability through cornering. The hydraulic actuator responsible for this function must operate precisely under rapidly changing loads.

In this actuator, sealing integrity is critical. Any significant leakage can lead to a loss of hydraulic pressure, preventing the clutch from functioning as intended and potentially forcing the car to retire from the race.

Operating conditions inside the actuator are demanding. Temperatures can reach approximately 150°C, while system pressures range from 5-250 bar. At the same time, the seal must tolerate aggressive transmission fluids and repeated mechanical loading throughout race distances. Components must maintain dimensional stability, resist wear and sustain sealing force despite thermal cycling, pressure variation and chemical exposure.

It is this challenge that the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team sought to address when partnering with Greene Tweed on advanced sealing solutions for its limited-slip differential clutch pack.

Engineering limits in real track conditions

Motorsport environments often expose the limits of theoretical design assumptions. While simulation and material data can provide valuable guidance, component behavior may differ when operating within a complete system. This is due to the complex interaction of thermal, mechanical and chemical conditions, which directly influence stresses and material behavior.

In a Formula 1 drivetrain, thermal loads, hydraulic pressure, mechanical motion and fluid interaction occur simultaneously within tightly packaged assemblies. These factors influence friction, wear patterns and long-term dimensional stability, particularly for sealing components.

As a result, validation under representative operating conditions becomes essential. Dynamic testing allows engineers to observe how materials respond over time, identify potential failure modes and refine designs before deployment on track.

Development of the sealing solution

Addressing the demands of the differential actuator requires a sealing architecture capable of consistent performance across wide ranges of pressures, temperatures and dynamic conditions.

For this application, engineers selected a metal spring-energized sealing design. The configuration combines a C-shaped polymer jacket with an internal corrosion-resistant metal spring, ensuring consistent sealing force regardless of system pressure. This architecture helps sustain contact between the seal and the mating surface as pressure and temperature fluctuate.

The sealing jacket is manufactured from a specialized PTFE-based material engineered to balance several performance requirements. Improved material strength supports dimensional stability under pressure, while wear resistance contributes to long operational life. Low creep relaxation helps preserve sealing force over time, and low friction properties support smooth actuator movement.

Together, these characteristics allow the sealing assembly to operate effectively within the actuator’s demanding environment. The spring-energized seal maintains an effective sealing force under conditions where system pressure is low, while the polymer jacket provides chemical compatibility, low friction and durability.

Dynamic testing and design refinement

Although seal pedigree, modeling and material data can help guide early design decisions, physical validation ultimately determines whether a component is suitable for high-performance applications.

To replicate operational conditions as closely as possible, engineers conducted validation testing on a dynamic transmission test rig. This environment reproduced realistic pressure cycling, temperature exposure and mechanical loading similar to those experienced in a working drivetrain.

Testing provided insights into how the sealing assembly behaved under sustained dynamic loads, particularly the effects of pressure fluctuations and thermal cycling on deformation and long-term stability. These conditions could not be fully captured through static testing alone.

Engineers adjusted the sealing configuration to improve resistance to deformation under high pressure and elevated temperature conditions. Through this iterative testing and design refinement, the team qualified the sealing system for use in demanding motorsport conditions.

Enabling system evolution and packaging

Reliable sealing performance can influence broader system design decisions. In high-performance vehicles, engineers continuously seek opportunities to improve packaging efficiency while maintaining reliability.

By delivering consistent sealing performance under extreme thermal, pressure and fluid conditions, the solution increased confidence in system reliability. This enabled engineers to develop a more compact differential architecture without compromising performance.

Improved reliability margins supported packaging optimization and weight reduction – both critical factors in Formula 1 performance.

The sealing solution has been successfully deployed in McLaren’s Formula 1 cars since the 2022 season, demonstrating sustained reliability under real race conditions. Ongoing refinements have strengthened system performance and supported continued drivetrain development, culminating in a next-generation system and seal assembly qualified for the 2026 season.

Engineering considerations for high-pressure motorsport systems

The development of sealing solutions for high-performance motorsport applications highlights several broader engineering principles.

First, sealing performance directly influences system reliability. In hydraulic control systems, even small leaks can disrupt pressure regulation and compromise overall functionality. Seal integrity and efficiency must therefore be treated as a primary design parameter.

Second, validation under combined operating stressors is essential. Factors such as thermal loads, pressure variation, mechanical movement and chemical exposure interact in ways that cannot always be predicted through simulation alone. Dynamic testing provides critical insight into how a seal assembly behaves within realistic system environments.

Finally, close collaboration between system engineers and seal design engineers can significantly accelerate development. Early engagement allows sealing technology to be effectively integrated into the system architecture rather than treated as a late-stage component selection.

In high-performance environments such as Formula 1, where marginal gains and reliability determine race outcomes, these collaborative engineering approaches between Greene Tweed and the McLaren Mastercard Formula 1 Team help ensure that every component performs. Crucially, the lessons learned extend beyond motorsport, informing sealing design strategies in industries such as aerospace, energy and advanced manufacturing, where reliability under extreme conditions is critical.

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Honda has returned to F1 as a works partner of Aston Martin, with the new partnership’s season getting off to something of a rocky start. However, the abilities of Honda’s teams in Sakura City in Japan and Milton Keynes in the UK should never be underestimated, as its comeback in the last rules cycle to provide a multiple championship-winning power unit proved.

PMW Magazine gained an exclusive audience with Honda Racing’s Shintaro Orihara, trackside general manager and chief engineer. Speaking in Bahrain pre-season, he was under no illusions as to the difficulties the new regulations present to a power unit manufacturer.

Top of the list of challenges is handling a 350kW MGU-K with a relatively tiny energy store. “The MGU-K power is massive, but the battery volume is the same as the last regulations,” Orihara explained. “It has become much more difficult to manage the energy, so we need to harvest as much as possible and deploy as much as possible.”

The resulting demands on the energy store, and the management of its energy content, are therefore much greater than before. “The battery SoC swings a lot and also, the power difference between MGU-K on and off is a huge difference. Where we deliver max power, that is a very difficult point,” he said.

Of course, none of this is news, and Honda has been working extensively off-track to nail this balancing act, but it was only once cars were on track in Bahrain that the subtleties became apparent. “We learned this is a very unique regulation through this winter testing. So now we are learning a lot in terms of energy management, that is most challenging for us. The lap time sensitivity [around energy management] is much higher than last year.”

Orihara said that athough much preparation work was undertaken prior to the power unit’s track debut at the Barcelona test, “discussion and actual operation is quite different”. However, he was happy that both parties are approaching the development of the trackside and operational relationship with an open mind.

Works relationship

As a works partner, Honda has been closely integrated with the Aston Martin F1 Team through the build-up to 2026. So how has this working relationship developed, particularly given the presence of Adrian Newey, a designer known to place great importance on tight packaging of the powertrain for aero performance?

According to Orihara, Honda’s in-house development work began back in 2023, with the Aston Martin partnership getting underway soon after. “The power unit has been developed with the team, because the power unit design comes from the car demand,” he explained, with the caveat: “Adrian Newey had a lot of requirements and Honda was keen to listen to those demands and meet those demands as much as possible. We have spent three years [on this] and I think the relationship is quite strong.”

But how do you balance the design intent of someone like Adrian Newey and the practical realities of producing a reliable power unit with the correct performance?

“It’s a good question,” mused Orihara. “It’s important to find the compromise point. But Adrian Newey is the best designer, and if the demand comes from Adrian Newey, Honda will respect that demand as much as possible. Sometimes, if it is impossible from a reliability viewpoint, we may say no. But, if we see a negative performance effect but total [car] performance is increased by the demand, we will respect the demand. It [power unit design] is defined by lap time demand, but also by Adrian demand.”  

Combustion challenges 

Looking at the ICE side of the power unit, Ohirhra singled out the loss of the MGU-H as “a complete game changer”. Previously, he said maximising H performance was everything, as increased output enabled longer deployment of the MGU-K throughout a lap. “If we increased engine performance but that meant we lost MGU-H performance, then we couldn’t use that technology,” he said. “With the new regulations, and no MGU-H, we only need to focus on improving engine performance.”

Ohirhra also pointed to the still-present challenge of maximizing combustion efficiency with the added complication of working with 100% sustainable fuel: “The performance mainly comes from combustion, and for combustion performance, it is important that we can burn the fuel correctly, how we get energy from the fuel.” While there has always been a close relationship between power unit manufacturers and fuel partners, the ties are closer than ever before.

“It is not only doing the testing, but we also need a very open mind to show them our dyno data,” Ohirhra said. “For example, normally on the dyno, we measure combustion pressure, which is super, super confidential, we are [now] sharing that type of information.”

Related, F1 2026 tech hub

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Honda rejoins Formula 1 this year as a power unit supplier with the Aston Martin team. Heading up its trackside operations is Shintaro Orihara, who has been the Japanese manufacturer for over 20 years.

You’ve worked at Honda for decades now, why did you want to join the company in the first place?
When I was in junior high school, I watched F1 on TV and something that stood out were the McLarens with their Honda-powered cars. From that moment onwards, I knew that I wanted to join Honda and be a part of this incredible sport. I started there in 2003 and, for the first 10 years, I worked on road-going projects. Despite this, my love and passion for F1 didn’t fade and the hard work paid off. In 2013, I transferred to the racing side of the business and reached my dreams. During this time, I could learn the tricks of F1 engineering and live some intense moments of adversity but ultimately some glorious memories and wonderful times. I can confidently say that Honda and F1 are a part of my life.

What are your responsibilities as F1 Trackside General Manager and Chief Engineer?
My role is vast and varied but, ultimately, I make the final decisions at the track relating to the power unit. I also manage all the trackside members from Honda Racing Corporation from a management viewpoint to make sure that our power units are ready.

Before departing for the race, we have a series of meetings with our colleagues in Sakura in Japan to check the situation and plan for the event. Usually, we travel early in the week so that when we arrive at track, the engine conditions after maintenance can be checked. On site, I will fine tune the plan with the engineers for the weekend, evaluating our options and scenarios depending on the conditions. Once we’ve done this, there’ll be a meeting with Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team engineers to go through every detail, ensuring we’re fully integrated.

When the sessions start, the car’s PU is mainly operated by other Honda personnel. It’s my job to look at the big picture and what is happening overall. I will be making the decisions and communicating with the team via radio.
At the end of each day, we’ll hold an internal PU meeting on site and with our colleagues in the control room in Sakura. We will review what happened and put countermeasures in place if we encountered any issues. This is then reported to and discussed with the team, to make sure we’re aligned.

The Aston Martin Aramco Formula One Team is a key component in Honda’s Formula 1 activity. What work do you do with them? What are the targets?
2026 is the first year that we’re learning with Aston Martin Aramco at the track. Although the partnership was announced in 2023, everything has been based on theory and simulations, so there is a lot of anticipation for testing.

So, the first target is to build the fundamental relationship between the two parties trackside and second is to accumulate mileage and gather data, understanding how the RA626H power unit works in the AMR26.

What are your thoughts ahead of the first official F1 test in Bahrain?
It’s been a long time coming, quite frankly speaking. Years of development and hard work culminates with this. Sakura, HRC UK and Aston Martin Aramco have been working tirelessly to develop, plan and build.
The Barcelona Shakedown was a pivotal moment in our relationship and a good step in the right direction. Our next target is to accumulate mileage with our power unit to confirm engine reliability and to check all functions.
We’re looking forward to seeing how the package behaves – car and power unit – as one machine.

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F1 is undergoing its biggest regulation shift this century – or possibly ever. The sport has seen significant changes in the past, including the aerodynamic rules dictating the current cars, and the huge technological jump of the 2014 powertrain regulations. However, in both those cases, it was either chassis or power unit that was altered, whereas 2026 will see wholesale change across chassis, power unit, tires and aerodynamics.

The key aims of the new rules are to enable closer racing and, to a degree, keep costs – particularly for the power unit – in check. The new rules will see cars get smaller, with the wheelbase reduced from 3,600mm to 3,400mm, and the track down from 2,000mm to 1,900mm; tire sizes are also reduced, while the minimum weight will fall from the current 800kg to 768kg.

The aerodynamics are also set for an overhaul, with the technical regulations defined to try to harness the gains made with the 2022 regulations regarding wake management. They also aim to eliminate the behavior that led to issues with ‘porpoising’ due to the sensitivity of the underfloor tunnels to variations in ride height. This means that tunnels are out, with a return to flat floors and diffusers.

Significantly, rear and now front wings will feature moveable elements, to reduce drag and account for the very different nature of power delivery from the revised ICE and hybrid systems. Though the basic architecture of the ICE remains, thermal energy recovery is no more. The MGU-H is banned, fuel flow limits have been replaced by an energy use formula, and the power of the MGU-K will be upped from the current 120kW to 350kW. In this feature, we will endeavor to understand the impact of these changes and how various teams across the grid are approaching the new era.

2026 F1 Car by Car

Alpine A526

Aston Martin AMR26

Aston Martin takes on Honda power for 2026, while the AMR26 is the first of its F1 cars to be truly influenced by the pen of Adrian Newey. When the car rolled out in Barcelona, it was immediately clear the team had taken a relatively extreme interpretation of the aerodynamic regulations.

According to Newey, “We took a really close look at the regulations and what we believe we want to achieve from a flow field perspective to suit them, and from there started to evolve a geometry that attempts to create the flow fields that we want. It’s very much a holistic approach……but, in truth, with a completely new set of regulations, nobody is ever sure what the right philosophy is.”Newey also note that, “Yes. The car is tightly packaged. Much more tightly packaged than I believe has been attempted at Aston Martin Aramco before.” However, when compared to some of the other cars in the field, it appears, to the casual observer at least, relatively bulky.

With the development of its new Silverstone Technology Campus, Aston now has wind-tunnel capabilities in-house for the first time, having previously used both the Mercedes wind tunnel and lately, the TMG facility in Cologne.

“The AMR Technology Campus is still evolving, the CoreWeave Wind Tunnel wasn’t on song until April, and I only joined the team last March, so we’ve started from behind, in truth. It’s been a very compressed timescale and an extremely busy 10 months,” says Newey.

“The reality is that we didn’t get a model of the ’26 car into the wind tunnel until mid-April, whereas most, if not all of our rivals would have had a model in the wind tunnel from the moment the 2026 aero testing ban ended at the beginning of January last year. That put us on the back foot by about four months, which has meant a very, very compressed research and design cycle. The car only came together at the last minute, which is why we were fighting to make it to the Barcelona Shakedown.”

According to Newey, the intent with the car has been to build a car with development potential, rather than one optimized for a tight performance window from the outset. “We’ve tried to do the opposite, which is why we’ve really focused on the fundamentals, put our effort into those, knowing that some of the appendages – wings, bodywork, things that can be changed in season – will hopefully have development potential.”

Audi R26

Cadillac

Ferrari SF26

Ferrari arrived at the second test in Bahrain with a very interesting addition to the rear crash structure, a winglet directly behind the exhaust, exploiting a loophole in the regulation geometry boxes. 

Haas VF-26

For Davide Paganelli, head of aero at Haas, the VF-26’s performance isn’t tied to a single element. Instead, it is a game of management. “It’s the management of the floor of the car from a coherent point of view,” Paganelli explains, “starting from the front wing through suspension and the bodywork in order to be able to feed as much as possible with good high-energy flow the rear”.

He notes that the front wing remains the primary tool for setting the car’s aerodynamic behaviour. Teams are currently split on their approach: whether to load the wing more toward the center or the outboard side to manage the wake of the front wheels. With the rules written so as to force in-washing of the wake, the goal of every team is to try and minimise the damage this cause to flow further down the car. Like in the pre-ground effect era, the goal is to retain as much high energy airflow towards the rear of the car as possible, helping to drive the diffuser.

The 2026 Power Units (PUs) have introduced a significant shift in thermal architecture, with a much greater emphasis on the electrical component. While one might assume this requires a radical cooling overhaul, Paganelli views it as a familiar challenge of scale. “The challenge is the same… you try to maximize your heat rejection keeping the volume and the weight as small as possible,” he notes.

The real divergence on the grid is seen in radiator packaging and the shaping of the sidepod inlets. However, the true complexity, says Paganelli, lies in the brake ducts. With high energy recovery from the electrical system, teams must precisely simulate energy management to correctly size the ducts within the tight geometric constraints of the wheel rims, as the design of the external ducts is tightly controlled.

Perhaps the most discussed feature of the new regulations is the move toward active aerodynamics on both the front and rear wings. For Haas, the hurdle isn’t just the mechanism, but the car’s balance in “straight-line mode.” “The main challenge is… to have a car that is drivable also in straight-line mode because the amount of loads that we lose activating both the wings is huge”.

This shift will likely change how teams approach wing levels across a season. Paganelli predicts that the days of bringing six different rear wing specifications to suit various tracks may be over, as the straight-line mode allows for a broader operating window for a single design.

Despite the early-season variety—such as some teams opting for a “high rake” philosophy reminiscent of the period up until 2022—Paganelli expects the grid to converge quickly. Unlike the hidden complexities of the under-floor, the bodywork and wing activation devices of the cars are visible to all. “It’s not like in the floor, that was a sort of hidden area difficult to be observed [driving the performance].”

However, the rapid pace of development is tempered by the budget cap and ATR (Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions). For Haas, the limitation isn’t just wind tunnel hours, but the capacity to run multiple projects in parallel. Having invested heavily in the late-season package for the VF-25, the team is now focused on the iterative refinement of a car where every square centimeter of carbon fiber must earn its keep.

Mclaren MCL40

Greene Tweed develops advanced MSE seals for McLaren Formula 1

Mercedes W17

Racing Bulls VCARB03

Red Bull RB22

Williams FW48

Williams had a hesitant start to 2026, missing the pre-season shakedown in Barcelona, while rumours swirled of an overweight car and missed crash tests. As it turns out, these were just that, rumour, and talking on the first day of pre-season testing proper in Bahrain, team principal James Vowels was upbeat about the the teams progress. Despite missing the initial shakedown, he says, “in lieu of that, we did a full week of VTT (Virtual Track Testing) running where we did quite a few hundred kilometers there. It’s not exactly the same thing as running on track, but you do shake out the gremlins. Followed by two filming days: one at Silverstone and one here [Bahrain] yesterday. The car ran flawlessly yesterday—it was brilliant.”

While Vowels wouldn’t be drawn on the exact weight of the car, understandably, he did not appear to think the team was any better or worse off than others. “I don’t think we’re on the weight limit right now as I talk to you. But there’s a plan in place both for Melbourne and then across the first three rounds or so just to make sure we’re jumping into that. Again, it goes back to: anyone that tells you exactly where they are is probably because they’re right on the weight limit or just below now. But there are sensor packs on the car that are worth around about 12 kilos here just to give you an idea, which is why until you shake that all off, no one knows exactly where [they are].”

Power Units

Mercedes AMG HPP

Facing the transformative changes coming for the F1 power unit

Honda

Interview: Shintaro Orihara

Red Bull Powertrains

Ford and Red Bull Racing accelerate 2026 F1 power unit development with advanced manufacturing and simulation

Ferrari

Audi

BP and Audi Revolut F1 Team join forces for sustainable racing

50% EV power

On paper, the changes to the energy recovery systems for 2026 simplify matters, moving from having two energy recovery sources (MGU-K and H) to a single MGU-K. However, the potency of the system more than doubles, from 120kW to 350kW. In theory, with both ICE and MGU on full song, the 2026 cars will be just as, if not more, powerful than the current machines. However, they will only be able to deploy this full power for a relatively small portion of a lap due to limitations imposed by the rules, energy recovery available under braking and harvesting via the ICE at part throttle.

On most tracks, the energy use limit will be set by regulation at 8.5MJ per lap (with the maximum SoC difference in the battery being 4MJ). However, at tracks where the FIA deems it harder to recover energy, the rules (currently) say that this allowance can be reduced all the way down to 5MJ, the intention being to mitigate any vast differences between teams who get a handle on energy deployment faster than the competition. At the time of writing, the rules surrounding where full power from the MGU-K can be deployed were still TBC, though it seems that maximum output will only be allowed as a push-to-pass function and during qualifying.

Furthermore, to prevent a ‘cliff-edge’ scenario of long straights, whereby battery energy is exhausted long before the braking point, available power from the battery will be tapered off at high speed, starting at 300km/h with 0kW available over 345km/h. Away from the energy management issues, which will no doubt consume gigaflops of teams’ computing power during simulation, the mechanical practicalities of the new systems are equally onerous.

As Aston Martin’s Andy Cowell notes, “350kW electric motors do exist in the world, it’s just whether you can get them down to a very lightweight, efficient 350kW. And the same with the battery: there are batteries that take 350kW but again, it’s the mass, it’s the volume and it’s the efficiency.” Starting with the mass of the MGU-K, this is set at 16-20kg, depending on whether the transmission delivering drive to the crank is incorporated within the ERS or the ICE. For reference, the current MGU-Ks have a minimum mass of 7kg. As Mercedes’ Hywel Thomas notes, “Of course, all of us will be aiming at the minimum mass. How close everyone gets, I think, will be an interesting topic.”

The regulations will also fix the location of the MGU-K, placing it at the front of the engine inside the safety cell (currently all teams mount theirs on the side of the engine). According to Thomas, the idea of fixing the location of the MGU-K was “to try to avoid one person coming up with an absolutely stunning idea of where to put it, which then everyone has to copy, and just spending their time copying it rather than actually developing good technology”.

Similarly, the control electronics will also be housed in the safety cell, meaning that there should be no high-voltage cable runs outside of the central chassis, thus improving crash safety. As with the current regulations, the efficiency of the electrical components of the power unit will be just as important as the ICE, the goal being to deploy as much of the permitted electrical power to the wheels as possible. Here the onus will be on the motor and power electronics engineers, and there will likely be some very useful (outside of racing) advances made in the field of high-power semiconductors and motor design, all while respecting the various competing demands of overall car performance, such as reducing cooling requirements to a minimum to keep the aerodynamicists happy

Ford to the Fore

The dawn of the 2026 F1 season will also see the advent of new manufacturer representation on the grid. Audi will arrive with an in-house-developed powertrain and chassis, having taken over Sauber; General Motors will become the 21 st team on the grid with its Cadillac brand; and Ford will come to the fore as the technical partner of Red Bull and Red Bull Powertrains. Although the first two have been keeping to tightly controlled schedules regarding the information they release to the media, Ford has been quite forthcoming about the nature of its involvement in the Red Bull project. Speaking to PMW at the Italian Grand Prix in August, Mark Rushbrook, global director at the newly minted Ford Racing (formerly known as Ford Performance), highlighted that the company’s activities had expanded beyond what it initially expected. “Back three years ago now, when we struck the initial deal, we had a short list of areas where we knew we could contribute and where we also wanted to learn. Initially that was focused more around the electrification, the battery itself: the cell chemistry, the battery pack, the motor and the software around it. That list has grown to much more involvement with the total powertrain and, more than I’d expected, the manufacturing of parts for it. “Where we didn’t expect so much [involvement] is on the ICE. We’re learning there more than we expected, to be honest. But then it’s the manufacturing of the parts. We have advanced manufacturing facilities, we’ve got clients that build hundreds of thousands of units a year, and we’ve got plants that do low volume with additive manufacturing, and that’s where we’re drilling from. Our facilities need to be able to support that, and the number of parts that we’re able to supply – making them in Dearborn and shipping them into Milton Keynes for assembly into the powertrains.” Ford was also able to provide vital capabilities to Red Bull Powertrains early in the development program, helping to reduce development timescales. For example, Red Bull didn’t have in-house rigs for turbocharger testing, which Ford Racing was able to access within the wider company.

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