Racing
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Rob Marshall says Formula 1’s new 2026 rules have produced far more design variety than McLaren expected, with Ferrari’s striking rear wing becoming the clearest proof that the regulations are not nearly as restrictive as they first appeared.
Speaking to media including RacingNews365 at a McLaren press event, McLaren chief designer Rob Marshall said the team went into the new cycle assuming the regulations would push the field toward similar concepts. Instead, once the cars reached the opening event, that expectation quickly fell away.
“We thought the regulations were going to be quite prescriptive,” Marshall said. He contrasted earlier rules that defined relatively simple volumes with today’s much more complex CAD-based legality models, which can make it look as if “it almost draws the car for you.” But when the cars arrived at the track, he said, “there are quite a few different solutions out there to look at on other people’s cars,” and “bottom line is nothing like as prescriptive as we thought it was going to be.”
Ferrari’s rear wing was the example that most caught McLaren’s attention. Marshall said the team’s “immediate question” when it saw the SF-26 design in Bahrain testing was whether it was legal. The concept uses a flap that rotates 270 degrees to open and close, operating “akin to an aircraft wing” to create lift on the straights and increase top speed.
That doubt did not last. FIA single-seater technical chief Nikolas Tombazis said Ferrari was “clear to run the wing as it sees fit,” and Marshall’s response was blunt. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “Okay. Well, well done then.”
For Marshall, the significance went beyond one eye-catching idea. He said Ferrari’s rear wing “was a surprise,” and added that McLaren also noticed “some more interesting stuff with their exhaust exit as well.” Even areas many expected to converge have split into different directions, with Marshall pointing to front wings across the field. “The front wings are all different,” he said, despite many believing they would end up looking much the same.
He also identified other solutions that stood out elsewhere on the grid. Audi’s sidepods were “quite interesting,” he said, because the team had “gone for a different solution, which no one has got anything quite similar to,” rather than the more conventional approach many expected. Aston Martin, meanwhile, has “quite interesting suspension geometry,” with Marshall describing the rear as “quite ambitious” and the front as “very interesting.” He added that the front suspension may be “inspired by something we did last year.”
That spread of ideas matters because it changes the way teams assess rivals under a rule set that was widely expected to narrow the design space. Marshall said McLaren studies everything it sees, but not with the aim of simply copying parts. “We look at everything,” he said, explaining that some ideas are ruled out as soon as the team checks the regulations, while others stay alive long enough to be assessed in CFD or the wind tunnel.
He argued that F1’s long-running line that copying never works is only partly true. Marshall pointed to the double diffuser as an example of a concept that succeeded on one car and then worked elsewhere once rivals adopted it. But he drew a distinction between imitation and understanding. “One thing is copying and the other is actually trying to understand what's going on, what the other team are trying to achieve with what they've done,” he said.
That, in his view, is where the real competitive value lies under the 2026 rules. If a team researches a rival concept properly, Marshall said, it can build the same underlying understanding while getting there faster because it has been inspired by what another team has already revealed on track.