The F1 season is in full swing and with five Grand Prix completed McLaren already have a clear points advantage over the pack in the Constructors’ Championship but, who has been doing what when it comes to car development?

Let’s take a closer look at the updates that teams have brought to the first five races and who are the outliers so far.

F1 development: The race within the race

In order to see how the development race is shaping up, I’ve gone through the car presentation documents and compiled a list of what each team has announced as updates to their cars, albeit with nothing taken from the Australian Grand Prix documentation, as teams list what aerodynamic changes they’ve made from the previous season in that document, although some teams, such as Sauber, did have genuine updates for the first race of the season.

It’s also worth noting the difference between the type of update that the team is announcing, with performance updates considered to bring an overall uptick in performance, whereas circuit specific updates are components added into the availability pool for the given venue and circuits that will fall within the same parameters, be that in terms of cooling or downforce/drag levels.

McLaren – rear brake duct winglet (China, performance), front brake duct winglet geometry (Bahrain, performance), reshaped diffuser, rear brake duct winglet (Saudi Arabia, performance).

Ferrari – Floor, including fences, main body, edge wing and diffuser, rear wing pillar winglet (Bahrain, performance), depowered upper flap for rear wing, rear wing and beam wing from last year’s pool (Saudi Arabia, performance).

Red Bull – engine cover, rear brake duct outlet (Japan, reliability / circuit specific, cooling range), rear suspension fairing (Japan, performance), front wing flap (Bahrain, performance), engine cover cooling louvres (Bahrain, circuit specific, cooling range), enlarged engine cover outlet (Saudi Arabia, reliability / circuit specific, cooling range), beam wing (Saudi Arabia, performance).

Aston Martin – rear wing upper flap (Saudi Arabia, circuit specific).

Racing Bulls – front wing, beam wing (China, circuit specific), halo fairing (Japan, performance), front wing, rear wing, beam wing (Saudi Arabia, circuit specific).

Haas – central floor re-shaped (performance), engine cover rear outlet enlarged (Bahrain, circuit specific, cooling range), lower downforce front and rear wing from last year’s pool (Saudi Arabia, Circuit specific).

Williams – beam wing (China, circuit specific), front wing upper flap and endplate (Japan, performance).

Sauber – engine cover (China, performance, test item), floor body, including fences, edge wing and diffuser, rear wing and beam wing (Japan, performance), front wing, beam wing, rear wing, rear wing endplate (Saudi Arabia, circuit specific) central floor body (Saudi Arabia, performance).

The first thing you’ll probably have noticed is that there’s two teams without anything listed, with Mercedes and Alpine having decided to hold off on developments in the opening phase of the season.

Now, this could be for a multitude of reasons and suggests they already had enough variation within their pool of parts from the beginning of the season to account for the different temperature and downforce levels required during the opening phase of the campaign.

It also suggests we may see a larger suite of components added to their cars at the start of the European leg of the season, which puts less pressure on the team from a logistical standpoint, whilst providing more information on the car’s performance baseline.

Furthermore, with 2026 just over the horizon, resources are stretched further than normal, with most teams looking to place a strong emphasis on next year’s challengers, owing to the gains that can be made in doing so.

Skewing this somewhat are the CFD and Wind Tunnel resource restrictions, which attribute more resources to those that are placed further down the championship order.

In terms of those that have put new parts on the car, I think we can break them down into three different groups, with Aston Martin one of the clear outliers here, having only introduced one new component, which helped to reduce downforce and drag for the Jeddah circuit characteristics.

McLaren, Racing Bulls, Haas and Williams largely fit into the next category having made a number of tweaks but nothing that will have substantially altered the output of their car, perhaps in an effort to rebalance things prior to a larger suite of components arriving in the coming races, having used the time since pre-season testing to work on those.

Then we have Ferrari and Sauber, the former of which had an update that was more like corrective surgery, with a holistic overview taken to improve the performance of the SF-25’s floor and the effective ride height window in which it can operate.

This included a number of changes to their fence arrangement, with the inner fence sat above the floor’s tideline being revamped to include an additional cutout on the top edge, whilst the outer fence was similarly tuned in order to alter the position and strength of the vortices being shed from the surface.

There’s clearly more changes going on under the hood too, with the fences and tunnel geometry altered out of sight, whilst the shape of the boat tail and diffuser have also been altered to maximise the alterations ahead of them.

Meanwhile, in an area where we can see, the edge wing has also been adjusted, with a deeper row of strakes used to influence the airflow, whilst their number has also been increased from two to three.

Sauber have been the most progressive team on the grid so far this season, with updates arriving at every race except Bahrain.

They’ve also delivered both updates that will increase the overall performance of the car and circuit specific solutions that take advantage of those alterations and rebalance the downforce and drag level of the car accordingly.

There’s barely an aerodynamic surface on the car that’s remained untouched during this overhaul but perhaps the best visual comparison of the changes they’ve made is when we look at the difference in sidepod shape between the two cars at the Chinese Grand Prix.

Nico Hulkenberg’s C45 has the new bodywork installed on the upper surface of the down ramp section of the sidepod, whilst Gabriele Bortoleto’s car still had the more indented version.

F1 development: We don’t know everything!

Of course, we must be careful when only using the car presentation document as a means to understand how much development is being undertaken, given that teams must only announce changes to aerodynamic surfaces that are new.

This leaves some room for ad-hoc adjustment to pre-existing solutions, such as the trimming of flaps that already exist within the pool of parts they have available.

We have often seen teams do this during this regulatory era to help balance the car for the given circuit characteristics without going to the expense of having a bespoke solution, meaning the element already has this functionality built into it.

Furthermore, there’s no need for teams to announce changes to a design’s flexibility if the rest of the assembly remains the same. And, there’s no mechanism for teams to announce any mechanical changes.

Therefore, we don’t have the full picture of what the teams are doing, just by leafing through the car presentation document at the start of each race weekend but, at least it’s a start.

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