For many years, Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame inductees Gerald Donaldson and Norris McDonald offered insights into the upcoming year in Formula One in a pre-season column that appeared in the Toronto Star. The column ended after McDonald passed away in November 2023. Sadly, Donaldson passed away in December 2025. As a tribute to both, Inside Track Motorsport News revives the tradition this year, with motorsport correspondent Jeff Pappone (a Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame inductee in 2018) and engineer Gavin Ward getting together to discuss the ins and outs of the 2026 F1 season.
Arguably one of the most successful Canadian motorsport engineers, Ward won four double world championships in F1 with the Red Bull team, helped driver Daniel Ricciardo take his first F1 win in the 2014 Canadian Grand Prix, and added an IndyCar title to his resume with Team Penske’s Josef Newgarden in 2019. A move to Arrow McLaren to become its team principal in 2022 saw the Toronto native lead the outfit to its highest single-season win total before he left the team two years later. Ward now works with IndyCar rookie Mick Schumacher, helping the former F1 driver adapt to ovals as he runs a full season with Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.
Jeff Pappone: Before we get into the preseason testing, you’ve been in the trenches when an F1 team gets to grips with a new set of regulations. When you have a new rule set like this, it’s obviously a pretty huge opportunity to shake up the order but also creates risk in the engineering departments of F1 teams. Can you talk about the task of creating an all new car to respond to new technical regulations? How big a challenge it is to get things right, and what are the odds of getting things wrong?
Gavin Ward: Well, I’ve seen it done well and I’ve seen it done poorly over the years. When teams get the first drafts of these new regulations, they’re usually discussed in a “technical working group,” which is a gathering of technical minds of the team. The technical group will discuss the rules for some time before they’re finalized and released. Teams will usually also start by putting a small group tasked on a future car to start sort of exploring the regulations – the basics of drawing a car – and figuring out all the “legality boxes,” essentially what’s allowed where and all the dimensions of various components.
One of the huge challenges facing teams when they get a new rule set is being able to change their ways of thinking. When the rules are stable in F1, an aerodynamicist will start focusing on smaller and smaller details and smaller gains, and psychologically you get into this hyper optimization mindset; when there’s a new rule set, teams really need to switch their thinking into big concepts. When I worked at Red Bull, I remember going to the tunnel with the future car concept for the 2017 aerodynamic shake up where some of the engineers who had been there for longer immediately reacted with “what are the big ideas?” and “why aren’t we doing bigger swings?” In the end, we didn’t have enough imagination to spot the opportunity and, because of that, we had to play catch up.
I’ve been lucky to work with one of the greats of F1 car design, Adrian Newey, who’s done it well more than most. Great designers spot the opportunities and the cross couplings, interactions between what you do at the front of the car and what that means for the back of the car and the middle of the car, and how it all ties together to make a complete package: One that not just produces downforce, but produces downforce with the characteristics you want, which makes lap time and makes a car the drivers can handle.
Jeff Pappone: One of the other things that can have a huge effect on the new car’s development seems to be the previous season. Apparently, the Alpine team essentially stopped working on upgrades pretty early in 2025 because the cars just weren’t competitive and, rather than put lots of time and effort into improving a bad car, it looked ahead to 2026 and seems to have made some big steps forward. Conversely, when you’re a front runner like McLaren trying to win the championship, stopping development is not an option so you have to balance short-term and long-term gain.
Gavin Ward: Exactly, this is a big thing that affects whether teams are able to execute a new car: How early do you start? There’s a significant resource risk-reward to consider and it’s always a trade off when you make that kind of top-level prioritization decision. If you’re not in the championship and you want to go all-in on future development, you can start way early; if you are going down to the wire in a championship fight, you might not invest in the next season and try and keep developing a current car and put fewer hours in the wind tunnel on the future car to do more with the current car.
But there’s another aspect that I don’t hear people talk about too much: How good is your correlation game? I saw this over and over when I worked at Red Bull, where my impression was that its wind tunnel to track correlation was not as good as some other teams because they’re running out of an older wind tunnel facility. Red Bull did a great job of what it had, but its limitations affected correlation. On the other hand, the engineers were extremely good at understanding what they had on track and at being logical about how to fix the deficiencies of the car. There’s a saying in the racing industry about racing not happening in wind tunnels, and I think one thing that I’ve seen great teams do is figuring out areas where the car doesn’t correlate. They’ll see that a geometry might not work in the wind tunnel, but it actually caused a flow change that should work on track and make real gains. All that said, when you have a huge rule shake up, you don’t have the luxury of having that track data, which can lead to going in the wrong direction, so you really can miss when you launch the car.
Jeff Pappone: As with the engineering side, all the drivers will need to adapt to the new rules and the resulting characteristics of the car. Sometimes that means drivers will struggle to get to grips with the cars, while others will excel. Any idea which driver’s style might benefit most from the new regulations?
Gavin Ward: A super interesting topic, especially with the tiny amount of testing available in F1. I think it’s almost impossible to adapt a driver to a car style and it’s not a black and white problem. I’m pretty passionate about human performance in our sport and you can approach it in two ways: Decide that you want the driver to drive the car the way it should optimally be driven, or manipulate the car in ways that allow the driver to drive with their natural style. I think you’ll find most engineers will try and tell a driver to drive the car as it needs to be optimally driven theoretically, based on aerodynamics, or tires, or what have you. And that’s a little bit neglecting the reality that a driver evolves their natural style over their entire career. By the time they get to F1, that might be 10 to 15 years of experience, and they develop a style that suits their natural strengths. Every driver is an individual and different and I think sometimes it’s underestimated how disruptive it is to try and coach a driver into driving fundamentally differently than they naturally do, and how difficult that is to adapt. But also, on the driver’s side, training adaptability is kind of the key to me, and training someone to drive intuitively and to explore different ways of driving and to find what suits the situation best.
As F1 lost track time, it moved more and more to simulators, which can be a little too repeatable, and that leads to not introducing enough variability into the practice to train adaptability. Think of a baseball player learning to hit a baseball off of a pitching machine rather than a pitcher. And sometimes I think that’s the pitfall of overdoing it in the simulation environment, and it doesn’t necessarily transfer to reality. So, I don’t know whose style will suit this new format the best, but I would suggest that Max Verstappen of Red Bull is probably going to be pretty good at it.
Jeff Pappone: Preseason testing always seems a bit of a game of cat and mouse. Pretty much all team principals talk down their chances, and drivers always seem to be worried about pace. What are the teams doing behind the scenes to try to mask their cars’ performance and hide their true pace?
Gavin Ward: Yeah, it’s an F1 thing. It was a real mindset shift for me when I moved from F1 to IndyCar. In IndyCar, there’s a little more of a competitive nature, and if you’re not fastest in testing, people are upset. If we were fastest at the end of the day with Red Bull at F1 preseason tests, we’d get told off by the senior management. Teams used to just run the cars heavy, but since the introduction of the hybrid cars in 2014, they can mask pace with energy deployment and manipulate a lot of performance. And now, active aero – the new movable wings – gives teams another way to manipulate.
Teams will use any data they can get their hands on to try to analyze their opponents. For example, they use the onboard video feeds from the more advanced TV subscription packages and then clip the audio to do frequency spectrum analysis on the engine note to calculate the engine speed around the lap. With that and a few speed traps from timing and scoring, they’ll know with high certainty how fast the car is going at that point in time. Then you can work out the revolutions per minute and gear ratios and sort of join the gaps across gear shifts to calculate every gear ratio in the car and the rear wheel speed trace (the rotational speed of each rear wheel). It’s some pretty cool stuff.
I’ve also seen certain engineers lose their minds at the prospect of photographers getting to pore over the back of their race car while, for example, we did a race start simulation at the end of pit lane. The quote, “why don’t you just go post the drawings on the *expletive* pitwall” has stuck with me somehow. You try to prevent competitors from getting a good look at things, but if a car runs out of fuel or breaks down on track, it’s a great opportunity to get good photos of sensitive aerodynamic parts when cars get brought in on the tow hook or lifted in the air to show their floors.
In the end, it can also be hard to predict, not just because of how teams mask, but how teams develop. If you go back to the first year of exhaust blown diffusers in 2011, McLaren launched the car with a radical ‘octopus’ exhaust option that just didn’t work, and they were terrible. It looked like they were going to be last place, but they showed up to Melbourne after copying the Red Bull exhaust, and all of a sudden they were a top three team.
But I’ll tell you one basic way teams can judge preseason pace. You look at the length of run a team does when they set a particular lap time and then you can work out the minimum amount of fuel they must have had onboard when the time was set. In 2009, Brawn F1 missed the first test and, at Red Bull, we thought we were the fastest car. The first run they did at our second test, they put up a quick time and we were like “if that is a qualifying run on fumes we can still beat that,” but then the car carried on for another 20 laps and we thought: “Oh dear, no, we definitely can’t beat that.”
Jeff Pappone: Can you take a crack at the pecking order, who looks like the team to beat? Which team do you think might have improved over 2025 and which might have slipped?
Gavin Ward: I think, with IndyCar being my day job, I haven’t really followed it enough to give us a super high confidence answer on what the pecking order will be come the first race, but it’s pretty clear that there’s a few teams out there that are doing alright. I think Mercedes, Ferrari, and Red Bull look pretty strong. A little hard to say who’s going to come out on top. On the other hand, I think Cadillac will struggle this year and it looks like Aston Martin’s troubles are real.
Jeff Pappone: Speaking of Cadillac and potential struggles, can you describe the mountain that a new team like that needed to climb to get a car on the grid this year?
Gavin Ward: It’s hard to even begin to explain the monumental task of starting an F1 team from the ground up and not buying into chassis off another supplier – I mean just the number of job interviews – the whole thing is a mind blowingly difficult task, but I think they have done a good job of recruiting a lot of people from within the F1 sphere and some from outside. You don’t want to be reinventing the wheel to start off with, but the infrastructure investment alone is daunting when you need to compete with teams like Mercedes, Red Bull and Ferrari that have decades of massive capital expenditures in things like wind tunnels, dynamometers, campuses and factories and driving simulators. And that’s not even getting into research and development labs, mission control, all the track side infrastructure – the logistics side of running an F1 team. It’s just a huge undertaking to even get a car to run on the grid, so kudos to Cadillac. And I think they did the right thing by not starting with both chassis and engine at the same time, but I do think they’re going to struggle. If Cadillac beats another team in Australia, it will be like a win.
Jeff Pappone: As you mentioned, it looks like Aston Martin F1 is behind the eight ball. You worked with Adrian Newey and have seen his designs win championships. How quickly can the team regroup and rebound?
Gavin Ward: I think one of the things with Aston Martin that makes their situation uniquely difficult is that it’s the only team Honda supplies with engines. That works out well if Honda happened to put out the best motor and you’re the only one with it, but when you’re in this situation which they find themselves, there is a huge risk. And I would say, cast your mind back to Honda McLaren days of a few years ago, where it wasn’t clear if it was the car, the engine or both that under-performed. And there is a natural and really destructive tendency for finger pointing each way.
I think the tricky thing for Aston Martin is being objective and not political, and not try and save their own bacon about the deficiencies of the car. They need to just focus on making it better in a hurry. I worked with Adrian Newey for a long time, and I learned a hell of a lot – he really is one of the best in the game. I think they can do it, but depending on the issue or issues, they could be in for a really long year. If it’s fundamental architecture that’s homologated and can’t be changed, the team will quickly start focusing on next season, and 2026 will just be a really painful ride. I’ve been in those situations, and it’s demoralizing. But if it’s just a matter of a couple little details that are very sensitive and a little off the mark, maybe they can make big gains in a big way and in a quick way. You know, we’ve seen great turnarounds from teams, so it can be done and, for the sake of everyone, I hope they do it.
Jeff Pappone: I’m thinking that fans will only see the true pace of the cars once they hit the track in Australia, but even then, the Melbourne street circuit really doesn’t seem representative enough to give fans a good idea of each car’s performance for the 2026 season.
Gavin Ward: For sure, and frankly, probably only in qualifying because teams will still be hiding pace in practice. They’ll run extra fuel and manipulate energy modes, so fans really won’t know what they’ve got until it comes to Q1 and Q2. Also, Melbourne is actually a pretty atypical track but it’s quick, there are no very slow corners. It’s very medium speed and quite power sensitive, but not the barometer of average season performance, either. And again, I think you’ll see the ability for pretty steep gains in early upgrades, so I don’t think Melbourne will set the tone for the whole season.
Jeff Pappone: F1 introduced the whole swath of new technical regulations, changes from acquiring more electric power to movable wings and bringing an end to ground effects. Obviously, they all work together, but does one element seem to have more influence than the others? Which new thing fascinates you most as an engineer?
Gavin Ward: I think the more electric power is probably looking to be the most influential of the changes, but I must admit, as a bit of a purist, I’m a little disappointed. I really was excited by shorter, narrower, smaller chassis and the return to more nimble F1 cars of days gone by. I would have loved to have heard we were going to a louder engine formula with more high revving motors. To me, the sport lost a little bit of magic when that went away. The step from V-10s into the V-8s was comparatively small, but the V-8 to V-6 and the step down from a 19,000 revolutions per minute V-8 to a 12,000 RPM turbocharged V-6 is really not the same for me. I would have loved if these cars made a big step back towards some high revs, but that’s not the case.
I think the move away from ground effects, back to a more flat floor and large diffuser, is interesting. I get the desire to get away from the porpoising issues of the ground effect cars, but there is something to be said for ground effect when it comes to following other cars. It will be interesting to see how these cars follow and race each other. But overall, I like the way the cars look and I think they’re more proportional. The end plates in the front and rear wing are more sensible race car parts and look the part. They’re not quite as gimmicky and goofy as what was on there before in the previous rule package. The movable aerodynamic stuff is probably what fascinates me most, but I would have liked it to be fully open from the point of view of where movable aero could be activated. While that would be some pretty cool stuff, I get there’s some safety implications, but racing isn’t without risk, and we’ve got the best engineers in the world that can build in some pretty good fail safes for things.
Obviously, the Ferrari’s full upside-down flap rear wing actuator definitely caught a lot of people’s interest, including mine. The stall effect of a rear wing is quite a difficult challenge: To get it right, you need to shed drag off the main plane through stall when the flap opens, which requires a bespoke main plane and flap design for each downforce and drag level you might choose to run and the optimum varies circuit to circuit. And then there is a small tire rolling-resistance or mechanical drag reduction when you drop downforce, which will bring some additional benefit above straight-line speed and less overheating of the rear tires, because you’ll take tire energy out of the rears by taking downforce off. It’s a funny thing that people often think that more downforce everywhere is better, but the truth is more downforce compresses the car more on high-speed straights, which means you have to raise the car; that in turn sees it run higher than optimum in the low speed corners where you need the car to be low to make downforce, to make grip, and to make lap time. So all things being equal, you actually want a car that sheds downforce towards the end of the straightaways and gains it back in the corners, especially when you don’t have high-speed corners. There’s an awful lot to consider in a little concept like that!