Ferrari is to introduce a B-spec version of its new Project 678 car as F1 2026 pre-season testing unfolds, it has emerged.
Ferrari endured a winless season in 2025 with drivers Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton hamstrung by a fundamental flaw related to the SF-25 car’s ride height.
Ferrari planning to introduce B-spec Project 678 in F1 2026 testing
The situation came to a head at the second race in China, where Hamilton was disqualified for excessive skid-block wear 24 hours after winning the sprint race. Leclerc was also excluded in Shanghai after his car was found to be underweight.
The measures taken by Ferrari to avoid a repeat – including adopting more conservative setup choices and instructing its drivers to lift and coast on the straights to protect the plank – meant the team was unable to extract the car’s underlying potential in 2025.
Having finished just 14 points short of McLaren in the 2024 title race, Ferrari came home a distant fourth – 435 points adrift of the champions – this year.
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Leclerc was limited to just seven podium finishes across the season, with Hamilton failing to register a top-three finish across a campaign for the first time in his career.
Formula 1’s regulations are being overhauled for 2026 as the sport embraces 50 per cent electrification, fully sustainable fuels and active aerodynamics.
As reported by PlanetF1.com in November, Ferrari’s 2026 car – codenamed Project 678 – is expected to feature a pushrod suspension at the front and rear.
The 2026 car is set to be the first Ferrari F1 chassis to carry a pushrod rear suspension since 2010, with Red Bull’s new RB22 car also expected to have a double pushrod suspension layout.
According to reports in Italy, Project 678 will also have a ‘revolutionary’ engine with an aluminium ally cylinder head featuring a ‘top-secret intake system.’
With the chassis and engine rules changing simultaneously, the 2026 regulations will represent a significant technical challenge for the teams with the winter testing schedule expanded to help preparations for the sport’s new era.
And it has emerged that Ferrari will tackle the issue by effectively producing two different versions of the same car for testing.
An initial launch specification of Project 678 will take to the track for F1’s behind-closed-doors test in Barcelona in late January as Ferrari focuses on reliability and verifying details like the functionality of the car’s packaging and electronics of the complex new power unit.
A more definitive version of the car will then appear at the following two tests in Bahrain on February 11-13 and February 18-20 as focus turns to performance with the introduction of upgrades like a new nose cone.
Fred Vasseur, the Ferrari team principal, recently confirmed the team’s testing plan – and predicted that more teams will follow the Scuderia’s strategy.
According to Racer, he said: “I think, yes, everybody will do it.
“But in this situation, the most important [thing] is to get mileage. It’s not to chase performance, it’s to get mileage, to validate the technical choice of the car, and then to get performance.
“I think everybody will come in Barcelona with not the real car, but a ‘Spec A.’
“It’s true that we are not used to having nine test days anymore. The last four or five seasons, we did three.
“It’s an advantage, but it’s also a completely different program. It means that the first target for this kind of season is to get reliability.
“You remember perfectly the season 10 or 15 years ago, the first races you had a huge percentage of DNFs.
“It means that first, we need to get mileage.
“Also what we want to avoid compared to 2025 is that when we were lost at the beginning of the season with the disqualification [in China].
“We lost mileage, we lost reference, and then you are [chasing] after this. It’s a long process.
“The first focus in Barcelona, we need to get mileage for the car, to understand the reality of the car, where we have to improve or on what we have to react.
“Because if we want to have something for Bahrain T02, we won’t have time to react for Australia.
“The first target – the promotional day no, but Barcelona – will be for sure to get mileage more than pure performance.”
Ferrari confirmed earlier this month that Project 678 will be officially launched on Friday January 23, three days before the start of the behind-closed-doors test in Barcelona.
The Scuderia’s car launches have traditionally been followed by a shakedown run at Ferrari’s Fiorano circuit on the same day.
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