The Formula 1 pecking order will undoubtedly change in 2026 with the major change in regulations, but the teams will be close, according to the former head of the Ferrari Driver Academy, Jock Clear.With his engineering background, Clear delivered an insight on how F1 engineers work within the teams’ design departments, which led him to believe that the new cars in 2026 will not be miles off each other. Not as close as they were at the end of the 2025 season, but not too far off nevertheless.
Clear began: “The way teams deal with it is actually to have structure and a methodology that deals with whatever you throw at it.
“When they put these rules out there, 18 months, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, did all the teams employ loads of new people and set up a different team for the 2026 regulations?”Pretty much the answer is no, because of all the F1 teams are in a situation where if you’re not developing, you’re going to go backwards. So all of their engineering group are developing something.
“They’re set up very well to be looking at whatever technology is going to bring performance to the car. So if you don’t change the regulations, these guys and girls are out there still working as hard as they ever did,” he explained.
What is the worst gap to be expected?
Clear went on: “It’s not a case of where we had a load of redundancy available in the engineering department; we woke them up and said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a project to do,’ and similarly, we didn’t have to go out and recruit loads of people.
“What we’ll see over the next year is how well that has worked for some teams and less so for other teams. We’ll be impressed with how close everybody is, and that’s something that always impresses me.
“We may well look at qualifying next year and see one team is miles off because they haven’t got the performance. That ‘miles off’ will be four-tenths of a second,” he predicted. “When you look at that round an average five-and-a-half-kilometer lap, that is nothing at all.
“When you look at giving 11 groups of engineers this huge challenge, it will be incredibly impressive how close everybody is when they come to put that package together.
“It won’t be as close as it was at the end of this season, where margins were thousandths of a second, but it will still be remarkably close,” the Briton maintained.
However, he pointed out that newcomers Audi and Cadillac will have to work hard to get into the mix.
“Audi and Cadillac will have that challenge of getting in the mix; it isn’t going to be easy, because it’s a really, really tight sport,” Clear concluded.