Babe, Wake Up: The First 2026 F1 Car Has Hit The Track And It's Glorious
Make sure you have your volume turned up...
I was so fired up to crack open my 2026 The Far Side desk calendar because I knew it meant we were closer to the start of the 2026 Formula 1 season.
The 2025 season will be a tough act to follow, but the sheer scale of change coming in '26 could be enough to keep excitement levels high.
By far the biggest change is the car. They're a bit smaller (which is great) and have major changes to aerodynamic components, namely new "active aerodynamics," that will move at certain times to increase or reduce downforce.
The first of the 2026 car launches is scheduled for January 15, when Red Bull and Racing Point unveil their cars — or, more likely, just their liveries on show cars — in Detroit. But on Friday, we got our first taste of a 2026 car on track, and it belongs to Audi.
The German automaker is making its F1 debut this season after taking over the team formerly known as Sauber. They had their first-ever F1 car on track for a "filming day" at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, the same venue that will host a test session later this month.
The car is going to be known as the R26 and will be in the hands of drivers Niko Hulkenberg and Gabriel Bortoleto, and it hit the track in a stealthy black livery to keep all the interesting bits hidden.
There's not much detail to see, but there's plenty to hear. That's our first real taste of an Audi power unit, and I think it sounds great by the standard of the V6 turbo-hybrid era.
They'll be the only team running these engines, and I love the bold step of entering F1 (granted, it's by way of purchasing an existing team) and saying, "We're going to build our own engines," instead of spending a year or two as a customer team.
Cadillac — F1's new 11th team — is going that route. They'll start as a Ferrari customer team (yes, a Cadillac powered by a Ferrari engine; sounds weird, huh?) before GM starts building its own power units in a few years.
As for the official launch of the Audi R26, that will happen on January 20 in Berlin. However, they showed a tease for what their livery will look like last year.