Ferrari didn’t so much start the 2026 conversation this weekend as shove it through the pitlane doors at Fiorano.
The SF-26’s first public steps were always going to be pored over — not just because the Scuderia’s coming off a bruising, winless 2025, but because this is the first car of a wholesale rule reset. Every team is trying to decide what to show, what to hide, and what to let the internet misread. Ferrari managed to tick all three boxes in the space of a few hours.
On the surface, the headline is simple: new car launched on Friday, shakedown completed, Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc both got mileage. Underneath, it’s already clear Ferrari’s chosen to arrive with ideas, not just paint.
Those who’ve been through the close-ups will have noticed the A-spec car isn’t a conservative first draft. The early focus has inevitably landed on the floor and front wing solutions — areas where you can plant a philosophy without giving away the whole aerodynamic map. This is where Ferrari appears to have leaned into interpretation rather than orthodoxy. It’s the sort of thing that can be either a decisive statement or the opening move in a season-long back-and-forth, depending on whether the concept has legs once the car is pushed beyond demo runs.
And yes, the shakedown had its “Ferrari moment” on social media: both Hamilton and Leclerc were captured stopping on track, footage that ricocheted around the usual accounts with the predictable insinuation that the SF-26 was already coughing before the season had even begun.
The reality, as understood in the paddock, is far less dramatic and far more modern-F1. Demonstration events are capped at 15 kilometres, a restriction that forces teams to be slightly creative if they want maximum value from minimal running. Ferrari’s stops were simply part of the plan: halt the car, avoid burning distance crawling back, and have mechanics push it in so those kilometres go where you actually want them — through systems checks, mapping, and the kind of low-risk validation you can’t do in a studio launch.
It’s the sort of detail that tells you two things at once. First, Ferrari is treating every inch of permitted running like it matters — which tends to be the hallmark of a team that knows it can’t afford another season of “we’ll understand it by mid-year.” Second, the optics game is already in full swing. In 2026, you don’t only hide performance; you sometimes hide intent. Let the wrong conclusion travel for an afternoon if it keeps the right people guessing for a week.
While Ferrari was absorbing the attention, Haas quietly used the same Fiorano venue to get its own 2026 car onto the road. Oliver Bearman handled the first laps, a neat continuation of Haas’ long-standing technical closeness with Ferrari and an on-brand choice of driver given his ties to the Scuderia’s junior set-up.
What makes Haas’ outing more interesting than a simple “first laps completed” update is what it says about their winter posture. The team’s partnership with Toyota has expanded for 2026, but the Ferrari relationship remains a major pillar — and doing your first mileage at Ferrari’s test track only underlines where the gravitational pull still is. The subtext is familiar: Haas needs the strongest technical spine it can buy or borrow to make the regulation change a genuine opportunity rather than another cycle of playing catch-up.
All of that sat in the shadow of a different kind of intrigue: the engine talk that inevitably follows any major reset.
Over the past few weeks, the rumour mill has been fixated on claims that two manufacturers — widely believed in the paddock to be Mercedes and Red Bull-Ford — may have found an edge in the 2026 power unit rules, specifically around compression ratio. It’s the sort of phrase that instantly becomes a lightning rod. Fans hear “loophole” and jump straight to “unfair advantage”; teams hear it and start asking which paragraph they’ve overlooked.
Ross Brawn’s take was notably calm, and, in its own way, revealing. Rather than clutching pearls about the spirit of the regulations, he framed it as clever interpretation — the implication being that if you can read the rulebook in a smarter way than your rivals, that’s not cheating, it’s the whole game. In other words: if it’s legal, it’s on everyone else for not finding it too.
That view won’t be universally popular, but it’s undeniably consistent with how Formula 1 actually works at the front end. The sport has always rewarded those who can live in the grey areas without falling into them, and the best technical groups don’t wait for clarity; they manufacture it. The fact this conversation is already bubbling before the season even starts is probably the biggest tell of all: 2026 is going to be won as much in meeting rooms as it is on Sundays.
If you want a reminder of how far teams will go when the rules reset, you didn’t have to look to the present. Former Toyota engineer Sammy Diasinos has been telling the story of a wonderfully shameless bit of misdirection from 2009 — management asking for a fake front wing endplate design to be created purely to mislead rivals about what Toyota was really doing. The details are almost secondary; the principle is evergreen. When the regulations change, paranoia and creativity rise together. Sometimes the cleverest “innovation” is convincing everyone else to copy the wrong thing.
Put all of that together and this weekend starts to look like an early snapshot of the season’s real texture. Ferrari’s showing solutions and playing the optics game at the same time. Haas is getting its programme rolling with familiar support but a new layer to its technical identity. And in the background, the engine manufacturers are already being accused — and, in some quarters, applauded — for finding the kind of interpretation that can define an era.
It’s January. Nobody’s won anything yet. But the 2026 mindset is already obvious: take nothing at face value, assume everyone’s hiding something, and never waste a kilometre — especially when you’re only allowed 15.
