Discussing the Science Behind F1 s New Rule Changes feat Lewis Hamilton

Gary, where are we? Welcome to Miami. Miami? Yep. This looks like Formula 1. Because it is. Formula 1 gone green. Absolutely, 100% green. The changes in 2026 have been some of the most substantial in the last 10 years. We'll get to talk to our old friend Federico Cattoni. Federico! Yes. Our engineer. Now the car can do all these new things. Is anyone thinking about the driver? You're going to be spending a time with a seven-time Formula 1 world champion. I'm going to leave it at that. So we're going to get in there. We're going to find our good friends Scuderia Ferrari HP. Okay. Before you start correcting me. Through our great friends Bitdefender who are allowing us access. We're going to get in the garage and we're going to talk to some very, very special people. You can go to the garage. I'm going to the garage. See you there. F1, Neil. It's different from, I want to call it typical sport. It's the most dynamic sport I can imagine. Well, for me, I like the science and engineering of it more than I like or care about who wins. Is that wrong to say that? No, it's not. Because it's your perspective. Not only do they change the specifications on the car quite often every year. But this year more than ever. Every single track is different. From Silverstone to Monaco, Monte Carlo, to Miami, to Vegas, to Austin, Texas. The engineers have to set up what they call a package. Be it the aerodynamics, be it the suspension for every single track. And then you've got a different driver. You've got two drivers per team. So they make like the car set up in a certain way. You need nimble engineers. Oh, gotcha. Think about when we went down in the pit lane and how many people were stood there in front of a screen. There weren't just two or three or four. There must have been a good 20 or more. Right. I was found curious that they were not looking at a monitor of the race. No, they weren't looking at the car as a physicality. They were looking at data. As a scientist, I'm intrigued that it's not just who's the most badass driver. It's you have teams of engineers and scientists behind you. FIA, the governing body of Formula One, are always putting engineers to the test. They're always giving them something different, a different puzzle to solve every season. Do the engineers get trophies if the car wins? Yeah, there's two championships. There's the Drivers' Championship and the Constructors' Championship. Nice. OK. So the engineers who are the real heroes. Sorry, drivers, apologies. You take all the glamour. The engineers do all the work. I'm kidding. And this year, they've probably made the largest tranche of changes in the last decade. They've basically put it on a GLP-1, right? It's shorter, it's narrower, and it's lighter. And the way Newton's second law of motion works, force equals mass times acceleration. So for any given force, you're going to have an acceleration. Right. Because they're on opposite sides of the equation. One will generate the other, but there's a mass term in there. Yeah. So for a given force, if you reduce the mass, you have a higher acceleration. It would be a good time to go and meet engineer Federico Cartoni, an old friend of ours from a couple of years ago in Silverstone. Bring it on. Yeah, bring him on. Bring it on. Come on, Federico. So 2026, a lot of changes. Yeah. Has it been a headache or has it been a challenge that you feel good about meeting? It has been a beautiful headache, I have to say. He said no one ever about headaches in the world. I suffer a lot of headaches, so now... A beautiful headache. Tell us about it. Yeah. I would say that is maybe the biggest regulation change that we have ever seen for the entire F1 story because it involves chassis, it involves aero, it involves tires, power unit. Anything you can look in an F1 car has changed compared to last year. They changed the floor panel in terms of its design. So the previous floors were Venturi floors and that is where you get the Venturi effect and what comes from that. Underneath, we have very fast moving air. That air has lower pressure than air above and there is kind of a suction, if we call it that, that pushes harder down on the car. It could be so effective that the car hits the ground, closing off the effect and then it recovers catastrophically only to repeat that cycle again. In engineering, we call that an instability. Which is what they don't like. So they have reduced the strength of that Venturi effect, but it means that the car is not pressing down as hard on the road, so they will have to drive differently. Didn't Federico say that? So we moved from the Venturi layout of the floor and we rolled back to a flat floor with an expansion on the rearward side of the floor itself. So before, we were generating a huge amount of load just by lowering the car as best as we could to get close to the ground. Right, I mean, it was this high up. I remember you checking it. I checked, it was this much. But it's raised a little bit now. The profile is a little bit higher. Now it works differently. Because not having anymore your convergent, divergent action of the Venturi, you need to rely on a different aerodynamic behaviour. So you play a bit more on how you pitch the car, how you optimise the diffuser suction. And so it's all about the rear part of the car that creates a suction and you need to play efficiently with the front and rear of the car. Let me back up and just put a little physics in here in case anybody didn't know. If you have rubber on concrete, that is a very high, as we say, coefficient of friction. A wet ice cube on a hockey rink has a low coefficient of friction. This friction means if you take the rubber and turn it, it'll send the object forward. But if the friction is low and you start turning the rubber, it'll just spin in place because it's not gripping. It's tyre grip. That's the consumer's term for friction. You can increase the force of friction that'll propel you forward by making the thing weigh more. Increase the weight. You put greater pressure between the rubber and the road. There's more traction there so that it won't slide on the road and you can accelerate much faster. So one way to do that is you can pile bricks in the back of their... What a great idea. I wonder if Ferrari ever thought of that. Just get some cinder blocks, load up the back of the car. That'll put pressure on the wheels, increasing the coefficient of friction. But if you did that, you're increasing the mass of the car. And force equals mass times acceleration. So for a given force that your engine is going to give you, if you have high mass, you're going to have a lower acceleration. So that's not good. No. Is there some other way to increase the weight of the car by not increasing its mass? You take an airplane wing, which is designed to give you lift, up, flip it upside down, stick it at the back of the car. Now the air going across it will push downward. But to do so, it's actually putting a drag on the car. Because the air is pushing it down. You don't need high grip at high speeds on a straightaway. You only need high grip if you're slowing down, speeding up, or on a turn. Yeah. When you're accelerating. When you need the better handling. The handling. Because that's where the grip matters. I ought to have a way to turn off the grip if I don't need the grip. Yeah. Which is the active aero. Active aero. They have louvers apparently. We have introduced, we, F1 has introduced this new active aero. Because now, as you can see, when the cars are racing, both wings, front and rear, they suddenly open their profiles. And the target is to have a massive reduction in downforce and therefore in drag. This means, consequently, you reduce the influence of the drag of the car on the following car. That means maybe having more spectacular races. And together with that, you try and have on your own car a shadow of drag. That means you go faster. If you want to take a turn fast, close the louvers. Now you have high downward force. Yeah. Now you can take the turn without flying off the track. I mean, you've handled one of the steering wheels. And it is basically like a computer console for gamers. Oh, I thought that was a toy they gave me. Where's the button I push so that I can pass everyone and win the race? Which button is that? It's actually at the back of the steering wheel. So when you see the front and the rear wing of the car dropping down, that's called straight line mode now in 2026. This is driver activated. So now four to three times a lap, every single lap during the race, this is what I'm going to click. I feel the buttons there. It's right there. I don't have to search for that. Exactly. Because that was made just for that driver. So this gives me my maximum speed. Exactly. Gotcha. So Gary, with all these design changes in the car, there would have to be attendant rule changes about how they race. Yeah. So what landed? Computer game terminology, almost. Overtake mode. As we've talked about, it is all about enhancing the race experience, getting more excitement, getting more overtaking. And more fan enjoyment. Of course, you've got these power boosts. They capture energy through braking. Regenerative braking. You were going to brake here to slow down. Rather than burn brake pads to do so, let's feed the kinetic energy of the car by a mechanism into the battery. Yeah. To recharge the battery. So the battery sucks up your speed by doing so. You save it for a rainy day. The other way to do it is lifting off the throttle. We could also call it slowing down. Right. That would be slowing down. Yes. And then there's a third option, which is a little bit counterintuitive, but through accelerating. But this time you're capturing from the internal combustion engine. Yeah. However, you can do that, but it's going to take energy away from your car. So you have to be ready, willing, and able for that to be the case. And that's one thing the drivers have pushed back on. Yes. This season in 2026. I heard about that. They call it super clipping. This is where drivers frustratingly don't feel the full energy output because it's being used to charge. Okay. So they would notice that drop in power. But if it's helping your battery when you need it the most, they should be able to embrace that trade-off. Before the Miami Grand Prix, there was a two-week period where they weren't racing. So they convened with the teams and said, What are your thoughts? How do we address? These would be their reactions to the new everything. We had to go and find ourselves a former Formula One racing driver and a former Ferrari driver, Marc Genet, who happens to be in charge of the Ferrari Academy, where the next gen of race drivers are coming through. Let's keep what works. Let's readjust what has room for improvement or doesn't perfectly work. They have been on the right direction. May not be enough. They're going to re-evaluate them now after this Grand Prix. But that's the approach of Formula One. And also very important, they take into account all the stakeholders. They listen to the driver. They listen to the teams. They listen to the fans. Rather than just say, These are what's happening for 2026. Get on with it. They were smart enough to say, Let's see three races in whether we need to change anything. Because they knew there was quite a change. So they did that. They took that on board. They had a little tweak. Had to think about it. And I think the drivers feel a little bit better. I think what they did was, and they brought this in for the Miami Grand Prix, was to reduce the maximum recharge and to increase peak energy output. And I think that went up to 350 kilowatts. Up from? 250. Okay. But I think a lot of what the changes were for the 2026 season was to give the Formula One fans more excitement. Because there's so many more overtaking moments in a race now that there weren't previously. Because you have the entire starting line. Their pole position is from their trial. Yeah, from their qualifying. The qualifying trial. So if everybody does what you'd expect, this configuration would never change for the entire race. So what they wanted was to generate more of these moments. No, what they should have done. Well, don't tell me. Started the reverse of that. Put the fast guy in the back and the slow one in the front. Then everybody's changing places at all times. I don't know. The fast guys aren't going to go for that. They're not. So what was interesting was, in the Australian Grand Prix in 2025, there was something like 30, 40 overtaking manoeuvres. The 2026 Australian Grand Prix had over 120. So it's working. I see words applied in Formula One racing, like attacking and defending. Tell me what that means when you're in a car. Of course, the car attacking is the car overtaking and defending the one that doesn't want to be overtaken. It sounds dangerous to defend your position. Because if I want to come overtake you and then you just come over, that feels dangerous. Yeah, and in order for it not to be dangerous, there are some rules. Oh, OK. Some of them are written and some of them are implied. Basically, one very important rule says you can change direction as long as the other car is not on the side. Once the car is on the side, you are not allowed to change direction, especially if you are braking. If you are in the braking zone, you have to stay in your line. Therefore, if you want to block, if you want to defend, you have to do that before the car is trying to make the move. So how has this season been different with a hybrid engine and the sort of differential energy that can be being horsepower between cars and overtaking? There is more the strategy aspect into it. Because you have to manage energy and you can decide, OK, I'm going to save energy here because I want to overtake him in Turn 12, for example. So that's where the strategy aspect plays more into account. The software says for every car what is the optimum way of deploying the energy. But on race day, and that's why even Charles and Luis like this type of racing, because they say the driver decides where to attack, where not to attack. OK, he's going to attack me now. Of course, you don't know how much energy the other driver has left. There is a lot of this overtaking, which I think is good, this Mario Kart overtaking or Yo-Yo overtaking. Basically, you overtake and suddenly you run out of energy and the guy behind has energy and overtakes you back. OK, so it's better for the fans. So far, the racing has played really well. I mean, we've seen up to now the best racing for many, many years. We were thinking, you know what? Never going to get a current driver because they're busy. But we did. I know, because he glides in on one of those electric scooters. And I remember speaking to him. It was loud in that garage. 100% loud. I don't even know if the audio came out, but we can find out. So we've all been reading about, we heard about these changes to the design and the wings. So how much of that you have to practice on and think about for this next race? This is the first race with that, right? With all the changes? I'm trying to ask him questions about Formula 1. And he's trying to ask me questions about cosmology. I mean, that's all boring stuff. I want to know about space. We'll trade space things. The new rules, they just made some adjustments, but they have not really made much difference. Basically, we're struggling this year. It's really hard for fans to fully understand it. And it's hard for us to understand it because the ultimate goal when you're driving a Formula 1 car is to push the car to the limit. The faster you take a corner, hopefully you should be up on your time compared to others. And right now with what we have, because we have a limited amount of battery, we have to constantly, when you're off power, you're charging the battery. When you're on power, you're using the battery. And when you're braking, I presume that charges the battery as well. Well, but we have less charge this year because they took away the MGU-H that we had last year, which is too confusing. So basically, if you take the high speed fast, if you got more committed and you take more risk and you go faster through a corner, you get penalized afterwards because you don't charge enough. So it's a whole, it's a strategy. Strategy, just how you have to drive. And then also the tyres, like yesterday, for example, we were fast through the high speed, but then we'll slow down the straight and others gained like four tenths of... That seems like there'd be more occasions to have lead changes. Yeah. So that's more fun for the viewer, right? It is, but also the software has to work right. And that's the biggest problem. Yesterday, I was losing three tenths of a second just because the software wasn't doing its job. How do you know you're losing three tenths of a second? I didn't know until I came back and out to my engineers, I'm like, I'm sorry. To my engineers I sit with, I'm sorry, like I'm slow. And they're like, you're not slow. The software wasn't working. So that's a real frustration because back in the day, they didn't have that. We need less... No one is looking at you and thinking about some software engineer in the back room. Everyone just sees that. Nobody's thinking about that. Everyone just sees that you're... It's your fault you lost that three tenths. Exactly. I have unlimited cosmic curiosities to share. And I'm delighted as an educator to be in the company of someone who has that level of curiosity, even in the middle of an F1 weekend. F1 drivers would make excellent asteroids. Oh yeah, that would be great. I can absolutely fly a rocket. I just maybe need to figure out the buttons. Different buttons. But I would have been a good pilot though. What you do is you get NASA to design just a little handle there with the buttons. Launch. Stop. Go back to the old orbit. And it sucks today that they're launching from mission control. Give the controls back to the pilot. You're a payload in the rocket. His interest is highly resonant with many. The search for life in the universe. I haven't asked a question here. So I watched the whole building of the Hubble telescope. Yes. Sorry, not the Hubble telescope, the... The images they sent of all those galaxies in one little space was like mind-blowing. Yes, yes. I believe there's life out there. All the... All... When you do the math, how old is the universe? How quickly life started on Earth? The ingredients of life on Earth, which are everywhere. No one denies that. No one who's studied the problem denies that. So what we can ask is, if we colonize Mars and their microbes, that'd be kind of fun. But if we do, we totally want to put an F1 track there. He has a space geek underbelly that revealed itself in conversation. Do you love the movie Interstellar? Yes, of course. You know when in that movie, they go to one of the planets and 45 minutes there is like years. Yeah, the gargantuan planet near the black hole. Yeah, it's the relativity. Because time is not the same for everyone. It flows at different rates. But in our galaxy, there's no... You wouldn't have that on any other... No, no, you can find a black hole that has those properties. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You could... So they found a place where that's going up. Not a matter of what galaxy are you in, it's what black hole are you near. And you can't go through a black hole. That we know of. You want to try? 100%. If I could, I would. We offered him a patch from the International Space Station. Mission 44. And guess what number he is? Tell him. 44. You're 44, correct? My race car is 44, yeah. This is the 44th mission to the space station, which was international. And it even included one of the Kelly brothers on there, the famous twin. Yeah, yeah. So we thought this would have special meaning for you because it was the 44th mission. Oh, cool. 44th patch. Yeah. That's so cool. It's simple but meaningful, I think. Super meaningful. Yes. I love this. So G-forces. There's more than one flavor of G-force. So can you break this down for us? Well, a G-force is simply an acceleration. That's all it is. And when you're standing on Earth, you're subject to Earth's acceleration of 32 feet per second per second. That's what it's called. Yeah, okay. We live in 1G. And no one's complaining. No, because we're used to it. We're used to it. We evolved here. You go into orbit, zero Gs because you are floating. Right. Okay. And you can have anywhere in between. On the moon, you weigh one sixth of what you'd weigh here. That's one sixth G. So I'm told you might hit a G-force up to four. Five. Five, but for brief. Yeah, yeah. So as soon as you get that turn in the breaking point, when you hit the brakes, it's five Gs, curved for a short period. This one here, you don't pull massive. There's not really any high-speed corners really here. When we go to like Spain, Barcelona, turn three, you're pulling high G for a lot longer. So your neck gets like a beating. So you can get G-forces by being on a planet. You get G-forces by speeding up. Everyone will feel this in a car, even if it's not an F1 car. No. You put your pedal to the metal. You jolt back a little bit. You're okay. When you brake. So not only when you're speeding up, when you slow down. In Miami, the highest peak of G-force is on the braking. So you're pulling forward on that. First of all, a driver on the brake pedal, we put more than 70 bar. More than 70 bar is like 100 kilos of force on the brake pedal. And that translates into around seven G. Not for very long. No. Otherwise, your head falls off. Less than a second, seven G. It's so hard that sometimes the sweating detaches from your body and sticks in the inside of the visor, you know? So it's... Who would have thought? Yeah. Actually, sometimes drivers think it's raining and it's not raining. It's your sweat detaches, yeah. Detaching from your face. Yeah. That has happened in the past. Okay. However, if you would drive in the car, the thing that would probably impress you the most is the lateral G-force. And in Miami, we don't have so many high-speed corners. But the lateral G-force, why is more impressive? Because it sustains over two, three seconds. Doing like three, four Gs over two, three seconds. And that really, you feel it on your neck, especially, you know? So yeah, Formula One car, G-force is very, very high. Once we get to Miami, Ferrari and our dear friend's Bitdefender approach us to say, we've got a special gift for you. Okay, swag. No, a hot lap. They put you in an extremely fast car with a really talented driver and they whiz you around the track. That's what the hot lap was. Because they told me about this and I said, no. And guess what? I said no. We did totally wimp out and we could not turn that gift down. What we did was sacrifice our young producer. I think that is the technical term. Sacrifice. Stuck him in there like a pea in a tin can and rattled him around. So maybe it topped out about 170 miles an hour. Yeah, that's up there. Yeah, but because we're twisted, we put a GoPro in there just to watch him rattle around like a pea in a tin can. Oh, I haven't seen this yet. So you get to see him respond to the G-forces. Yes, okay. All right, let's watch it. All right. That's my Alex. What are they doing there? He's our producer. I know, we really have put him out there, haven't we? Let's see how he handles the thrust. Sorry to laugh. Oh, look at him. Look at the facial expressions. I know, but look at his upper body. It is being thrown. He looks like an anime character. What we see happening to his ID badge is happening to his inner organs. Oh, good news. And I think also his brain, but I didn't want to tell him that. No, don't do that. Yeah. He won't be listening to this, will he? And look at the smile on the driver's face. The driver's like just totally chill. Yeah, that's what I do. He's enjoying himself. The three more turns there each, or whatever we get here, 60 degree turns. Yeah. Those aren't so bad. Because he is scrambling our producer here. That's a hell of a straight. The driver's just like, yeah, I'm just going to the, you know, piggly wiggly, picking up some milk. I'm going to pick up some groceries. It just shows you that is a graphic example of exactly what's in play. Yes, yes. We've got to be thankful to Ferrari, Scuderia Ferrari, the stable Ferrari, and Bitdefender. They're partners, and in similar ways, they're adaptable to ever-changing conditions. And yeah, they're pretty good at what they do. And they were good to us, Neil. They looked after us very, very well. Come to think of it, Gary. Yes. All these changes, in any given moment, they feel, they might feel oppressive, or they might feel, why are you doing that? What's going on? But then step back, and look at the original Formula One cars. You are glad that's not what they're racing today. Somebody is moving, moving things forward. Yeah, I mean, it's, I talked about it as an evolution. Yes. On not just one front, but many fronts. Multiple fronts. And so, of course, science operates that way. There's no substitute for good data. And on another level, there's no substitute for lots of data. Because not only does it, can it affirm what you thought you knew was true, but it can open up vistas to experiment further. And it looks like Formula One is carved in that image of the flow of science. I think so. From what we did and what we thought was true yesterday to the future that is yet to be plumbed. For our genius and our innovation. How about that?