08/06/2024
NEWS STORY
While Fernando Alonso has claimed the 2026 cars will be "pretty slow", GPDA director George Russell fears that the speeds being reached will be "crazy".
"The cars are going to take a quite a big turn in terms of how they perform," said the Mercedes driver. "They're going to be exceptionally quick in the straights, 360km/h (224 mph) probably at most tracks, which is pretty impressive.
"Obviously then the safety needs to be probably improved," he added, "because having a crash at 360, 370km/h is going to be pretty crazy."
Of particular concern to Russell are the super-fast circuits like Monza, Jeddah and Baku,
"When it comes to safety, unfortunately, history has told us that incidents need to happen before changes are made," he said. "Everybody needs to do a really thorough job ahead of these regulations, because the cars are going to be so quick.
"It's going to have so little downforce in the straights, it's almost going to feel like you're just flying through the air. You can imagine in a race that it starts raining and you're on slick tyres, and you're doing 250 miles an hour on a street circuit. That's going to be a bit of a sketchy place to be, so these are questions that need to be answered.
"To be fair to the FIA, they are fully aware of this and they're on top of this, and they're looking at all of the possible scenarios of what could happen.
"Time will tell, but the cars are already bloody fast as they are. Where do we stop, are we going to get up to 400 kilometres an hour? Do the fans really need or want to see this?
However, the Briton admits that the reduction in downforce which will lead to higher speeds should improve the racing.
"From a driving standpoint you want the fastest cars," he said, "you want to feel like you're in a fighter jet and in 2020 and 2021 that's how it felt, and now these cars are getting very quick again.
"It would be a shame to lose some of that performance of the car," he admitted. "But on the flip side, it will improve the racing if there's less downforce and there's less dirty air.
"You can't have it all and you've got to choose your battles. What is it that we want to achieve? For me, you want to have good, hard racing, and strong competition, ideally, between every team and every driver."