Little has been said about it so far, but the topic is very interesting. The 2026 power units will have an important innovation: for safety reasons, the MGU-K can no longer be housed on the side of the right bank of the internal combustion engine, but must necessarily be housed inside a cradle of the chassis.
The reason? It’s very simple: the electric motor works with high voltage so you want to isolate it to avoid possible current losses.
Here is the current MGU-K fitted by Mercedes
Photo credit: Mercedes AMG
The MGU-K, compared to today which delivers 120 kW, will have an electrical power of 350 kW, i.e. a value almost triple what we are used to. The new motor-generator will have to have a minimum weight of 16 kg and at most will be able to spin at a speed of 60 thousand revolutions per minute, while the current solution cannot exceed 50 thousand revolutions while delivering only 163 horsepower.
If Ferrari uses a complicated epicyclic gear system on the 066/12 to couple the crankshaft to the MGU-K, in 2026 a new transmission system specifically designed will be necessary because the 6-cylinder will spin at no more than 11 thousand rpm at the gearbox gear.
And this will be one of the important technical issues in the search for reliability: it seems that engine engineers are dealing with very different solutions because bench failures are frequent in this experimental phase.
FIA chart
Photo by: Franco Nugnes
The manufacturers are also working to understand where to place the transmission which will have its own clutch: this new “gearbox” can be mounted near the MGU-K, in the niche of the chassis, and then the motor-generator will have an increase in weight of 4 kg, or it will be placed from the 6-cylinder crankcase and in this case it will be the ICE with a minimum weight of 130 kg to which the 4 kg of the connection system must be added. There is also a third possibility: if the transmission will be halfway between the two parts, the 4 kg will be distributed half on the MGU-K and the other half on the 6 cylinder.
If the manufacturers will look for the best location to make the power unit more efficient (the transfer case will also need a cooling system!), the chassis builders will try to understand how much the movement of the transmission can affect the weight distribution, transforming a theme purely motoring in a matter that will also affect the hardware of the car.
Any change in the regulations could have important effects on the layout of future single-seaters. The simulations that the teams carried out on the model presented by the FIA in Canada revealed the inability of the agile cars to reach a performance threshold adequate for F1, recommending that the current distribution of power be reviewed (50% from the internal combustion engine and 50 % from the hybrid) to the advantage of an increase in fuel to prevent the PUs from finding themselves with flat batteries at certain times.
And even the desire to review the aerodynamic load (the FIA proposal would like a 30% reduction in downforce which seems unrealistic) could have effects on the aerodynamic and mechanical definition of the 2026 single-seaters, perhaps calling into question some fixed points of the projects already started by the Builders.
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