Red Bull Racing quietly used a Silverstone filming day this week to roll out one of the biggest chassis upgrade packages any team has committed to so far in 2026 — a deliberate attempt at redemption after skipping their traditional pre-season shakedown.
The car that appeared on track showed a new front wing, a redesigned sidepod layout, a revised DRS mechanism and, for the first time, halo winglets. A new floor has also been rumoured, though tight security and blurry leaked images have made it hard to confirm every component.
The front wing is the cleanest change to read from the images. The nose appears sharper than the current specification, and Red Bull have finally added a footplate — an element Mercedes and others have been running in 2026. The front flap looks close to what was introduced in Bahrain, but paired with the footplate it is a more complete assembly.
Mid-section, the change is more obvious. Red Bull rolled out a sidepod update in Japan, but it was incremental rather than a reset. The Silverstone car shows a more abrupt downwash profile, a visible bulge in the central area, and the engine cover now carries downwashing elements and a refined fin to manage flow towards the rear. The undercut remains, though the paint finish and light angle make it difficult to see whether it is deeper than the Japan-spec car.
The revised DRS mechanism is another notable addition. The flap appears to open further than before, and the aim is clearly a straight-line speed gain. Some had wondered whether Red Bull would mimic Ferrari's Macarena-style rear wing, but this is not that solution. Ferrari's system rotates the upper element to the side; Red Bull's is a more conventional DRS angle extension.
Perhaps the most striking addition is the pair of halo winglets — a direct borrowing from Ferrari, whose approach to extracting downforce from the halo area has clearly caught the rest of the paddock's attention. Red Bull have gone further than Ferrari's first execution and appear to have produced a cleaner carbon-fibre version. Whether the halo area becomes a development frontier for the rest of 2026 is now a real question.
There is also almost certainly a new floor on the car, although the camera angles have not allowed a clean view.
The timing of the filming day is almost as important as the parts themselves. Red Bull skipped a shakedown at the start of the 2026 season, and Silverstone has given them an opportunity to do catch-up work under the updated FIA energy management rules that come into force at Miami. Super-clip peak power has been raised from 250 kW to 350, and the qualifying harvest cap has dropped from 8 MJ to 7. Silverstone — a circuit with a mix of fast corners and long-ish straights — is a reasonable environment to start building driver feel for those new limits before the single-practice weekend in Miami.
Red Bull also ran flow viz on the car, an indicator that the new aerodynamic surfaces still need real-world correlation against the simulation data. Between that and the range of new parts, this was less a promotional filming day and more a de facto testing exercise within the rules.
Combined with Ferrari's Monza day, the two teams that have been chasing Mercedes have stolen a head start on preparing for the new rules at Miami. Whether the Red Bull package delivers the chassis redemption that car has been searching for since pre-season will only be answered once Friday practice starts in Florida. On paper, the scale of the update is bigger than any Red Bull upgrade of recent seasons. The car, finally, is catching up to the rules.
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*Originally published on [Formula One News](https://newsformula.one/article/red-bull-silverstone-filming-day-chassis-upgrade-halo-winglets-miami-2026). Visit for full coverage.*
