While this sounds like a genius tactic to get more manufacturers involved to keep the sport going, It presents Pirelli with many new challenges. We didn’t know how intense it was until we sat down with Mario Isola (pictured below with Max Verstappen), head of Pirelli’s F1 Motorsport Director. Isola is the one F1 boss we don’t see on Drive to Survive, but he’s no less critical than Toto Wolff, Christian Horner, or Guenther Steiner.
According to Isola, the first challenge Pirelli faces is weight. In 2005, the average weight of a car on the grid was roughly 1,100 pounds. Enter the hybrid era and the weight of a car shot up to 1,700 lbs.
This is when Isola makes quite a revelation about the 2026 cars, about which we don’t know much. “The drivers want the car to drop by roughly 50 kg (110 lbs), and one action is to have a smaller car, also with smaller tires,” said Isola. He’s in the know, so can we look forward to smaller cars on the grid again? The vehicles have become so big that they struggle to get through the famous Fairmont Hairpin in Monaco. We can only hope.
