F1 Sidepods Explained: Cooling, Crash Safety, and the Zero-Sidepod Gamble (2026)

F1 Sidepods by the Numbers

• 3: distinct jobs every F1 sidepod handles at once -- cooling, structural crash protection, and aerodynamics.
• 780kg: mass of the FIA's mandatory side-impact test impactor, fired into the sidepod's crash structure at a minimum of 10 metres per second.
• 80 kN: maximum force any of that impactor's four segments may register for more than a cumulative 3 milliseconds during the test.
• 15%-35%: the share of total impact energy each of those four segments must individually absorb, per the FIA's own technical regulations.
• 2014: season the FIA mandated an identical carbon-fibre side-impact structure across every car -- a concept Marussia first proposed and Red Bull Racing helped optimize.
• 2022: season Mercedes gambled on a radically slimmed "zero-sidepod" W13, a concept it quietly abandoned by the following year's Monaco Grand Prix.

What a Sidepod Actually Does (Three Jobs in One)

It's easy to think of a sidepod as just a cosmetic panel, but it's really three separate engineering problems solved in the same small volume. First, cooling: the water and oil radiators live inside the sidepod, fed by its inlet, alongside the MGU-K electronics and part of the exhaust routing -- and the cooling package actually changes circuit to circuit, with teams running more open bodywork at a hot, low-speed venue like Singapore than at a cooler European track. Second, structural safety: every sidepod cavity contains a dedicated side-impact structure designed to absorb lateral crash energy before it reaches the cockpit survival cell (see the crash-test numbers above). Third, aerodynamics: since the ground-effect regulations arrived in 2022, the sidepod's outer surfaces have become, according to f1-fansite.com's technical glossary, "one of the most heavily worked aerodynamic surfaces on the car" -- shaping how air reaches the floor and diffuser and how it manages the turbulent wake coming off the front tyres.

The Zero-Sidepod Gamble: Mercedes' 2022 Failure

During 2022 pre-season testing, Mercedes rolled out the W13 with dramatically slimmer sidepods than anyone else on the grid, betting that shrinking the bodywork would cut drag and improve cooling efficiency without sacrificing downforce. It didn't work. Wide sidepods act a bit like the "miniskirts" cars used in the ground-effect era of the 1970s and 80s -- they help seal and accelerate the airflow travelling under the floor, which is exactly what generates ground-effect downforce. Mercedes' minimal pods couldn't replicate that effect, and the W13 suffered from severe porpoising, a violent aerodynamic bouncing that forced the team to run the car higher off the ground than intended, erasing much of the benefit the design was meant to deliver in the first place. Mercedes stubbornly stuck with the concept into 2023 before scrapping it altogether -- a conventional, downwash-style W14 broke cover at the Monaco Grand Prix that May. To Mercedes' credit, technical director James Allison has pushed back on the idea that the sidepods alone sank the car, arguing the entire concept -- "from the tip of the nose to the very back of the tail" -- was uncompetitive, with the sidepods simply the most visually obvious symptom of a broader problem.

2026: A New Round of Sidepod Experiments

Sidepod design is being reopened for 2026, for a genuinely new reason this time: the power units themselves have changed. The new combustion engines need less cooling than before, but the significantly upsized hybrid system rejects more heat than it used to, which shifts the balance teams have to strike when sizing a sidepod's inlets. Per Motorsport.tech's breakdown of the 2026 aero regulations, most teams are still expected to run oversized "high and flat flank" sidepods similar to the post-2022 downwash consensus, since a super-slim design still isn't an obvious solution to that airflow problem. Audi, however, showed up to Bahrain pre-season testing with a strikingly different interpretation: a narrow, near-vertical inlet with an outwardly tapering forward section, plus a channel cut into the top surface specifically to shorten the distance airflow has to travel before reaching the top of the diffuser -- reported by PlanetF1 and The Race as one of the most eye-catching technical talking points of the test. Whether it proves closer to Red Bull's successful downwash blueprint or Mercedes' abandoned zero-sidepod experiment won't be clear until the season is properly underway.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a sidepod on an F1 car?

A sidepod is one of the two bodywork pods mounted on either side of the cockpit, between the front and rear wheels. Each one does three jobs at once: it houses the water and oil radiators plus the MGU-K electronics for cooling, it contains a mandatory carbon-fibre side-impact structure for crash safety, and its outer surfaces are shaped to direct airflow toward the floor and diffuser for downforce.

Why did Mercedes' zero-sidepod concept fail?

Mercedes' minimal-bodywork W13 lacked the wide "miniskirt"-like flanks that help seal and accelerate airflow under the floor, which is critical for generating ground-effect downforce. The car suffered severe porpoising -- violent aerodynamic bouncing -- forcing Mercedes to run it higher than intended and erasing much of the benefit the slim design was meant to deliver. The team quietly abandoned the concept, debuting a conventional-looking W14 at the 2023 Monaco Grand Prix.

How much force can an F1 sidepod's crash structure withstand?

Under FIA technical regulations, a car's side-impact structure is tested by firing a 780kg impactor into it at a minimum of 10 metres per second. The force on any one of the impactor's four segments can't exceed 80 kN for more than a cumulative 3 milliseconds, and each segment must individually absorb between 15% and 35% of the total impact energy -- numbers the carbon-fibre structure has to meet without letting the cockpit survival cell take the hit.

What's different about F1 sidepods in 2026?

The 2026 power units need less cooling for the combustion engine but reject more heat from the upsized hybrid system, shifting how teams balance sidepod inlet sizing. Most of the grid is sticking with the "high and flat flank" downwash approach that became the post-2022 consensus, but Audi debuted a genuinely radical design in Bahrain testing -- a narrow, near-vertical inlet with a tapering forward section and a top-surface channel designed to feed airflow to the diffuser faster.

The Bottom Line

The sidepod is proof that even the least glamorous-looking part of an F1 car is really a compromise between three competing engineering demands -- cooling, crash safety, and aerodynamics -- and getting that balance wrong can cost a team an entire season, as Mercedes learned the hard way with its 2022 zero-sidepod gamble. It's the same underlying physics as the ground-effect floor and front wing covered elsewhere on this site -- every aerodynamic surface on a modern F1 car exists to feed clean, fast air to the floor. For more on how the FIA also regulates the safety side of car design, our monocoque safety-cell explainer covers the survival cell that sidepod crash structures are built to protect.