F1 Suspension Explained: Pushrod vs Pullrod in 2026
Welcome to the Happy Hour Racing Formula 1 Tech Breakdown - where we take one confusing part of F1 and make it make sense. No engineering degree required.
The Short Version
An F1 car has no springs you can see. The wheel is held on by six thin carbon rods, and one extra rod carries the wheel's movement inboard to a pivot called a rocker, which twists a spring hidden inside the chassis. If that rod angles upward from the wheel it is a pushrod. If it angles downward it is a pullrod. For 2026 most of the grid picked pushrod at both ends, and the reason has almost nothing to do with ride comfort.
Why You Cannot See the Springs
On your road car, the spring and the damper sit right next to the wheel where you can look at them. On an F1 car they are tucked inside the nose and inside the gearbox casing. Everything out in the open air is just linkage.
The reason is air. Anything hanging out in the airflow costs lap time, and a spring is a lumpy shape, so teams moved the heavy bits inboard and left only slim rods in the breeze. The rules push that further. Article C3.17 of the FIA technical regulations says every suspension member that is not round has to wear a sealed fairing, a smooth cover, no bigger than 100mm across and no more than 3.5 times longer than it is thick. The FIA knows teams would turn the suspension arms into extra wings if they could, so it caps how wing-shaped they can get.
Meet the Parts
Six rods connect each wheel to the car. The FIA spells it out in Article C10.3.2: exactly six suspension members per corner, and no spares. Four of them form two wishbones, the upper and lower triangles that locate the wheel. At the front, one of the six is the track rod that connects to the steering. The last one is the pushrod or pullrod, and that is the one doing the suspension work.
That rod runs to a rocker, a lever that pivots on a fixed axis inside the chassis, and the rules allow exactly one rocker per wheel. As the wheel rides up over a kerb, the rod shoves or tugs the rocker, and the rocker twists a torsion bar. That is the spring. A torsion bar is a solid metal rod that resists being twisted: wind it up and it wants to unwind, which is what a coil spring does, in a shape that fits down a tube.
The rocker also works a damper, which soaks up the energy so the car settles instead of bouncing. That is the whole list. Article C10.4.3 permits two things only, springs and dampers, and it bans springs that work on a fluid, which rules out air and hydraulic springs.
So What Is the Difference, Really?
A pushrod goes from low on the wheel upward to a rocker mounted high in the chassis. A pullrod goes from high on the wheel downward to a rocker mounted low. Same job, opposite direction.
Pullrod puts the heavy parts low, which helps the centre of gravity, and it keeps the rod thinner, because a rod being pulled can be slimmer than one being squashed. Pushrod lifts the rockers up and out of the way, which matters in 2026 because the cars shrank. The new rules cut the maximum wheelbase to 3,400mm, two hundred millimetres shorter than before, and the width to 1,900mm. Less room inside means a rear pullrod has to thread past the clutch and the gear cluster with far less space to do it.
The other half of the answer is airflow. The front rod sits in the wake of the front wing, and the 2026 wing feeds the floor differently than the ground-effect wings did. Most of the grid decided the cleanest answer was to lift the rockers out of that low airflow. Mercedes, Ferrari, Red Bull, Racing Bulls and Haas all launched with pushrod at both ends. Alpine and Cadillac went the other way and kept a pullrod front.
According to Autoracer, Red Bull will also move to push rod front suspension in 2026. As I mentioned when I talked about Ferrari, I believe this is entirely aerodynamically motivated and is the result of the entirely different flow conditioning the front wing will produce.
— brakeboosted (@brakeboosted) November 19, 2025
The Long List of Things You Are Not Allowed to Do
F1 suspension is simple because the rulebook keeps taking the clever bits away. Article C10.2.4 forbids any powered device that changes how the suspension behaves. Article C10.2.5 says no adjustment while the car is moving. Article C10.2.6 goes further and bans ride-height control, self-levelling, feedback loops, and any system that stores energy to release later.
That list is a museum of banned ideas. Active suspension, where computers and hydraulics held the car at a perfect ride height, won championships for Williams and was outlawed for 1994 alongside the rest of the driver aids. FRIC, a hydraulic link between the front and rear suspension, was pulled off every car for the 2014 German Grand Prix after the FIA warned teams it looked like a moveable aerodynamic device. Renault's mass damper, a weight on springs in the nose, was banned at the 2006 German Grand Prix under the same argument. And the inerter, the Cambridge-designed device McLaren ran from 2005 under the cover name "J-damper," is now named and forbidden in the regulations by both of its names.
One thing is still allowed, and it matters. Fixed geometry tricks like anti-dive and anti-squat, where the arms are angled so braking or acceleration fights the car's natural nose-dive or rear-squat, are written into the rules as permitted. That is the loophole engineers live in now. They cannot make the suspension think, so they make its shape do the thinking for it.
What You Will Actually See on Track
Watch an onboard at a street circuit. The car barely moves. Wheel travel is tiny next to a road car, because the floor has to stay at a near-constant height to keep making downforce. That is why F1 cars look so brutal over kerbs: there is almost nothing there to absorb the hit, so the whole car skips.
Watch the nose under heavy braking too. A car with plenty of anti-dive stays flatter than you expect for the speed it is shedding. And when a driver says the car is riding badly over the bumps at Monaco or Baku, that is this trade-off talking. Soft enough to take the bumps means the floor moves and the downforce goes away. Stiff enough to hold the floor steady means the driver gets beaten up.
The Bottom Line
F1 suspension is not really about comfort. It is a set of rods whose job is to hold the floor at the right height while the tyres stay in contact with the ground, and every design choice from pushrod to pullrod is an argument about airflow and packaging first. Next time a commentator says a team "switched to pushrod front," you know what moved and why: the spring did not change, the rocker just got out of the air.
If you like the engineering side of this sport, we have the gear for it. The Formula 1 Tech Limited Edition Belgian GP Hat and the F1 Tech Collection softshell jacket both come straight out of the paddock Tech line, and there is team gear too, from the McLaren New Era 9Fifty camo cap to the Red Bull Racing Spielberg GP tee. Browse the full Formula 1 collection and wear your colours on race day. New tech breakdowns drop every week.
