Formula 1's cleverest bit of 2026 bodywork is suddenly on the defensive. After Max Verstappen crashed out of two races in a row with the same rotating rear wing letting go, the FIA has opened safety talks with the teams running the device — and the Red Bull driver is not mincing words about the danger.
Verstappen was running third at Silverstone, six laps from the finish, when the wing failed to reattach through the quick corners at Stowe and pitched him into a spin. The Austrian Grand Prix weekend before, qualifying had ended the same way.
"At this point, it's super dangerous, because I could have really hurt myself two times," he said. "I was lucky in Austria; I was lucky here. But that's why you get really fed up with it."
Asked to explain what actually happens, Verstappen kept it simple: "While turning into the corner, the rear wing is not fully attaching, and you lose a lot of downforce. You just spin off the track." He told Autosport the second failure was "a different fault, let's say, but the same outcome."
The device in question is the "Macarena" wing — Ferrari boss Frederic Vasseur's own nickname for a rear flap that rotates towards flat on the straights to cut drag before flipping back for downforce in the corners. Ferrari raced it first in 2026, Red Bull followed at Miami, and McLaren has one waiting but has yet to run it. The catch: the flap has to snap through that movement in a fraction of a second, and one that doesn't fully close dumps rear grip without warning.
Red Bull principal Laurent Mekies backed his driver. "Look, he's right not to be happy," he said. "It is very unpleasant for drivers to be let down by the car in the high-speed corners in two consecutive races."
Whether the concept itself is to blame is another question — and one Mekies would not answer yet. "We have raced quite a few races with that concept now. We have raced this since Miami," he told The Race. "It's too early in the analysis to establish whether it's an issue with the concept or something else. But we are for sure going to leave no stone unturned when it comes to it. And we have all the options open."
Reading between the lines, "all the options open" includes bolting on a conventional wing for the Belgian Grand Prix. Spa's long, flat-out sections leave no margin for a third failure, and Red Bull's engineers have pinned down two separate faults — one they understood from Austria, one at Silverstone they did not. "We will do whatever is necessary to be on the safe side," Mekies said.
Ferrari is in the same conversation with the FIA. Its wing swings the hardest of the three, and the team has already learned the concept can bite: at Suzuka it parked the design after the flap's timing clashed with the front wing and upset the balance. Now the governing body is weighing everything from stricter safety limits to an outright ban of the moving wings — which would strip the grid of a season-defining trick just as everyone has copied it.
The lines are drawn. Verstappen wants it fixed or gone. Mekies wants proof before he gives up on it. And the FIA has to weigh straight-line speed against a driver telling anyone who will listen that the thing nearly hurt him twice.
