Brembo's Race Against Time for F1's 2027 Braking System
In the shadows of F1’s new era, Brembo is fighting a race of its own – one that never appears on a timing screen but can decide everything.
The 2026 regulations have redrawn the map for power units, and with them, braking has become more intricate than at any other point in the sport’s history. For Brembo, the long‑time benchmark in stopping power, the job is no longer just about slowing a car down. It is about managing a constantly shifting balance between combustion and electric power, between energy harvesting and pure deceleration, between today’s demands and tomorrow’s deadlines.
And tomorrow is already late.
Designing for 2027 while racing in 2026
Speaking to RacingNews365, Brembo race engineer Andrea Dellavedova laid bare the scale of the task. The company entered this season with one eye firmly on the future, only to see the target move mid‑stride.
“Now we have done half a year, so we understand more, and we were focusing on some direction,” he explains. “As next year the energy ratio will change, what we learned this year will not be that useful for the new development.”
That single shift changes everything. The new generation of power units leans far more heavily on electrical energy, and the FIA’s decision to tweak the combustion‑to‑electric power ratio in stages has forced Brembo to rewrite its own roadmap.
“This year we already started to think about the 2027 braking system,” Dellavedova says. “But now we have to think newly about the system, and we cannot use all the info that we discovered this year for the next one.”
The governing body confirmed in June that the ratio will move to 58:42 in 2027 and then to 60:40 in 2028. On paper, it’s a couple of numbers. In reality, it rips up months of development and demands a fresh approach to how the braking system interacts with energy recovery and power deployment.
A fast sport, a short clock
In F1, time is always the enemy. For a brake manufacturer, it’s ruthless.
“Being in a very fast environment, the more time we have to develop the new system, the better it is,” Dellavedova says. “If the communication would happen some weeks before… it’s always easier, because we have to design and test the prototype, and then launch the production.”
The clock is already ticking. Teams will want components early next year, long before the public sees a car on track. That leaves Brembo juggling two unforgiving timelines: racing now, designing for 2027, and doing both under a compressed development window.
“The time horizon is very short, because the teams need the components for early next year,” he continues. “It’s something that takes time, both designing and producing our components. From the design to the production phase, it takes months; it’s not something that you can do in weeks, because the process itself of producing the disc and the carbon material is very long, because they have to spend time in the oven, with several processes.
“Also, the calliper itself, they have to spend a lot of time on the machine. Then there is also the testing. Sometimes we do the testing and the production in parallel.”
That last line says everything about the pressure. In an ideal world, you test, you refine, you sign off, then you build. In F1’s world, Brembo often has to do those steps side by side, trusting its experience to close the gap between theory and reality.
Inside Brembo’s “witch’s kitchen”
If there is a place built to handle this kind of strain, it is Curno.
Brembo’s racing heart beats in this Italian town near its headquarters, even though the company’s footprint stretches far beyond. The operational and administrative centre sits in Kilometro Rosso, Bergamo’s science and technology park, while manufacturing and commercial sites run across 18 countries. The global scale is impressive. The real magic, for F1, happens in one building.
In Curno, Dellavedova oversees what he calls the “witch’s kitchen”: a dense cluster of dyno test benches and development rigs that never really sleep.
“We have several dyno test benches that we use to test the new developments in terms of both materials, geometries and also dimensions of the braking system,” he says. “They are running 24 hours per day, 6 days per week.”
That relentless schedule underpins every late regulation change, every revised energy ratio, every urgent call from a team chasing a tenth of a second under braking.
The advantage is not just the hardware. It is proximity.
Speed of thought, speed of metal
Brembo has kept its research, design, development, production, and testing tightly grouped. In an era when many companies spread their operations across continents, Brembo has chosen to keep its core F1 work under one roof. Dellavedova believes that choice is decisive.
“The performance is there with both offices and also the production and testing department,” he says. “We are very close, so the designer can work on the laptop, design the new component and in a very fast way they just go to the first floor — the dyno test benches are there with the people working directly on the tests, so they have a very fast way of communicating, and also they can physically inspect the products that they are developing.”
No long email chains. No waiting days for a prototype to arrive from another country. An engineer can sketch a new caliper geometry in the morning and stand next to it on a test bench soon after. In a development race defined by weeks and sometimes days, that short walk upstairs becomes a competitive weapon.
Confidence in the middle of chaos
The scale of the 2027 challenge is obvious. A changing energy ratio, a compressed timeline, and a technical landscape that looks different to anything F1 has seen. Yet Brembo does not sound rattled.
Dellavedova, who lives in the middle of this storm, still sounds assured.
“In terms of timing, we are in line,” he concludes. “In terms of performance, based on our experience, yes, because, of course, we are doing the best that we think will be the best for the next year.”
The cars of 2027 will look and sound different. Their power units will behave differently. Drivers will talk about new braking characteristics and new limits. When they stamp on the pedal at 330 km/h and trust the car to stop, the work done today in that “witch’s kitchen” in Curno will decide whether they make the corner – or not.
