Brembo's Challenge in F1's New Era

The ovens in Curno don’t care about regulation cycles or FIA press releases. They just burn, for hours and days, turning raw carbon into the discs that decide whether a driver makes the corner or ends up in the wall.

Inside Brembo’s racing headquarters, that heat now comes with a fresh layer of pressure. Formula 1’s new era has barely begun, and already the goalposts are moving again.

A New Era, Already Shifting

This season’s technical reset has made braking more complex than at any point in F1’s history. Brembo, the sport’s dominant brake supplier, is wired into every team on the grid, juggling the demands of 2024 while staring straight at 2027.

The core complication sits at the heart of the hybrid rules. The FIA confirmed in June that the combustion-to-electric power ratio will change in two steps: 58:42 in 2027, then 60:40 in 2028. That shift doesn’t just affect engines and energy recovery. It rewrites how the car slows down.

For Andrea Dellavedova, race engineer at Brembo, the timing is as challenging as the numbers.

“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’s the sting. Half a season’s worth of data, simulations and track learning suddenly loses value just as the engineers thought they had a handle on the new cars.

“This year we already started to think about the 2027 braking system,” he 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 target is moving. The deadline is not.

Racing the Clock to 2027

In a sport obsessed with marginal gains, time is the one resource nobody can buy back. For Brembo, early clarity on regulations is almost as valuable as horsepower.

“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 calendar is brutal. Teams want components for early next year. Between a regulation decision and a brake disc turning laps in Bahrain, there are months of invisible work.

“The time horizon is very short, because the teams need the components for early next year,” he explains. “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 tells its own story. In an ideal world, testing finishes before production starts. In modern F1, those phases overlap because they have to. The stopwatch dictates the workflow.

Inside Brembo’s “Witch’s Kitchen”

If there is a place built to survive this kind of regulatory turbulence, it’s Brembo’s network of facilities. The company’s operational and administrative centre sits in Kilometro Rosso, Bergamo’s science and technology park, anchoring a global operation that spans 18 countries.

For F1, though, the heartbeat is closer to home. Curno, just outside Bergamo and near the headquarters, is where the racing hardware is born.

“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,” Dellavedova says of what he calls the “witch’s kitchen” in Curno. “They are running 24 hours per day, 6 days per week.”

The image fits. Behind closed doors, brake discs and callipers are tortured on dynos that mimic the violence of an F1 lap: 300 km/h to 80, again and again, until the material gives up or the data says it’s ready.

The key advantage, Dellavedova believes, lies in how tightly Brembo has packed its ecosystem.

“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 delays waiting for feedback from another continent. A drawing in the morning can become a physical part on a test bench in astonishingly short order. In a regulatory race, geography becomes performance.

Confidence in the Middle of Complexity

The task facing Brembo is huge: support today’s cars, anticipate tomorrow’s hybrids, and do it while the rules shift under their feet. Yet inside Curno, there is no sense of panic.

Although the 2027 regulations demand a fresh concept, Dellavedova leans on experience, capacity, and a track record that stretches across decades of F1 title fights.

“In terms of timing, we are in line,” he says. “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 ovens keep running. The dynos keep screaming. And as F1’s power units edge further into the electric age, the question is no longer whether Brembo can build a brake that stops the car — it’s how far ahead of the next rule change they can afford to be.