About F1

The steering wheel

An F1 steering wheel is closer to a games controller than a road car's wheel. It's rectangular rather than round, has a screen in the middle, and is covered in buttons and rotary switches. Through it the driver changes gear, talks to the team and adjusts how the car behaves corner by corner.

Each team designs its own wheel, and drivers often have a say in where the controls go. So the layout differs from car to car, but they all do much the same jobs.

The paddles behind the wheel

On the back of the wheel are paddles the driver works with their fingers:

  • Gear paddles: right to change up, left to change down. F1 cars have eight forward gears and a reverse, and a gear change takes a few milliseconds.
  • Clutch paddles: used only when pulling away, at the start of the race and leaving a pit stop. Once the car is moving the clutch is handled automatically. Some drivers have one clutch paddle, others have two.

The display

The screen shows the gear, engine revs and lights that tell the driver when to change gear. Drivers can switch between pages showing lap time deltas, tyre temperatures, the state of the battery, warnings and anything else the team wants them to see.

Buttons and rotaries

Most of the controls are for fine-tuning the car while it's moving. Common ones include:

  • Brake balance (or brake bias): how much of the braking happens at the front or the rear. Drivers often change it several times a lap to suit different corners.
  • Differential: how the rear wheels share power, which affects how the car turns into and exits corners.
  • Engine and energy modes: how much power the car uses and how it harvests and deploys electrical energy.
  • Boost and overtake mode buttons, new for 2026. See overtake mode and boost.
  • Straight Mode, to open the wings in the marked zones. See active aerodynamics.
  • Pit limiter, which holds the car at the pit lane speed limit.
  • Radio, so the driver can talk to the engineer. The team can talk to the driver whenever it likes, but the driver has to press a button to reply.
  • Drink, which pumps water from a bottle in the car through a tube in the helmet.
  • Neutral, used when a car stops on track, so marshals can push it.

You'll often hear engineers on the radio telling a driver to change a setting, for example "strat mode 5" or "brake balance two clicks forward". Teams can't change the car's settings from the pit wall, so every adjustment during a session has to be made by the driver.

Taking it off

The wheel comes off with a quick-release catch, so the driver can get out of the cockpit quickly. They need to remove it to climb out, and in an emergency they must be able to get out within a few seconds.