RB’s Daniel Ricciardo has said that a 2kg increase in the driver minimum weight limit for the 2025 Formula 1 season will give him and his fellow competitors “freedom to be athletes.”
Last month’s meeting of the Formula 1 Commission saw a tweak in the 2025 regulations, increasing the minimum dry weight of cars from 798kg to a record-high 800kg.
The two-kilo increase pertains specifically to driver weight, seat and equipment which must total a minimum of 82kg in 2025, compared to 80kg in 2024.
Ricciardo has praised this decision and believes it benefits not just the taller drivers in the field, but everyone, allowing focus to go toward strength training rather than weight saving.
“[Certain drivers] can’t help being tall,” the Australian said during Thursday’s Belgian Grand Prix press conference.
“So it is unfair if they have to kind of dehydrate themselves just to make the weight, so to speak.
“But even us, if we’re not, even reaching that weight it is nice that we have the freedom to yeah be the athletes that we need to be and it’s not like ‘oh, we have to watch out, we can’t do too much strength training…’
“So, having a little bit of freedom now around our training and uh that’s I think that’s a big benefit for a lot of us.”
Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz noted, “I did have to be careful with the amount of muscle you put on and the food that you take.”
However, the Spaniard said that he’s “always been on the limit of that weight,” but like Ricciardo, spared sympathies for the taller drivers in the field.
Still, Sainz did share his concerns regarding the weight limit increase and although the 2026 technical regulations will seek to combat this with a planned weight reduction, the Ferrari driver warned that small incremental changes can build up to a larger problem.
“Obviously, two kilos is not a big change,” he said.
“The problem is when you start adding two kilos on top of another two, another two, another two, which I think is where the trend has been in Formula 1 over the last 10 years to keep adding two kilos here, three there, five there, and then the cars have become 800 kilos heavy.
“In the past, they were around 600. Work is going on, I guess, for ‘26. At the same time, I think this weight has made the cars also safer because there’s a lot of impact structure and a lot of work being done on the driver safety, which I’m never going to deny that I want that safety to be as high as possible.
“But anything that we can do to bring the weight back down, I think every driver here will appreciate it. We hope that the FIA and the teams are taking that into consideration when deciding future rules, not only the ‘26 ones.”
