The radical winglet loophole taking over Monaco

It is absolutely wild what happens when you take away a team's toys. With Straight Mode deleted for the Monaco weekend, Mercedes, Red Bull, and McLaren have pounced on the empty space left behind by the actuators. Instead of leaving the area blank, they have slapped massive, high-mounted winglets right on the mainplane of their rear wings to hunt for every scrap of extra downforce.

Here is the beauty of it: it is a total loophole. While the rest of the rear wing is locked into strict height regulations, that specific centre section has an allowance for the mechanisms that handle mode switching. Mercedes has taken the most extreme route, ditching the actuator pod entirely for a complex set of rearward-stretching winglets, while Red Bull has repurposed the pod to mount two simpler ones. Because Monaco is the least drag-sensitive track on the calendar, these steep, high-mounted additions are effectively free downforce.

We have seen this kind of madness before, like back in 2001 when Jordan and Arrows showed up with massive, high-mounted wings that the FIA eventually had to ban for safety. It just goes to show that if you give an engineer an inch of space in the rulebook at a track like this, they will take a mile.