Brembo's Challenge in F1: Designing Brakes for 2027

In the shadows of F1’s headline-grabbing rule revolution, Brembo is fighting its own battle.

The Italian braking giant, already embedded at the heart of every team on the grid, has been forced into a development sprint that barely pauses for breath. The sport’s new era has made stopping a car as complex as making it go fast – and the clock is already ticking on the next wave of change.

Designing for today, racing against 2027

This season’s regulations have reshaped the balance between combustion and electric power, and that shift has landed squarely on Brembo’s desk. The company must keep every team supplied and competitive now, while simultaneously reimagining what F1 braking will look like in 2027.

Speaking to RacingNews365, Brembo race engineer Andrea Dellavedova laid out the scale of the task. The first half of the season has given the company valuable data and direction. Under normal circumstances, that would be the foundation for years of refinement.

Not this time.

“As next year the energy ratio will change, what we learned this year will not be that useful for the new development,” he explained. Brembo had already started thinking about the 2027 braking system, but the revised power split means they are effectively being pushed back to the drawing board. “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 FIA confirmed in June that the combustion-to-electric ratio will be adjusted in two stages: 58:42 for 2027, then 60:40 for 2028. On paper, those are just numbers. For a brake supplier, they rewrite how energy is harvested, how much work the friction brakes must do, and how the entire system behaves at the limit.

The earlier a supplier knows, the better. This time, the decision landed late enough to hurt.

“Being in a very fast environment, the more time we have to develop the new system, the better it is,” Dellavedova said. If the communication had arrived even a few weeks earlier, life would have been easier. Instead, Brembo must design, prototype, test and ramp up production on a compressed timeline, while teams expect components early next year.

That’s not a tweak. It’s a logistical and engineering squeeze.

Months in the oven, minutes on track

From the outside, a brake disc looks simple: a carbon ring, bolted on, hammered into life at 300 km/h. Inside Brembo’s world, it’s anything but.

“From the design to the production phase, it takes months; it's not something that you can do in weeks,” Dellavedova said. The discs and carbon materials go through a long, multi-stage process, including extended time in the oven. Calipers, too, demand long machining hours. None of it can be rushed without risking performance or safety.

Then comes testing. Sometimes, he admits, they are forced to overlap testing and production just to keep up with the calendar. That is the reality of modern F1: cars evolve relentlessly, and the suppliers must match that pace or get left behind.

The ‘witch’s kitchen’ at Curno

If Brembo can handle this storm, it is because of what sits just outside Bergamo.

The company’s operational and administrative base lies in the Kilometro Rosso science and technology park, with manufacturing and commercial sites spread across 18 countries. For motorsport, though, the beating heart is Curno, near headquarters in Italy. That is where the racing technology is born.

Inside, Dellavedova describes a bank of dyno test benches running “24 hours per day, 6 days per week,” a relentless cycle of trials on new materials, geometries and dimensions. It is no coincidence that insiders call it a “witch’s kitchen”: this is where the alchemy of stopping power happens.

A key advantage, he says, is that research, design, development, production and testing sit under one roof. The chain from idea to validation is brutally short.

“The performance is there with both offices and also the production and testing department,” he said. Designers can sketch a new component on a laptop, then walk upstairs to see it being put through its paces on the dyno. They talk directly to the people running the tests, inspect the parts with their own hands, and iterate at a speed that would be impossible if the operation were scattered across multiple sites.

In a sport where milliseconds matter, that proximity becomes a weapon.

Confidence in the countdown

The challenge is huge: new ratios, tight deadlines, and the knowledge that the work done today may not fully translate to tomorrow’s cars. Yet Dellavedova’s outlook is anything but gloomy.

“In terms of timing, we are in line,” he said. On performance, he leans on experience. Brembo has been part of F1’s evolution for decades, from steel to carbon, from screaming V10s to hybrid power units. This is another turn in the spiral, not a leap into the unknown.

“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 demands will only grow as F1 pushes harder into its hybrid future. More electric power, more energy recovery, more complexity. The cars will change. The racing will change.

And somewhere in Curno, the dynos will keep spinning through the night, shaping the braking systems that will decide who dares to leave it latest into Turn 1 in 2027.