Two crashes in two weekends, both traced to the same trick rear wing, have pushed Formula 1's most talked-about aerodynamic device into a safety review — and left Max Verstappen openly fed up.
The Red Bull driver spun out of third place at Silverstone with six laps to go when his rotating rear wing failed to reattach through the fast corners at Stowe. It was the second such failure in as many races, after a near-identical moment in Austrian Grand Prix qualifying.
"At this point, it's super dangerous, because I could have really hurt myself two times," Verstappen said after the British Grand Prix. "I was lucky in Austria; I was lucky here. But that's why you get really fed up with it."
He described the mechanism plainly: "While turning into the corner, the rear wing is not fully attaching, and you lose a lot of downforce. You just spin off the track." Speaking to Autosport, he called the Silverstone problem "a different fault, let's say, but the same outcome."
At the centre of it is the so-called "Macarena" wing — the nickname, coined by Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur, for a rotating upper rear flap that flips towards horizontal on the straights to shed drag, then swings back for cornering downforce. Ferrari pioneered the concept early in 2026; Red Bull introduced its own version at Miami, and McLaren has built one but has yet to race it. The flap has to complete that transition in a fraction of a second, and when it fails to close fully, the downforce loss is sudden and violent.
But he stopped short of condemning the design itself. "We have raced quite a few races with that concept now. We have raced this since Miami," Mekies told The Race's Jon Noble. "It's too early in the analysis to establish whether it's an issue with the concept or something else. But we are for sure going to leave no stone unturned when it comes to it. And we have all the options open."
That last phrase matters. Red Bull's data points to two distinct faults — the Austrian failure was understood, the Silverstone one was not — and the team has left the door open to reverting to a conventional wing before the Belgian Grand Prix, where Spa's flat-out sweeps would punish a third failure. "We will do whatever is necessary to be on the safe side," Mekies said.
The FIA has now opened safety talks with both Red Bull and Ferrari over their revolving wings. Ferrari's version rotates the most aggressively of the three, and even its own drivers have found the concept a handful: at Suzuka the team shelved it after the flap's movement failed to coordinate cleanly with the front wing, unsettling the car's balance mid-transition. The governing body's options reportedly stretch from tighter safety requirements to banning the moving wings outright on safety grounds — a real threat to a device every top team has spent the season chasing for straight-line speed.
For now the split is clear. Verstappen wants the danger gone. Mekies wants answers before he blames a concept Red Bull has invested in. And the FIA has to decide whether F1's cleverest 2026 innovation is worth the risk. Spa is the deadline.
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*Originally published on [News Formula One](https://newsformula.one/article/verstappen-wing-failures-trigger-fia-macarena-safety-probe). Visit for full coverage.*