The New Mercedes F1 Safety Car Is Now Almost More Interesting Than The F1 Cars Themselves

This past weekend’s F1 Hungarian Grand Prix saw Mercedes celebrate 30 years as the official provider of the sport’s safety car by introducing an all-new model with a wing so offensively large that it looks like it could have come off one of its F1 cars.

It’s the 14th car from Mercedes to perform the duties since it took up the role full-time in the middle of the 1996 season. For the past five years it’s split the races with Aston Martin, which also provided a DBX707 as a medical car alongside the various Vantages, but the British brand’s participation ended ahead of the 2026 season, and it’s back in Mercedes’ hands alone.

The safety car is a big deal in F1, as it really has two roles during a race. Primarily, it’s deployed as a last resort to keep the race rolling when an incident requires marshals to be on the live race circuit, slowing the cars down into a single train to provide big gaps and allow safe working.

However, it also needs to go as fast as possible to keep heat in the race cars’ brakes and tyres, as F1 machinery tends to get a bit upset at lower speeds. Indeed, there’s a saying in F1 that safety cars breed safety cars, with incidents common at restarts due to the lower temperatures and bunched-up pack.

That’s been a problem over the years as the road cars used as safety cars are obviously nowhere near as rapid as F1 cars, especially in the wet conditions that see them deployed most commonly and in the pre-Mercedes era, which was a bit of a clown show.

When the idea of the safety car first materialized at the 1973 Canadian Grand Prix at Mosport, the organizers used a yellow Porsche 914 as part of a fleet that was seemingly also used for the driver parade.

Deployed after a collision between Francois Cevert and Jody Scheckter, it picked up the wrong car as the leader due to confusion at race control, resulting in hours of post-race mayhem poring over the manual race charts to work out who’d actually won. Shades of AD21 …

Over the intervening years there’s been some wacky and sometimes inappropriate safety cars, from a FIAT Tempra sedan in Brazil to a Lamborghini Countach at Monaco. A couple have been more infamous, with the Tatra 613 used in the Hungarian Grand Prix in 1995 as the car that ran over Arrows driver Taki Inoue.

The Opel Vectra 4×4 in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix was so slow that Ayrton Senna pulled up alongside it, gesturing for it to go faster, and we all know what happened the lap after it came into the pits to release the pack.

Switching to a single supplier and formalising the car brought a dose more professionalism to the process, and safety cars have been getting faster and faster since that first C36 AMG. The latest model in the long line of Mercedes safety cars – the Mercedes-AMG GT 63 Pro 4Matic+ – continues that path with two solutions to the issue.

The new rear wing with integrated warning lights is a twofer all by itself. Of course, the wing provides additional downforce, combined with new front-end elements, to make the car quicker in the corners. It also sports an active flap to improve straight-line performance, but such a large aerodynamic device at the rear of the car would partially obstruct a roof-mounted light-bar from the low perspective of the drivers following it.

Moving the lights to the wing itself restores that visibility, but also, by removing the huge barn door stuck to the roof, improves the safety car’s aerodynamic performance yet further. It’s been a feature of Mercedes’ safety cars since 2022, but the new item is considerably higher and ought to be easier to see in heavy spray.

Additionally, the new model is the first safety car in the Mercedes era to use an all-wheel drive system – although the Vectra and earlier Ford Escort RS Cosworth in 1993 beat Mercedes to it – which will aid grip in the wet weather conditions.

Regular safety car driver Bernd Maylander is once again behind the wheel of the 612hp V8, which not only remains the only V8 in action during a race but handily outstrips the combustion engine units in the back of the F1 cars under the 2026 regulations.

Other than routine duties during the formation lap and start phase of an F1 race, the new safety car was thankfully not called into action during the Hungarian Grand Prix as race control preferred the virtual safety car while Oscar Piastri’s expired McLaren was recovered.

There’s still half the season to go, but with F1 now on its summer break, the next opportunity to see it will be at the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August.

Top graphic image: Mercedes-Benz