New unique hitbox for the Formula 1 cars in Rocket League

10/18/2023 Last revision: 10/22/2023

Without any announcement, the Formula 1 2021 and 2022 car bodies have received a unique kind of hitbox setup in yesterday’s Patch 2.33.

The cars were previously of the Dominus archetype. Now, they have the exact same box size as the Plank preset and should also turn the same. However, that doesn’t mean they’re the same. The hitbox was shifted drastically forwards relative to the center of mass, which means that the cars rotate around a point much further back than any other hitbox type. That provides a longer lever than anything we’ve ever had in the game (even before standardization) and should make a quite a difference on shots and other mechanics. I’ll elaborate below.

Disclaimer: This might have been an accidental change. So try it while it lasts. I will update this page if it gets changed back.This change was confirmed as intentional and has been added to the official patchnotes. The wording is somewhat misleading though. It says that the Formula 1 cars have been changed to Plank with adjusted positioning. The alignment of the visuals to the hitbox is different for nearly every car in the game. However, the alignment of the center of mass to the hitbox is identical for all cars of the same preset. The F1 cars are not the same preset as the Plank, and saying so will confuse the community on what a preset means.

The lever

Let's make sure you understand what I mean by lever first! Since the Rocket League car always rotates around the fixed center of mass, the lever is just the distance from the center of mass to the front of the hitbox.

A longer lever provides lots of advantages:

reaching a couple centimeters further just by air rolling
making reverse flicks (where it rolls over the front hood) easier and more powerful
(potentially more powerful shots. This one is parentheses because the differences have been pretty much irrelevant for cars so far. I haven't tested this new type yet though.)

Essentially, it's just better for most shots, redirects, and flicks.

It is not completely without downsides though. The long lever can make the car feel difficult to maneuver in tight spaces. This could impact situations where you need to instantaneously recover as you take the shot. It is, however, not as bad to have a longer lever, as it is to just have a longer car. One of the reasons the Octane hitbox was so much better than the other short cars, before Psyonix standardized them all, was that it has a pretty long lever for a short car.

The crazy stats of the new car

The new preset has a lever length of 85.92 uu. That means it's almost 10% longer than the previous longest, Breakout with 78.25 uu. The Breakout actually only has a lever that is 7% longer than the Octane. So, this new preset is not only the one with the longest lever, it also sticks out by a massive margin.

I'm planning on having all these stats neatly presented in the Knowledge Base. It is still under construction though, so you can look at the ugly GitHub changes if you want to see them raw. But you can also have this comparison shot of the car with the old Dominus hitbox in red, and the new hitbox in green. The wheels of the old hitbox aren't shown.

Formula 1 car with the two afforementioned hitboxes displayed. The new hitbox sits lower and is shifted much more forward compared to the previous. It lines up better with the front wing of the F1 cars.