Red Bull’s Mekies says 2026 fight will be “flat-out” — and admits the team may start on the back foot
Red Bull rolled out a retro gloss-blue look for its RB22 showcar and a refreshingly blunt message from the top: 2026 is going to be a bare-knuckle development brawl, and the reigning powerhouse might be taking the first punches rather than throwing them.
Team principal Laurent Mekies, speaking as F1 prepares for its biggest rule reset in decades, is bracing for an “incredibly high” rate of progress once the new-era cars hit the track. Active aero, lighter chassis, and that 50/50 ICE-to-electric power split will shred any comfort zone that teams built up over the last cycle. He knows it. He actually sounds energised by it.
“We are going to be in an incredibly high development rate season, both on the chassis side and on the power unit side,” Mekies told Sky Sports News. “We believe in our people… We’ll take [what we learned last year] for 2026 multiplied by three or four in terms of development rate… step by step but with the right level of aggressiveness.”
Aggressiveness is the right word. The behind-closed-doors shakedown in Spain late this month will be less a warm-up and more a sprint start to a year where updates will arrive fast enough to make those pretty launch renders obsolete by spring. No one has a clean read on the pecking order yet, and that’s exactly why everyone’s in the wind tunnel at midnight.
Red Bull’s twist in this story is the power unit. For the first time, the team will race its own in-house engine under the Red Bull Powertrains banner, with technical support from Ford. That’s huge upside if it clicks — ultimate integration, ultimate control — but it’s also a reality check when you line up against manufacturers who’ve lived and breathed hybrid F1 for a decade.
Mekies isn’t sugar-coating it. “We know it’s going to come with some difficulties. We know we are going to have quite a few sleepless nights and a few headaches, but please bear with us for the first few months,” he said. “Nobody underestimates the size of the mountain that we have to climb… I think it would be naive, to say the least, for us to think that… we turn up at the first race and we are the same level as people that have been doing it for many years. It’s not going to be like that, we are going to be trailing them.”
You don’t often hear “we’ll be trailing” from Milton Keynes. But the candour tracks with how last season ended: McLaren and Lando Norris stopped Red Bull’s run and left Max Verstappen two points shy in an end-of-year surge that at least reminded everyone what he does under pressure. Momentum into a reg change doesn’t count for much, though, and that’s the point. The slate is clean. The lap time will live in the calibration — software, energy deployment, aero maps — as much as in any single “concept.”
If Red Bull’s winter message is “patience,” their plan is anything but passive. The RB22’s outward nod to 2005 is nostalgia; the rest screams modern. Smaller, lighter cars, complex active systems and a power unit architecture that forces tough trade-offs will reward teams that learn fast and aren’t precious about ripping up their own ideas when the data says so.
There’s also the cultural question. Red Bull has been a relentlessly efficient race team for years; now it’s also a full-fat engine company. The marriage of those two identities will dictate the first half of 2026 more than any launch headline or livery shade. Expect some friction. Expect some big gains when the right people bump into the right problems at the right time.
Timeline to watch:
– Private group test (Spain): from January 26, closed to media
– Bahrain test 1: February 11–13
– Bahrain test 2: February 18–20
– Season opener: Australian Grand Prix, March 8
By the time the lights go out in Melbourne, the fastest car may still be the one that can switch its systems on across a stint and harvest the right energy at the right moment, not the one that looks happiest in a launch gallery. And that’s where Red Bull tends to earn its keep: turning a moving target into a working margin.
Mekies and Co. know they can’t bluff the early months. They don’t intend to. But don’t confuse caution for weakness. This is a team that’s built dynasties on rate-of-improvement, and 2026 is exactly the kind of unstable environment where they historically sharpen the knives.
If they really are “trailing” at the start, enjoy it. The chase won’t last long if the tools work the way they think they will.
