Toto Wolff isn’t in the business of handing out free compliments to rivals, particularly not to Red Bull. So when the Mercedes team boss says Red Bull Powertrains has done a “good job” with its first Formula 1 engine, it’s worth listening — even if he’s also careful to attach the usual caveat: none of this really counts until someone starts leaning on the tyres and the timing screens stop being theatre.
The first proper glimpse of the 2026 cars came behind closed doors in Barcelona at the end of January, with new chassis and power unit regulations finally moving from PowerPoint to pitlane. It was a private five-day test, shut to the media, but the broad themes still filtered out: the headline was reliability. For a brand-new engine formula, and for at least one brand-new manufacturer programme, there was a notable lack of smoke, stoppages and embarrassed silences on the radio.
Mercedes, Ferrari and the Red Bull Powertrains-Ford operation all appeared to log their running with few interruptions. Audi, running its R26, had some early teething problems but seemingly recovered. Aston Martin’s mileage wasn’t enough to draw meaningful conclusions about the Honda package it’s set to run.
That context matters, because the pre-season narrative for months has been that 2026 would be an engine lottery — a regulation reset where one manufacturer might hit the target early and drag its customers along for the ride, while others scramble. Wolff’s read from Barcelona was more sobering: it’s very easy to tell yourself a story about massive gaps when nobody is actually showing their hand.
“It’s another example where so much is being made up in performance differentiation in a certain area,” Wolff said when asked about the idea that the new power units would immediately spread the field.
From what he’d seen — and Wolff made a point of framing it carefully — no-one looked like they were “really collapsing” either on a single lap or over several. That’s not the same as saying everyone’s equal, of course. It’s just that the first week of 2026-era running felt more like a systems check than a competitive reveal.
Mercedes, he said, was pleased with how its own programme unfolded: interaction between chassis and power unit, deployment behaviour, and the overall flow of a test that, crucially, didn’t descend into frantic fault-finding. But Wolff was quick to hose down the temptation to read too much into that.
They’d had “a solid three days” — the wording alone tells you Mercedes wasn’t treating Barcelona as a scoreboard exercise — and the bigger picture simply isn’t visible yet. Not when key teams and key drivers haven’t done anything resembling a push lap.
“We haven’t seen Max [Verstappen] driving the car fast, and we haven’t seen McLaren and Ferrari doing what they can do,” Wolff said. “So I would carefully refrain from saying that was great for us. We simply don’t know.”
That same restraint didn’t stop the conversation circling back to Red Bull, because the politics of this new era are impossible to ignore. Red Bull is debuting its own power unit operation for the first time, in partnership with Ford, and it has done so after a recruitment drive that has drawn plenty of attention up and down the paddock. Christian Horner previously claimed Red Bull had hired more than 200 people from Mercedes alone, and while nobody in Brackley is going to publicly itemise who left and what they took with them, the subtext has never been subtle.
Wolff, for his part, didn’t try to downplay the significance of Red Bull arriving as a manufacturer. Nor did he try to spin Barcelona into anything more dramatic than it was. He simply pointed to what could be seen: the car ran, it ran consistently, and it put laps on the board — which, for a new programme, is the first hurdle.
“When it comes to Red Bull, I think they’ve done a good job,” Wolff said. He referenced rookie Isack Hadjar completing 107 laps on the first day, a number that stands out in any early test but especially in one designed to stress brand-new hardware.
That’s the interesting part of Wolff’s praise: it’s grounded in the least glamorous metric. Not a whispered horsepower figure, not a rumoured deployment trick, just the ability to circulate and gather data without drama. If Red Bull Powertrains-Ford has started 2026 by looking operationally “normal” alongside Mercedes and Ferrari, that alone is a statement — because the whole point of this era is that it isn’t supposed to be easy.
Still, Wolff’s final line was the one that really mattered. The pleasantries end the moment the lap time becomes the point.
“The rest, we will see when the stopwatch actually comes out.”
That moment isn’t far away. The first official pre-season test for 2026 is in Bahrain on 11-13 February, followed by a second Bahrain test on 18-20 February. Barcelona was the shakedown, the systems phase, the part where everyone wants to discover the problems before the world is watching.
Bahrain is where teams begin deciding which problems they can live with — and which ones will define their season if they don’t fix them quickly. And for Red Bull’s new engine operation, that’s the real debut: not simply proving it can run, but proving it can run when others are finally prepared to show their speed.
