Mercedes might’ve topped the opening day of 2026 pre-season running in Bahrain, but George Russell isn’t buying the idea that the Silver Arrows are the story of the winter.
In the paddock, the noise has been dominated for months by talk of power unit loopholes — specifically the wording around compression ratios and whether certain manufacturers have found a way to effectively operate beyond the 16.0 limit once the engines are up to temperature. Mercedes has been at the centre of plenty of that chatter. So, too, has Red Bull Powertrains Ford.
But Russell’s message in Bahrain was pointed: if you’re looking for the real performance tell, look at what Red Bull is doing with energy deployment.
“It’s pretty scary to see that difference,” Russell said, after being asked about the early competitive picture across Barcelona and Bahrain testing.
He’s not talking about a couple of kilometres per hour you can shrug off as DRS usage, tow effects or fuel. Russell echoed Toto Wolff’s view that Red Bull appears to be extracting something enormous from the hybrid side — to the tune of half a second to a full second over a lap through deployment. In a year when everyone’s still learning how to make these new packages behave, that’s the sort of advantage that changes how teams approach the first flyaways.
Russell described this test as “a bit of a reality check”, and you can see why. The winter narrative had Mercedes as the likely power unit benchmark, even if most of that was guesswork dressed up as certainty. Yet in Russell’s telling, Red Bull arrived in Barcelona on day one already sharp — and repeated the trick in Bahrain.
“Day one here in Bahrain, again, they sort of knocked it out the park,” he said. “So they are, at the moment, very much the team to beat.”
What’s striking is the way Russell framed the problem. He wasn’t leaning on the usual testing caveats to play it down; he was using those caveats to explain why Red Bull’s start matters even more. With three days in the same place you can iterate and move around set-up targets. Once the championship gets going — starting in Melbourne — the clock speed changes. You get three practice sessions, three hours, and then it’s qualifying. If Red Bull genuinely has a deployment edge baked into the package, “catch-up” becomes less about a tidy upgrade and more about a fundamental re-optimisation of how you run the car.
Max Verstappen, for his part, suggested the usual testing theatre is in play — rivals “hiding” and trying to make Red Bull look stronger than it is. Russell didn’t dismiss the idea outright, but he didn’t sound convinced either.
“Well, I hope we’ve got a big ace up our sleeve,” he replied, before landing the punchline: whatever people are or aren’t hiding, Red Bull has “hit the ground running far better than every other team”.
It’s also telling that Russell pulled Ferrari into the same conversation. Not as the headline, but as a reference point. From where Mercedes is sitting, this isn’t just a Red Bull-versus-Mercedes winter; Ferrari “also look in a good place”, which only tightens the margin for anyone who’s starting even a fraction behind on the new-era fundamentals.
The compression ratio debate continues to swirl in the background. Reports over the winter suggested Mercedes and Red Bull Ford were the manufacturers most closely associated with exploiting the grey area in how ratios are measured — at ambient temperature — compared to how they behave when heat-soaked in real running. Red Bull, however, has appeared to align itself with Mercedes’ opposition on one key point: pushing for compression ratio tests to be conducted at hot temperatures.
Asked whether Mercedes has a Plan B if rivals successfully trigger a regulatory change before the season opener, Russell was candid about how much of that conversation sits above a driver’s pay grade.
“I don’t really know much about” the compression ratio talking point, he said, adding that what he’d heard sounded like it had “leaked from other team members who have moved around.”
Then he returned to his main theme: the wrong people are being scrutinised.
“I don’t think anybody should really be looking at us,” Russell insisted. “You should be looking at the most competitive car on the grid, which right now is the Red Bull.”
The “why” matters. Russell pointed out that Red Bull’s straight-line form doesn’t look like a chassis-only phenomenon — especially when you consider the RB car running the same power unit is also “delivering really strong performances in a straight”. In his view, that points the finger somewhere between the hardware and the way energy is being deployed, rather than simply an aerodynamic efficiency trick.
That would fit with the telemetry-based whispers doing the rounds in Bahrain. Data from long runs has suggested a consistent top-speed advantage for Verstappen versus at least one Mercedes-powered reference (McLaren’s Lando Norris), though even those closest to the numbers will stress testing data is never gospel: engine modes, run plans and battery management can turn “facts” into mirages quickly.
Still, Russell’s read is clear — and it’s not the kind of line a driver throws out casually in February.
Red Bull has been the sport’s gold standard for building complete packages across the past decade and a half, Russell noted, even in seasons where its engine situation wasn’t ideal. If it’s now pairing that organisational muscle with a deployment advantage at the start of a major regulation change, the rest of the grid may be facing an uncomfortable truth: the “new era reset” might not have reset quite as much as some had hoped.
