Red Bull’s rivals are doing what they always do at the end of a murky pre-season: point at Milton Keynes, talk it up, and see if it sticks. Toto Wolff has already lobbed the “benchmark” label in Red Bull’s direction, and James Vowles suggested the RB22 looked handy until somebody mentioned its power unit, at which point it was conveniently “turned down” in Bahrain.
Laurent Mekies isn’t buying any of it — and, to his credit, he isn’t even pretending to play along.
“There is a good game in the pit lane to try to move the attention onto competition,” the Red Bull team boss said in Bahrain. “Our approach is that we try to keep the noise low, to concentrate on ourselves. We have a huge amount of work to do.
“We are unfortunately not the benchmark.”
It’s the kind of line that sounds like classic sandbagging until you put it next to what we actually saw over nine days of running split across Barcelona and Bahrain. Red Bull didn’t top the timesheets once; Max Verstappen’s best effort left him fifth on the final pre-season order, 1.2s off Charles Leclerc’s headline lap. On raw numbers alone, that’s not a team strutting into Melbourne with a target on its back.
Of course, pre-season timing is always a rigged carnival. Fuel loads are private, engine modes are a dark art, tyre programmes rarely overlap cleanly, and teams can make themselves look fast or slow by shifting one or two variables that never show up in a press release. But what’s interesting about Mekies’ stance is the specificity. He didn’t stop at “not the benchmark” — he went further and suggested Red Bull isn’t even in the lead group right now.
“I think there is a very high confidence that we are probably trailing the group of the top guys right now,” he said, before naming who he believes is actually setting the standard: Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren.
That’s a bolder claim than the usual “we don’t know where we are” routine, especially when the paddock narrative has already tried to cast Red Bull as the reference point. Mekies even described Mercedes as the team that “we see… being the fastest right now,” while refusing to rank the three precisely — partly, he admitted, because he doesn’t want to join the same guessing game he’s criticising.
Still, it’s not all doom-and-gloom from Red Bull’s side. Mekies was clearly keen to underline the upside of what he called a “completely new project”, pointing to the consistency the team managed across its running. That, in a regulation reset year, isn’t nothing. If the lap time isn’t there yet, banked mileage and repeatability at least give you a platform to work from.
And the more you listen to those inside the Red Bull ecosystem, the more the subtext shifts from lap time to legwork: the new Red Bull-Ford power unit is running, it’s staying together, and it’s getting through the programmes.
Racing Bulls boss Alan Permane, whose team has the same power unit, echoed that theme in even plainer language. “There’s no doubt the power unit is working well. There’s no doubt it’s reliable,” he said, citing a hefty mileage haul — including 400 kilometres in a single morning.
In other words, whatever games are being played on the stopwatch, Red Bull’s priority right now looks more like validation than intimidation. That’s an unfamiliar posture for a team that, in recent years, has often entered seasons with an air of ruthless readiness.
None of this proves Red Bull is behind when it matters. It also doesn’t prove Wolff or Vowles are wrong to suspect the real pace is being kept in the garage. But there’s a difference between rivals trying to talk you into the role of favourite, and you actively swatting it away while naming three teams you believe are “a fair bit faster”.
The irony is that both sides can be telling versions of the truth. Red Bull can be satisfied it’s achieved baseline performance and reliability with its new package while still acknowledging it doesn’t yet have the outright lap time of the front runners — at least not in the spec and operating window it was willing to show in testing. Meanwhile, rivals can take one look at Verstappen’s long-run consistency and conclude that, when the engine maps turn up and the fuel comes out, the picture might change fast.
Either way, the first real answer is still the same as it always is. As Permane put it, “We need to wait until Saturday afternoon in Melbourne before we make a judgment on who’s where.”
Until then, the paddock will keep doing what it does best in February: pretending it knows. And Red Bull, for once, is insisting it doesn’t — while quietly daring Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren to prove it.
