Max Verstappen’s Friday in Melbourne was a neat summary of where Red Bull finds itself at the start of 2026: plenty to like about the underlying package, and just enough untidiness to keep the garage lights on late.
The headline moment came in second practice when Verstappen ran out of road at Turn 10 on a push lap. A snap of oversteer on the way out of the fast right-hander sent the RB22 skating across the grass and into the gravel, where it took a proper smack and spat bits of floor into the scenery. Verstappen did well to gather it up and keep it pointing roughly in the right direction, but the underside had clearly taken a hit.
Red Bull chief engineer Paul Monaghan didn’t dress it up afterwards, but he also wasn’t reaching for the panic button.
“There’s enough to keep us busy,” Monaghan said. “It’s recoverable. It’s nothing that drastic, but it’s a bit of a thump, so we’ll tidy it up and go again.”
In a season where everyone’s still learning what the new rules want from a car, that phrase — “recoverable” — carries weight. Floors are precious now. You can lose a chunk of performance from damage you can’t even see, and Melbourne’s bumps will happily turn minor scuffs into a bigger headache if you send the car back out half-right. Verstappen managed another lap after the excursion, but it didn’t take long for the team to pull the plug and bring him in for checks.
Even before the gravel trip, FP2 had already thrown Red Bull a curveball. At the start of the hour Verstappen’s car appeared to cut out in the pitlane when the revs dropped, a messy little interruption that cost him track time and rhythm. By the end of the day he’d logged 13 laps in the afternoon, on top of 27 in FP1, and finished Friday sixth on the combined narrative rather than the combined timesheet.
Verstappen’s own read was fairly blunt: the car isn’t quite where he wants it yet, and the lack of clean running didn’t help.
“In FP1, we did get in a good number of laps, and in FP2 we found that we ran into a few issues,” he said. “We are working on getting the setup right with the car and were struggling a bit with grip, and also went into the gravel.
“We didn’t have a full day of clean running, but pace-wise, we are where I expected us to be. There is still a lot of work to do.”
What will interest paddock-watchers isn’t so much Verstappen having a rare clumsy moment — it happens — but how Red Bull’s weekend is already being shaped by a very 2026 kind of priority list. The team is trying to put a baseline under an all-new car and, crucially, an all-new in-house power unit project. Track time is gold dust. Anything that eats into it, whether it’s a pitlane stoppage or an avoidable off, matters more than it would in a mature rules cycle.
And on that front, Monaghan was openly upbeat about the bigger picture: Red Bull Powertrains’ first race weekend has started with the sort of basic competence that teams privately crave and rarely celebrate until it’s missing.
“Fantastic,” Monaghan said. “Brand new engine – our own – a new car, new rules, and both cars went out in the pit lane and started FP1, and both were competitive, straight off.”
That’s the subtext to all of this. The floor damage is a repair job. The more meaningful story is that Red Bull’s new era has begun without the kind of reliability gremlins that can derail an entire development path before it’s even properly started. Monaghan pointed to the simple value of just being able to run — to “go round and round” and learn — especially while others are evidently paying a higher price for teething problems.
“If we come to the practice session and don’t do any laps, you don’t learn anything,” he said. “So the value of going round and round, especially with the new car, new rules, everything, is rather obvious… Brand-spanking new engine, and it just runs. It’s wonderful.”
As for where Red Bull truly sits in the competitive order, Monaghan wasn’t playing the Friday guessing game. Too many variables, too much unknown fuel, too much deployment and tyre management trickery to claim certainty on a day like this — even by the standards of an F1 engineer whose job description includes selective vagueness.
“If I said to you how much fuel is in each car, you probably don’t know. Equally, you don’t know how much is in ours,” he said. “There are many things that we can improve upon for tomorrow. It’s just whether that improvement is good enough to take us to the front, or whether we will line up behind some of our charming opposition.”
That’s Melbourne on a Friday, and Red Bull’s 2026 in miniature: the long-term pieces look solid, the short-term execution still needs tidying, and Verstappen — even when he’s bouncing through the gravel — remains the sharp end of the operation. Saturday will tell us whether this was merely a scruffy start, or the first sign that the new cycle is going to demand more patience from a team that’s not used to it.
