Red Bull is heading to its own backyard with an upgrade package, a lighter car on the wish list, and a growing sense that 2026 isn’t going to be rescued by one big “Austria fix”.
Laurent Mekies didn’t try to dress it up after Barcelona. Yes, new parts are coming for the Red Bull Ring, and yes, the factory has been grinding away to get them ready. But the idea that a single weekend’s developments will flip the competitive order? He’s not buying it.
“Only lap time will answer your questions,” Mekies said, when pressed on whether Red Bull can pull off the kind of step Ferrari just delivered in Spain. And then the key line: Austria alone “will not be enough”.
That’s a refreshingly blunt read of where Red Bull sits in the first season of the new rules. The team has made progress — Mekies pointed to a “continuous closing the gap trajectory” since Japan — but he’s also realistic about how wide the problem is. This isn’t one corner type or one set-up quirk that can be tuned out with a Friday night tweak. It’s everything, everywhere, all at once: mid-speed, high-speed, straights, and the power unit/chassis blend.
Barcelona was a useful reminder of that. Monaco had teased something better, with Red Bull able to fight for pole, but Mekies admitted they expected a “reality check” once the calendar returned to a circuit full of longer, faster corners. The RB22 simply didn’t have the underlying efficiency or balance to consistently threaten the front. Mekies put the deficit at roughly “three or four tenths” relative to winning pace — still an improvement on where the team began the season, but not close enough to pretend it’s a title-winning baseline.
Max Verstappen’s weekend reflected it: a lonely fourth, never really in position to turn it into something more. And Verstappen, typically good at zooming out to the bigger story, has already framed this season as a development race — whoever brings the upgrades that work will surf the momentum, and whoever misses will get stranded. In the early phase of a new regulation cycle, the gains can be chunky, and the pecking order can swing.
Ferrari just proved the point in Barcelona with a substantial package — new front wing, floor, diffuser, the works — aimed at improving airflow, wake control and downforce. It translated immediately. Lewis Hamilton took the win in a hard-edged strategy fight, ending Mercedes’ clean sweep of the season to date and sending a message that the front isn’t a closed shop.
Red Bull’s Miami upgrade had already shown how quickly the mood can change when parts do what they’re supposed to do. That weekend, Verstappen raved about how the RB22 had been transformed from awkward and unpredictable into something he could finally lean on.
“A few things have changed, and it made it a lot more comfortable to drive,” Verstappen said in Miami. “I feel a lot more confidence and I don’t feel like I’m a passenger anymore in the car.”
That kind of language tells you what the first months of 2026 were like from the cockpit. Comfort and confidence aren’t “nice-to-haves” at this level; they’re the foundation for extracting the last couple of tenths. Red Bull has moved on from fighting the car, but now it needs the car to be faster in absolute terms — and Mekies’ point is that Austria won’t magically supply all of that speed in one go.
There’s also the quieter reality that, for Red Bull this year, performance isn’t only about aero shapes and floors. It’s about learning how to be a full manufacturer operation in public, under race pressure, with every flaw instantly visible.
The team is still seeking answers from the FIA regarding the ADUO power unit benchmarking, which has judged the RBPT DM01 as the standard setter. Red Bull’s view is that the internal combustion engine shouldn’t be singled out as *the* benchmark when the competitive picture is assessed as a complete power unit. Whatever the politics and semantics there, the DM01 has been competitive from the start of this regulation cycle.
But it’s not bulletproof. Race starts have become an unflattering theme, and it’s the kind of weakness that can undo a weekend before Turn 1. Both Verstappen and Isack Hadjar have struggled to consistently get clean launches; in Barcelona, Hadjar tumbled from sixth to 14th on the run to the first corner and had to spend his afternoon digging out of a hole.
Mekies didn’t evade it. “We have had weak starts so far this season,” he said. In his telling, it’s the kind of systems-level detail that catches you out in year one as a manufacturer — the interface between chassis and power unit, the operational windows, and the margins that are narrower than they look on paper. Red Bull can talk about having a very good power unit and still accept that it’s “a PU that has a very narrow window”, with “many areas” that can make life difficult.
Then there’s the other, less glamorous part of the Austria plan: mass. Red Bull is aiming to shed weight as it chases the 768kg minimum, with the RB22 rumoured to have started the season around 10kg heavy. Mekies was happy to joke about it — “Eat less! That’s my plan!” — but weight reduction is a performance upgrade you can trust. It’s also one of the more expensive and time-consuming ones, because it often involves rethinking parts rather than simply bolting on a new aerodynamic surface.
All of which makes Austria feel less like a turning point and more like another step in a longer catch-up project. Mekies is clearly trying to manage the narrative, but there’s substance behind it: Red Bull knows it has to keep stacking gains, not banking on a single home-race miracle. The goal, as he put it, is to stop talking about four tenths and start talking about “a lot less”.
At the Red Bull Ring, the stopwatch will give its verdict. But even if the new parts do bring a step, the bigger question is whether they bring Red Bull into the same conversation as McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes — or simply reduce the volume of the uncomfortable questions for another week.
