Red Bull is preparing to sit down with the FIA after being blindsided by the governing body’s early-season readout on the new ADUO system — a mechanism meant to stop the 2026 engine reset from calcifying into a one-manufacturer show.
The surprise isn’t that the FIA has created a benchmark, or that it’s trying to quantify internal combustion performance across a spread of races. Red Bull’s issue is that the FIA’s numbers don’t resemble anything it’s seeing in-house.
In Monaco, teams were briefed on the FIA’s Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities findings, based on data gathered across the opening five grands prix weekends from Australia through Canada. The benchmark internal combustion engine, according to that assessment, is Red Bull Powertrains’. Mercedes was judged to be more than two per cent down and therefore awarded one upgrade opportunity, while Ferrari, Audi and Honda each received two opportunities after being pegged at more than four per cent behind.
Laurent Mekies has now confirmed Red Bull wants clarity — not about the principle of the rules, but about the confidence level in how the FIA is separating engine performance from everything else that shapes a lap time in 2026.
“We are completely okay with the fact that the rules state that you should only try to estimate the pecking order of the ICE power,” Mekies said after the Barcelona Grand Prix. “We have all agreed to that and we don’t think that is the issue.
“We certainly would like to have a deeper conversation because we do not see one single data sample that indicates that we would have an advantage over our friends at Mercedes.”
That last line is the one that matters. Red Bull isn’t arguing the FIA shouldn’t be doing this; it’s arguing that if you’re going to hand out upgrade windows that can reshape an entire development cycle, you’d better be absolutely sure you’ve got the right team pegged as “dominant”.
The ADUO concept is straightforward: if a manufacturer’s internal combustion engine is deemed to be trailing the benchmark, it’s allowed specific opportunities to claw back performance. In a regulation set designed around convergence, it’s the balancing tool that prevents one early architecture win from becoming destiny.
But Mekies is effectively warning that the system can only work if the measurement is watertight — because the moment teams believe the benchmark call is noisy or track-dependent, ADUO risks becoming a political football.
“You would need to have extreme certainty in the way you are assessing the ICE pecking order, in order to have the right confidence to give it to the dominant team and not to the team that is chasing the dominant team,” he said.
He pointed to what Red Bull sees as a pattern that doesn’t match “best ICE on the grid” status. Canada, a circuit where engine performance is at a premium, ended with Red Bull qualifying sixth. Monaco, where power sensitivity is lower, saw the team within a few hundredths of pole. Back to a more power-sensitive test in Barcelona, and it was sixth again.
“Especially when you get relative performance variations from track layout to track layout that are perfectly consistent with the ICE power sensitivity,” Mekies added. “We do not see one single data sample where we estimate ourselves higher than competition, let alone being consistently above them.”
That’s not an argument that Red Bull is struggling — it’s an argument that the FIA’s model may be assigning “ICE performance” to a car’s overall performance in ways that the team believes don’t survive scrutiny once you isolate the variables.
The timing is awkward, too. Barcelona underlined that Red Bull is not currently operating from a place of crushing advantage; Max Verstappen finished as the highest-placed Red Bull in fourth, roughly 40 seconds behind race winner Lewis Hamilton. If the governing body’s benchmark verdict is correct, it suggests the chassis side is leaving a lot on the table. If it isn’t, then ADUO has just handed rivals extra tools based on an imperfect diagnosis.
Mekies was also asked whether he feared teams could “play chess” with development opportunities — the obvious concern being that manufacturers will start optimising not just for performance, but for how performance is perceived and classified by the FIA’s framework.
His answer didn’t accuse anyone of gamesmanship, but it didn’t pretend the incentives don’t exist either. If the margins are tight and the measurement is sensitive to track characteristics, teams will inevitably ask whether the system rewards strategic positioning as much as it rewards engineering.
Verstappen, for his part, wasn’t in the mood to litigate it publicly. Asked if the ADUO finding meant Red Bull now had one hand tied behind its back, he offered little more than a hope that it didn’t — and when pressed, he chose to park the question.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I hope not.”
Pressed again on whether it could be the case, Verstappen added: “I hope not. I don’t think I want to answer it at the moment. At some point. I don’t know.”
That reticence is telling in its own way. Drivers don’t typically get deep into regulatory mechanics unless they’ve been briefed to, and Red Bull’s immediate priority is likely to understand what’s driving the FIA’s conclusion before it decides whether this is a fight worth having in public.
For now, Red Bull is framing it as a technical conversation — an audit of methodology rather than a complaint about the result. But in a season where engine trajectories will shape not just 2026 but the direction of the next few years, “methodology” is never just methodology. It’s competitive reality, written into the rules.
