Red Bull didn’t go looking for a fight with the FIA’s new engine “safety net”. It’s been dragged into one by the sheer weirdness of what the governing body has decided: that Red Bull Powertrains, not Mercedes, is the benchmark internal combustion engine manufacturer under the 2026 Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) indexing.
That verdict landed in the manufacturers’ inboxes on the Sunday morning of the Monaco Grand Prix. Yet, days later, the FIA still hasn’t published the findings publicly, leaving the paddock to do what it always does in an information vacuum: fill in the gaps, argue about motives, and read between lines that aren’t there.
The ADUO system is supposed to be straightforward. If a power unit manufacturer is judged to be more than 2 per cent down on the best-performing ICE, it gets a homologation opening; more than 4 per cent down, it gets two. It’s a mechanism designed to stop the new rules era hard-freezing into a competitive farce.
The twist is that the one-page FIA document doesn’t provide the underlying numbers, only the “entitled to the following…” outcome for each manufacturer — which makes the benchmark call both hugely consequential and oddly opaque. You can infer the rough performance bands from who’s been granted what, but you can’t see the working.
And that’s the point Red Bull keeps coming back to.
Max Verstappen admitted as much when asked about it on Thursday. “I think we were all a little bit surprised with that news,” he said, before adding that Red Bull’s conversations with the FIA were about understanding how that conclusion was reached.
What makes the whole episode deliciously awkward is that being labelled “best” here isn’t unambiguously good news. It’s nice for the ego — and for the credibility of a still-young works powertrain programme — but under ADUO it can also mean your rivals get help you don’t. If Mercedes is deemed behind on ICE, it’s potentially in line for an upgrade route that can be deployed not just on the combustion side but also on the electrical half, even though only the ICE is used for the measurement.
So Red Bull’s bafflement isn’t performative. If the grid’s dominant car has won every race so far, the instinctive assumption is that the benchmark power unit sits at the back of it. The FIA has effectively told the sport that Mercedes’ superiority has been achieved with an ICE that isn’t the top reference — a claim that runs against the paddock’s baseline expectation, even among people who accept Mercedes has been strong on more than just power.
Honda, for its part, has poured cold water on the idea that the FIA has made some glaring misread. Shintaro Orihara said the figures matched what Honda expected and called the outcome fair, praising the job Red Bull Powertrains has done. That matters because Honda has skin in the game here: it knows what Red Bull is running, and it knows what “good” looks like in this rule set.
Red Bull’s frustration, then, seems less about insisting the FIA must be wrong, and more about the political and competitive knock-on of an assessment that can’t be properly scrutinised. “Show your work” is the thrust of the pushback: what data, what methodology, what assumptions.
On that front, the FIA has already hinted it won’t be easily shifted. Single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis has previously explained that the governing body discussed using a more complex basket of parameters — turbo pressures, turbo dimensions, plenum temperatures — before the manufacturers collectively opted to keep it simple. In other words, the sport asked for an indexing system focused on current ICE horsepower measurement, and that’s what it got. If Red Bull’s ICE has “nailed” the chosen metric, it’s hard to construct a compelling complaint after the fact without reopening an argument everyone thought had been settled.
That’s why the tone around the ongoing discussions is important. The language in the FIA’s note to manufacturers reads final, not exploratory. There’s no “provisional” or “preliminary” cushioning, just a statement of entitlement. The most logical interpretation is that the FIA is in verification mode — making sure its processes are defensible before it goes public — rather than teeing up a rewrite.
Still, Red Bull’s broader concern is understandable: ADUO is meant to prevent the rich getting richer, but the sport is already living with the tension that a team can be “behind” in one measured slice of performance while being comfortably ahead overall. Mercedes, to many in the pitlane, appears to have an extremely complete package. If it’s also granted extra room to move, Red Bull will understandably ask what the system is really correcting.
There was even noise in the paddock this week about whether anger over ADUO had spilled into separate politics — namely the vote on proposed 2027 power unit ratio changes. The suggestion was that Red Bull might have dug its heels in. The understanding, however, is that Honda was the sole vote against, not Red Bull Powertrains, and that Red Bull supported the change in a position consistent with Verstappen’s publicly stated desire for the sport to head in a direction that keeps him engaged.
For now, the unresolved part is timing. The FIA has met its regulatory obligation by informing the manufacturers, but there’s no public deadline — and the longer the gap, the more this starts to look like a governing body managing the optics of a sensitive announcement rather than simply publishing a technical bulletin.
Red Bull, meanwhile, is left in the odd position of being told it has the class-leading combustion engine while simultaneously watching the sport’s current pacesetter potentially gain extra upgrade freedom. It’s a compliment that lands like a complication — and in a season already defined by one team setting the pace, the last thing anyone needed was another reason to argue about how the playing field is being levelled.
