Lewis Hamilton didn’t exactly buy what he’d been hearing about the FIA’s latest power unit pecking order.
In Barcelona, the seven-time world champion admitted he was taken aback by the verdict coming out of the FIA’s ADUO assessment, which has pointed towards Red Bull as having the strongest engine on the grid. Hamilton’s reaction wasn’t defensive so much as incredulous — the sort of response you get from a driver who’s spent more than a decade living with the strengths and weaknesses of Mercedes power and knows how difficult it is to separate the top manufacturers in the real world.
“I mean, that’s definitely a surprise,” Hamilton said. “Because Red Bull and Mercedes engines are very, very close.”
The nuance here matters. The understanding is that Red Bull’s advantage, as seen by the ADUO, is based on the internal combustion engine alone. That’s a specific slice of the overall power unit picture, and Hamilton was quick to point out that Mercedes is not suddenly second-best in any meaningful, week-to-week sense.
“Red Bull have done an amazing job with their engine, but so has Mercedes,” he added. “I think Mercedes still has as good a bench, maybe as good an engine. It’s very, very close between them.”
There was also a telling little paddock aside from Hamilton — the kind of comment drivers rarely throw in unless they’ve heard enough chatter to believe it. “I heard that there were some people from Mercedes that went to Red Bull,” he said, before giving credit where it’s due for what Red Bull has achieved in a short timeframe as a newer engine manufacturer.
Even without the FIA publishing any official league table, the politics of these conversations is obvious. A paper verdict, especially one framed around the combustion engine only, can quickly become a talking point teams use to apply pressure: on regulation direction, on concessions, on how the narrative around performance is set.
But Hamilton’s bigger point was that the sport’s current competitive shape doesn’t really support the idea of Mercedes being outgunned. Mercedes has won every race so far this season. That doesn’t mean it has the best engine in every metric — it rarely does, even in dominant eras — but it does underline how blunt these “best PU” labels can be when they’re divorced from the full car.
And that’s where Hamilton took the conversation next: if Red Bull’s power unit is “strongest” in a narrow technical sense, it hasn’t been the decisive factor in the races he’s lived from the cockpit.
Monaco should have been the sort of weekend where any power deficit gets masked. Yet Hamilton still ended up six seconds behind the winner, Kimi Antonelli, despite a late red flag that might have offered a reset. When asked how that gap existed on a track where horsepower is usually down the list, Hamilton didn’t hesitate.
“Pure downforce,” he said.
It was an answer that cut through all the engine noise — and it was backed up by the recent development timeline he laid out. Hamilton pointed to Miami, where his side brought an upgrade package “which the team worked really hard to bring,” while Mercedes didn’t bring a comparable set of updates and “won easily” anyway. Then came Montreal, where Mercedes arrived with what Hamilton described as a sizeable step — “four tenths, half second, whatever it was.”
At Monaco, Hamilton said he could see the difference from ahead: earlier on the power, more rear grip through the corners, the kind of planted platform that turns Monaco from survival into control.
“I could see when he was ahead of me just how much earlier he could get to get to power, how much more rear end he had through the corners, and I couldn’t keep up with that,” Hamilton said. “And that’s just downforce.”
There’s a subtext here that’s hard to ignore. In 2026, when the sport is deep into a new technical era and everyone’s still learning where lap time really lives, the temptation is to obsess over the engine — because it’s measurable, it’s reportable, and it’s politically useful. But Hamilton is essentially telling you that the decisive performance is still being earned in the less glamorous areas: aero efficiency, balance, and how effectively teams are turning upgrades into real grip.
So yes, Red Bull being flagged as strongest on the internal combustion engine may be a genuine technical achievement — Hamilton certainly framed it that way — but it doesn’t automatically translate into the thing that wins races. Not on its own. And Hamilton, perhaps more than anyone, knows how often “best engine” is just shorthand for “best overall package.”
In that sense, his surprise wasn’t really about Red Bull being good. It was about the implication that Mercedes isn’t. From where he’s sitting, that simply doesn’t match the reality of how close — and how complicated — this season actually is.
