Red Bull Powertrains might still be the newest kid in F1’s engine room, but it’s already pushing back against the way the sport intends to police the 2026 reset.
With the first homologation deadline looming on March 1, RBPT technical director Ben Hodgkinson has made it clear he’d happily trade the FIA’s tightly managed upgrade framework for something more direct — especially now that power unit manufacturers are being pulled under their own budget cap.
“I would personally love just to get rid of homologation and have a gloves-off fight,” Hodgkinson said, arguing that the combination of a $190m spending limit for 2026 and restrictions such as dyno-hour caps should be enough to stop the arms race spiralling. In other words: if everyone’s already financially handcuffed, why add another set of locks?
That line lands with a bit more weight than it might have done in previous cycles. The 2026 rules were sold as a clean-sheet era, but the governance around power units is anything but freewheeling. Homologation is the big moment — the designs go in, the FIA signs them off, and then the scope to chase performance through the season becomes narrow, with only defined windows to touch certain parts of the architecture.
Layered on top is the so-called Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system, a safety net designed to stop any manufacturer getting stranded in the wilderness if it misses the mark early. The FIA will maintain a performance index across the five manufacturers, and if one is deemed to be too far adrift, it can be granted extra chances to bring updates at shorter intervals. The intention is obvious: avoid a repeat of the kind of long-tail competitive damage F1 has seen when an engine concept starts the cycle on the wrong foot.
Hodgkinson’s take is pragmatic rather than ideological. He doesn’t deny the need to stop a runaway leader; he just thinks the sport occasionally forgets what “catching up” actually looks like on the power unit side.
“The gestation time of an idea in power units is much longer than it is in a chassis,” he explained. It’s not simply a case of machining a new part and shipping it to two cars. With engines pooled across a season, a single change can mean updating a whole batch — and doing it in a way that won’t detonate your reliability targets, because homologation turns every gamble into a potential self-inflicted wound.
That’s the part of this debate that often gets flattened in the public version of it. Chassis development is iterative and visible; power unit development is industrial. Hodgkinson talked through lead times that can run to 12 weeks for some high-precision metal components, then another chunk of time to prove them, then more time to get them into the race pool. The timeline makes the FIA’s “six races then assess” cadence sound neat on paper, but wildly optimistic in practice.
“After six races, it’s assessed so, technically, in the seventh race, you can introduce the update,” he said. “I think that it’s quite challenging to come up with an update in a couple of weeks. If I had 20 kilowatts to bolt on the engine right now, I’d do it.”
That last line is doing a lot of work. It’s half joke, half reality check: there is no secret switch. The system is supposed to create competitive elasticity, but physics, manufacturing and validation don’t care about good intentions.
All of this is playing out against a backdrop that’s hard to ignore in the paddock: RBPT has emerged from pre-season testing looking, at minimum, credible — and perhaps more than that. For a project that effectively built its factory and its processes from scratch, it’s the kind of first public outing that changes the tone of the conversation. It’s also why Hodgkinson’s comments don’t read like those of a man pleading for help. They read like someone who thinks his group can fight on merit, and would prefer the rulebook to let them.
The irony is that Red Bull’s power unit programme is now also a symbol of continuity through upheaval. Christian Horner, who pushed hard for Red Bull to create an autonomous engine division, was removed from his roles by Red Bull GmbH in mid-2025. The programme carries on, but the politics around it have shifted.
Laurent Mekies, now leading RBPT and the Red Bull F1 team, has been keen to praise what’s been achieved while refusing to buy into the idea that Red Bull is suddenly the reference point. That matters, because Toto Wolff openly suggested the RBPT unit has looked like the benchmark in terms of energy deployment and management — precisely the kind of public comment that can be equal parts genuine assessment and strategic theatre.
Mekies, for his part, wasn’t biting. He called out the “game in the pit lane” of trying to redirect attention, and insisted RBPT is “unfortunately, not the benchmark,” saying Red Bull believes it’s “probably trailing the group of the top guys right now.”
Still, even in Mekies’ caution there’s an admission that the paddock didn’t expect this level of early consistency from a brand-new manufacturer. He pointed to the scale of the task — and the inevitability of uncomfortable moments: reliability snags, days where the gap to the front feels brutal, the sort of setbacks that define new engine projects. But he also framed it as a development race on both chassis and power unit, exactly the kind of fight F1 claims it wants.
That’s what makes the homologation debate so loaded. If RBPT really has started well, the sport’s “keep it close” mechanisms will be watched through a very particular lens. The best-funded, best-organised programmes want freedom to out-develop their rivals; the teams with early pain want guardrails and extra chances. The FIA is trying to thread a needle between sporting fairness and technological credibility — while now doing it under a power unit budget cap that, in theory, should already be doing some of the levelling.
Hodgkinson’s argument, stripped down, is simple: pick your limiter. If you trust the cost cap and dyno limits to keep the contest sane, then let the engineering fight breathe. If you don’t, then admit it — and accept the homologation regime for what it is: not just cost control, but performance control.
Either way, the first real test of the system won’t be the March paperwork. It’ll be what happens when somebody turns up to race one with an advantage, and everybody else has to decide whether they can realistically build a response inside the fences F1 has erected around the new era.
