Red Bull has moved quickly to lock in one of the key pillars of its modern operation, announcing a multi-year extension to its title partnership with Oracle just as Formula 1 heads into the first season of the 2026 rules cycle.
On the surface, it’s the continuation of a relationship that’s been splashed across the sidepods since 2022 and was reported at the time to be worth around $100 million per season. In practice, this is Red Bull doubling down on a way of working that has become increasingly central to how front-running teams expect to win races in an era where the margins are measured in milliseconds and the variables multiply every year.
The renewed deal is framed around two strands: ongoing use of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure in Red Bull’s performance programme, and a fresh push into trackside decision-making with an AI-powered strategy agent designed to support the team’s race engineers.
That second element is the interesting one, because it lands right when 2026 will ask teams to juggle more moving parts in real time. Red Bull has pointed out that the new regulations bring additional complexity into simulations, with energy management and active aerodynamics now part of the picture. In other words, the inputs for “what do we do on lap X?” aren’t just tyre life and traffic any more — they’re wrapped up in how and when you deploy performance, how the car behaves in different modes, and how quickly you can respond when the race changes shape.
Red Bull’s pitch is that Oracle’s tools will help it process those variables faster and with greater precision than rivals, and that the AI agent will sit alongside human decision-makers rather than replacing them. That distinction matters. Every strategist in the pitlane will tell you the job isn’t just finding an optimum on a clean spreadsheet — it’s doing it with incomplete information, under time pressure, and with drivers who don’t always experience the race the way your model predicts.
There’s also a power unit angle to this extension that shouldn’t be lost. Red Bull says its new engine, developed in partnership with Ford, was built and tested using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and that it stood out for impressive reliability during testing. With Red Bull Powertrains now supplying both Red Bull Racing and Racing Bulls from the start of 2026, that sort of early robustness is exactly what the company needed: credibility on day one, not just a long-term promise.
None of this is to claim Oracle is the secret sauce by itself — F1 doesn’t work like that, and nobody in the paddock believes a single supplier turns a midfield team into a champion. But the direction of travel is clear. Competitive advantage increasingly comes from how efficiently you turn data into decisions, and how quickly you can iterate — whether that’s in the factory, in simulation, or mid-race when a safety car flips the order and the “obvious” call suddenly isn’t.
Team principal Laurent Mekies leaned into that theme as Red Bull announced the extension, pointing to the success of the partnership since it began in 2022.
“Since Oracle became the team’s title partner in 2022, the team has delivered three Drivers’ World Championships, two Constructors’ World Championships, and broken many records,” Mekies said. “Our partnership with Oracle has been hugely successful, and we are delighted that we will continue together into this new era for F1.
“We rely on Oracle’s invaluable expertise to help us understand and optimise countless variables with greater precision and speed than the competition.
“With Oracle Cloud and Oracle AI, we can adapt quickly, make smarter decisions, and sustain the level of performance required to win Championships, and we look forward to continued success in this multi-year partnership.”
Oracle CEO Clay Magouyrk’s comments mirrored the same message — that the technology Red Bull uses at the track is the technology Oracle sells to the wider world — but in F1 terms the subtext is simpler: this is an arms race, and Red Bull doesn’t intend to turn up to the first year of a major regulation reset with anything left on the table.
“Oracle Red Bull Racing relies on Oracle Cloud and Oracle AI to achieve the highest levels of performance and solve some of the most complex, time-critical challenges in the world,” Magouyrk said. “The same technologies the Team uses to model strategy, refine its hybrid power unit, and deploy the latest AI innovations trackside are the ones powering transformation for companies across every industry.
“Whether on the track or in the enterprise, Oracle Cloud and Oracle AI deliver the speed and intelligence needed to win.”
The timing is no accident. The 2026 season begins with the Australian Grand Prix on 8 March, and it’s hard to ignore how aggressively the top teams are trying to set their foundations early for what comes next. For Red Bull, that means not only committing to the new Ford-linked power unit era and its expanded multi-team supply role, but also ensuring the infrastructure behind the scenes — the compute, the simulation capability, the decision support — is treated as a performance component in its own right.
Because when the lights go out in Melbourne, there won’t be much patience for “learning year” narratives. Not at Red Bull, and certainly not from a team that has built its recent success on being quicker than everyone else — on track, in development, and increasingly, in the split-second calls that decide whether you win or spend Sunday night explaining what might have been.
