Red Bull arrived in Barcelona knowing this week was always going to feel different. New rules, a new car, and – for the first time – a Red Bull-built power unit running under the Red Bull Ford banner. The paddock might love to talk about lap times at this stage of winter, but inside Milton Keynes the real scoreboard is far more basic: does it start, does it run, and does it give you clean data you can trust?
On that front, Laurent Mekies sounded more relieved than triumphant after a second day that lurched from encouraging to messy. Max Verstappen’s brief off through the gravel brought out a short red flag. Rain arrived earlier than expected and ripped up any neat, pre-planned programme. And then Isack Hadjar ended Red Bull’s afternoon with a crash at Turn 14, leaving the team facing the sort of repair job nobody wants when test days are rationed.
Mekies called Hadjar’s accident “very unfortunate”, but the more important line was the one that followed: Hadjar walked away unhurt. That matters in any circumstances, but especially in conditions that Mekies described as “very tricky” – the kind of half-wet, half-usable track state where drivers are learning new cars and teams are trying to isolate variables, not add fresh ones.
There was an obvious attempt to keep the bigger picture in view. Red Bull’s Day 1 had been productive, with Hadjar logging 107 laps and, according to talk filtering out despite the closed doors, setting the unofficial pace. With no media access at the circuit, the information ecosystem has been the usual winter mixture of whispers, short clips, and selective team messaging. Even so, mileage still means something when you’re bedding in a brand-new power unit and an all-new chassis concept for a regulation change.
“A big thank you and well done to everybody back in Milton Keynes, chassis side, power unit side,” Mekies said, stressing how much work had gone into simply having the car ready to roll on Monday morning. “It was incredible to see the car going out at a few minutes past nine on Monday morning, with our own power unit.”
That’s the subtext to everything Red Bull says publicly right now. This isn’t a normal winter where the team’s biggest anxiety is whether a new front suspension geometry behaves as expected. Red Bull is learning how to operate as a works-style entity: calibrations, integration, reliability sign-offs, and the reality that your engine issues are now your problems, not a supplier’s.
Mekies didn’t pretend Day 2 had gone to plan. Verstappen managed only a single “run’s worth of dry running” before the rain took over the morning, and Red Bull – along with Ferrari – was among the few teams to run at all once the weather turned. That decision says plenty: if you’re chasing understanding, wet laps are still laps. But it also raises the stakes, because the margin between “useful learning” and “unnecessary risk” gets razor thin when visibility drops and the track is constantly changing.
Hadjar’s afternoon stint offered more of that wet running, and Mekies was clear that it was still providing “good learning”. Until it didn’t.
Asked for further details on the incident, Mekies didn’t add much beyond conditions being difficult and the team needing to analyse what happened. That’s not evasiveness so much as realism. A crash in a shakedown-style test can be anything from a driver misjudgement to a systems issue to a simple aquaplaning moment – and in a year where Red Bull is trying to build confidence in its own machinery, it won’t want to speculate.
Where the consequences bite is in the calendar. With each team limited to three of the five days, Red Bull has already used two. Mekies admitted the priority now is assessing the damage and deciding how to “play that card carefully” with only one day left available.
That line will resonate in every engineering office in the pit lane: the hardest part of modern testing isn’t finding speed, it’s getting enough uninterrupted running to understand what you’ve built. A crash doesn’t just cost parts; it costs time, correlation, and sometimes the chance to answer questions you’ve been queuing up for weeks. When the programme is this tight, even a “very brief” red flag and a morning of rain start to feel expensive.
Still, Mekies’ overall tone was notably upbeat about the early engine steps. “In terms of what we were expecting from the power unit on these first couple of days, I can only repeat how proud we are… to have managed to give us something that we could actually run with,” he said. Early days, nothing perfect, but enough to “start to learn” and “work as one team”.
That’s the crux of Red Bull’s winter: turning a technically and politically huge shift into something operationally boring. If the car can be repaired in time and the final day is clean, the headline inside the team will not be about Hadjar’s Turn 14 impact. It’ll be about whether the RB26 platform – and the first iteration of Red Bull’s own power unit – continues to behave like something you can develop, rather than something you have to nurse.
For now, Red Bull has what every team wants at this stage: data, a driver who’s fine, and a clear list of jobs to do. It’s just that the list got longer, and the time to do it didn’t.
