Racing Bulls has pulled off a quietly significant hire ahead of Formula 1’s 2026 shake-up, confirming Dan Fallows will join the Faenza-based outfit as technical director in April.
It’s a move that lands at an interesting moment for the Red Bull sister team. The new regulations have reset the market for engineering leadership, and teams with clear technical direction — and the ability to execute quickly — are the ones most likely to make the early gains that matter. Racing Bulls isn’t pretending it can buy its way to the front, so it’s opting for something else: proven process, sharp aero instincts, and someone who’s lived inside a championship machine.
Fallows arrives with a CV that practically screams Red Bull methodology. He spent close to two decades at Red Bull Racing, joining its aerodynamics department in 2006 and later becoming chief engineer for aerodynamics in 2014, working alongside Adrian Newey through the team’s era-defining design cycles. Racing Bulls knows exactly what it’s getting on that front: an engineer shaped by a system where aero development is relentless and where the line between good and great is usually execution, not ideas.
His most recent F1 spell at Aston Martin didn’t end well, but it does add context rather than baggage. Fallows served as Aston Martin’s technical director from 2022 to 2024, before being moved aside after a difficult 2024 season in which the AMR24 lost ground as upgrades failed to deliver the expected step. He formally parted ways with the Silverstone operation in 2024 and then moved on to Aston Martin Performance Technologies, the broader technology arm of Lawrence Stroll’s organisation, around 10 months ago. With his gardening leave now expiring, the timing has lined up neatly for Racing Bulls to act.
The remit at Racing Bulls is broad: Fallows will work “across design, aerodynamics, and performance” and will report to chief technical officer Tim Goss. That reporting line is worth noting. Racing Bulls isn’t installing a one-man technical monarchy; it’s slotting Fallows into a structure designed to tighten the link between concept, wind tunnel/CFD direction, and on-track performance — the areas where midfield teams can burn a season through misreads and mismatched priorities.
Fallows framed it as a project with momentum rather than a rebuild. “I’m very pleased to be joining VCARB at an exciting time for the team,” he said.
Team principal Alan Permane was equally direct about why Racing Bulls has made the play now. “Dan has a wealth of experience,” Permane said. “His technical understanding and leadership will be a real asset to the team as we continue to develop and push forward competitively. We’re delighted to welcome him to VCARB.”
There’s also an unavoidable subtext: Racing Bulls is a team that has, at times, looked like it’s been searching for a fixed technical identity — quick enough to spring the odd surprise, but not consistent enough to turn potential into a sustained climb. Bringing in Fallows is a statement that the next phase needs to be calmer, more methodical, and less reactive. And with 2026 demanding clean thinking from day one, “good enough” won’t be good enough for long.
It’s hard to ignore the symmetry, too. Fallows built his reputation inside Red Bull’s orbit, left to help shape Aston Martin’s technical reset, and now returns to the Red Bull family — but to the side of the garage where the constraints are tighter and the margins for error even smaller. If he can translate the best parts of that Red Bull pedigree into Racing Bulls’ reality, this could be one of those hires that looks routine on the day it’s announced and obvious in hindsight a year later.
