Martin Brundle’s been around long enough to know when a paddock “project” is actually a programme — the sort with the people, the facilities and the ruthless intent to make it real. And in his telling, Red Bull’s much-scrutinised decision to become its own power unit manufacturer for 2026 never had the whiff of a vanity exercise.
Speaking on Sky’s *The F1 Show*, Brundle revealed he was given an unusually early look behind the doors at Red Bull Powertrains, taken around the Milton Keynes operation by then-team principal Christian Horner nearly two years ago. It wasn’t a polished PR walk-through either; Brundle says they were in the middle of serious hardware work.
“Christian Horner took me around it best part of two years ago, and they were just doing their first high-power run on the recharge unit,” Brundle said. “I think they were a bit surprised Christian was dragging a journo in there to have a look at it!”
That little detail matters. The modern F1 engine programme isn’t built on grand announcements; it’s built on test cells, control rooms and the kind of incremental, brutal learning that happens when you start turning up power and the numbers get unforgiving. Brundle’s point wasn’t that he saw a finished product — it was that he saw the right sort of operation early enough that a strong start in 2026 wouldn’t be a shock.
Red Bull’s first season under the new regulations doubles as the start of life for the Red Bull Powertrains-Ford partnership, with Red Bull entering this new era not only as a chassis constructor but also as an engine manufacturer. It’s a huge shift for a team that’s already collected 14 world championships on the chassis side of the fence, and one that’s invited plenty of scepticism in recent years simply because of the scale of what they’ve taken on.
But the early signs have been hard to ignore. Pre-season testing produced a notably clean, reliable run for a power unit division that’s been created from scratch. In a winter where everyone’s tried to read the tea leaves from long runs and energy management, the Red Bull Ford unit’s energy deployment was even openly praised by Mercedes — and by Williams team boss James Vowles, whose outfit runs Mercedes power.
That sort of compliment is rarely handed out unless there’s something tangible underneath it. Nobody in that paddock benefits from inflating a rival’s narrative unless they genuinely think the baseline is strong — or they’re trying to get ahead of the questions when the stopwatch starts asking them.
Brundle, though, is framing it less as surprise and more as inevitability. He’s pointing to the underlying structure: the kit, the personnel, the time and the budget.
“But the facilities they have there, the people that they have got there, and the time they’ve had, and the budget, they’ve done a fine job,” he said. “Having seen what they were doing so long ago, I’m not at all surprised, actually.”
It’s also a reminder of what Red Bull’s “engine gamble” really was. This wasn’t merely about building an engine; it was about building a company inside a company — and doing it while still fighting at the front, still living with the weekly pressure of being Red Bull Racing. That’s where Horner’s role, as Brundle describes it, becomes part of the story: getting the project off the ground and then treating it like a core pillar rather than a side quest.
The immediate knock-on effect, of course, is that whatever Red Bull has created doesn’t just shape its own season. Brundle noted it will “play out for the Racing Bulls as well” — the second team’s fate tied directly to the same power unit story. Customer teams live and die by the quality of their supply, and for the first time Red Bull effectively becomes its own supplier ecosystem.
Still, Brundle was careful not to confuse a strong winter with a guaranteed campaign. There’s one bar that every new manufacturer eventually has to clear: doing it for real, weekend after weekend, with the reliability and repeatability that the established players have banked over decades.
“Will they have the reliability down the road of Mercedes in particular, and Ferrari? Perhaps. We’ll find out,” he said.
That’s the heart of it. Pre-season reliability is an encouraging sign, and energy deployment chatter is the kind of detail engineers listen to, but Melbourne is where the scoreboard starts. The 2026 season begins at the Australian Grand Prix from 6 March, and Red Bull’s new identity — not just as the team that packages a car brilliantly, but as one that must own the entire power unit story — stops being a concept and becomes a responsibility.
Brundle’s early tour anecdote doesn’t guarantee Red Bull’s on top of the new era. But it does add weight to the idea that this wasn’t a leap in the dark. Red Bull didn’t simply decide to build an engine; it decided to build the infrastructure to win with one. And if the winter clues are anything to go by, the rest of the grid may be about to learn what that looks like in practice.
