McLaren want answers after Red Bull’s Brazil engine reset powers Verstappen to P3
Red Bull didn’t so much roll the dice in São Paulo as upend the table. After Max Verstappen’s shock Q1 exit at Interlagos, the team tore up its Saturday, broke parc fermé to rework the RB21 for race trim and fitted an entirely fresh Honda power unit. Pit-lane start be damned, Verstappen charged to the podium. And now McLaren’s Andrea Stella wants to know what, exactly, that all means for the cost cap.
“These kinds of power unit changes challenge the regulations,” the McLaren team principal told reporters after the race. “I’ll be interested to understand if the cost of this engine now goes in the cost cap or not. If the engine was changed for performance reasons, it should go in the cost cap.”
That’s the nub of it. While the financial rulebook has lived with F1 since 2021, the practical line between swapping hardware for reliability and doing it for performance uplift can get blurry, especially when you bolt in an all-new set of bits on Sunday morning and immediately look quicker. Red Bull fitted the full suite: a new internal combustion engine, turbo, MGU-H, MGU-K, battery and control electronics. It was a clean reset and, as it turned out, a fast one.
The lap charts told their own story. Verstappen sliced forward early, even after a puncture on the hard tyre forced a reset to last. He then made the mediums sing, and late in the race Red Bull reached for the softs to give him one final crack at the podium. George Russell was ticked off without ceremony; Kimi Antonelli, in the other Mercedes, was not. The Italian rookie soaked up the pressure and kept Verstappen parked in third, while Lando Norris controlled things up front to win for McLaren.
How much of Verstappen’s jump came from a kinder setup and cooler conditions, and how much from that brand-new Honda, is the debate to be had on the flight out of Guarulhos. Verstappen’s take was measured. “It was everything together,” he said. “Set-up as well. I just felt a bit happier. The temperatures today, a bit cooler, everything was working a bit better.” On the softs, chasing Antonelli, the limit arrived fast. “When you start getting close you wear your tyres a bit. When I was getting close to Kimi the tyres started to overheat and you lose a lot of grip.”
Stella, for his part, hinted that the “new engine equals new pace” narrative might be too convenient. “In general, these engines don’t exhibit much degradation with mileage,” he said. “That’s why normally you wouldn’t change an engine and accept a penalty or loss of positions, because the performance you get back doesn’t really compensate.”
The politics here matter as much as the pace. With the season on the home stretch and the constructors’ order still worth serious prize money, every decision comes with an accounting shadow. If an engine is swapped in for performance, as Stella suggests, rivals will argue it belongs on the cost-cap ledger like any other development spend. If it’s framed as reliability, it becomes a different conversation entirely. It’s a grey area, and Sunday’s move by Red Bull will only sharpen calls for clarity.
There’s also the sporting impact to chew on. Verstappen’s recovery drive was relentless, but Norris never felt fully out of reach. McLaren kept the race tidy and turned the screw where it mattered; Mercedes left Brazil with one driver proving hard to pass and the other a mile marker. The upshot: momentum leans papaya as the calendar winds down, and Verstappen’s fightback—superb as it was—may have been more damage limitation than statement win.
Still, Red Bull’s “drastic” Sunday reset did exactly what it said on the tin. It salvaged a rotten Saturday, it brought the fight to cars that had looked untouchable 24 hours earlier, and it handed the paddock a fresh regulatory talking point. Expect the engine-accounting question to run a while yet. Teams are listening closely—not just to how the Honda sounded flat out on the run to Turn 4, but to how the FIA intends to tally it up.
