Toto Wolff didn’t bother with the usual pre-season shrug when he was asked about Red Bull’s first in-house power unit. He went straight to the point: it looks like the benchmark.
That, in itself, is what makes Pierre Waché’s response worth listening to. Red Bull’s technical chief isn’t pretending the comments are meaningless — but he’s adamant they should be read in the right key. In the paddock’s annual February theatre, praise can be as weaponised as criticism, and Waché is framing Wolff’s compliment as a familiar move in a game that’s already getting spicy under 2026’s new engine rules.
This winter’s backdrop is the biggest reset since the sport last tore up its power unit playbook: a 50/50 split between electrical and combustion power, with the ICE running on fully sustainable biofuels. With everyone still learning where the lap time really lives — compression ratios, launch revs, deployment patterns — it’s no surprise the most valuable commodity in the first test weeks has been perception. Who looks quick. Who looks tidy. And, crucially, who looks like they might be forcing the FIA and rivals into hurried conversations before homologation.
Wolff, speaking after the early running, said what plenty in the pitlane will have been thinking but few would state so plainly.
“I was hoping that they were worse than they are, because they’ve done a very good job,” he said. “The car, the power unit are the benchmark at the moment, I would say. And then obviously you have Max in the car. That combination is strong.”
It’s a line that lands with extra weight because Red Bull is doing this without Honda for the first time in the modern era, having produced its own power unit for 2026 through Red Bull Powertrains. And Wolff didn’t just talk about peak performance. He zeroed in on what tends to separate the sharp outfits from the ones still juggling compromises: deployment.
“Look at the energy deployment,” he said. “They are able to deploy far more energy on the straights than everybody else. On a single lap we’ve seen it before, but now we’ve seen it on 10 consecutive laps with the same kind of straight-line deployment.”
If that picture is accurate in race-trim rather than just the usual test-day cocktail of unknown fuel loads and run plans, it’s exactly the sort of early advantage that can shape an entire season. Not because rivals can’t catch up — they often do — but because consistency across multiple laps hints at control. Control over temperatures, harvesting limits, and the algorithms that decide when the car spends and when it saves. In 2026, those details are the difference between looking electric on a qualifying sim and being unpassable over a stint.
Waché didn’t bite. Not publicly, anyway.
Speaking in Bahrain, he suggested Wolff’s remarks belong in that familiar pre-season category: the compliment that’s also a nudge, the “benchmark” label that comes with an unspoken subtext — if something needs looking at, the attention should go over there.
“I will not say we are the benchmark, because I think everybody knew in this room that it is a game that everybody’s playing,” Waché said. “But we have to recognise also that the fantastic job that the engine people have [done] as a startup – because it is a startup.
“Three-and-a-half years to make an engine, be able to be not stupid on the track, is a massive achievement.”
That last line is the important one. Strip away the politics and there’s a very real point: for a brand-new works programme to arrive at the first proper pre-season test and simply… function, rack up mileage, and avoid the sort of embarrassing gremlins that derail early development, is already a statement. It doesn’t prove they’re quickest. But it does suggest RBPT has cleared the first bar that matters: credibility.
The wider political context, though, is impossible to ignore. Mercedes is understood to be facing a crucial supermajority vote after identifying what rivals consider a loophole in compression-ratio wording — a debate that could still pivot into a regulation tweak on how compression ratio is measured before power units are homologated on March 1. That’s not background noise; that’s the sound of teams trying to shape the rulebook in real time, before the ink dries.
In that environment, Wolff praising Red Bull as the benchmark can be read two ways at once. It can be honest admiration for a job well done — and it can be a subtle effort to redirect the spotlight when your own house is in the middle of a very public planning meeting.
Waché also pushed back on the specific claim that Red Bull’s deployment advantage looked sustainable across longer runs, arguing that what Wolff saw early in the Bahrain test didn’t remain the picture by the end.
“It’s true that during the first day we were a little bit closer to where we should have [been], and you start to see the tendency of the others going to the same direction and now I will say a little bit better than us,” he said.
In other words: yes, Red Bull may have rolled out of the garage with its homework done. But the field compresses quickly once everyone’s engineers and simulation groups have a day’s worth of real track data to correct the models. Waché even hinted that Red Bull’s strength might simply have been getting to its baseline earlier than others — less “secret weapon”, more “better prepared on day one”.
That’s a plausible explanation in modern F1 testing, where the quickest lap time is often less revealing than how cleanly a team moves through its programme. Yet Wolff’s point about 10 consecutive laps will still raise eyebrows up and down the pitlane, because it implies something more repeatable than a single headline run.
The truth, as ever in February, is that both men can be right. Red Bull can have done an impressive job getting its first engine project to a solid, competitive starting point — and Wolff can be leaning into the paddock’s oldest trick of all: complimenting a rival loudly enough that everyone else starts asking questions.
What’s changed in 2026 is that the questions aren’t just about wings and floors. They’re about the core of the car, the bits you can’t redesign in three races once homologation locks the hardware in. That’s why every “benchmark” comment matters — and why Waché is treating it as a move on the board, not a trophy being handed out in the Bahrain sun.
