Formula 1’s winter is usually a well-rehearsed dance: a few carefully chosen quotes, a bit of sandbag theatre, and just enough intrigue to keep everyone talking until Melbourne. This year, though, the noise has a sharper edge. Red Bull’s post-Horner era is no longer a background subplot — it’s right there in the middle of the paddock mood as 2026’s new rules bed in.
Christian Horner, speaking as part of the next series of *Drive to Survive*, has described the emotional fallout from being fired by Red Bull last summer in terms that don’t leave much room for interpretation. “Loss and hurt” is the kind of phrasing you use when you feel something was taken from you, not when you’ve simply moved on. What makes it land harder is the way the departure happened — sudden, with no warning — the sort of corporate guillotine drop that’s still unusual at the very top end of F1 team leadership.
The detail that’ll pique paddock interest isn’t just that Horner’s still wounded by it; it’s that Toto Wolff got in touch afterwards. The politics of that are obvious. Wolff doesn’t do anything without a read on the wider chessboard, and a message to an ousted rival is never *just* a message — not in this sport, not between those two. Even if it was simply a human moment, it’ll be interpreted through a competitive lens because that’s how F1 works.
All of which would be plenty to chew on before a new season. But the twist is that Red Bull’s on-track narrative is also in a delicate phase — not necessarily because of lap time, but because the team has changed shape at exactly the moment it’s trying to prove it can stand on its own technical feet.
Max Verstappen has been broadly positive about Red Bull’s first in-house power unit making it through pre-season testing reliably, and he’s been quick to praise the scale of what the team has undertaken. That’s significant in itself: reliability is the first bar you have to clear with any brand-new programme, particularly when everyone’s still learning the quirks of a fresh regulations cycle.
Yet Verstappen being Verstappen, the compliment comes with a needle. His view is that “any good team with a Mercedes engine” could be in for a strong season. It’s not quite an alarm bell — more a reminder that the new year may begin with a familiar name at the front of the power unit conversation.
That’s where the subtext gets interesting. Red Bull’s been used to setting the terms of debate, not reacting to it. In the Horner era, the team projected strength relentlessly; it controlled the story as aggressively as it attacked the track. Now, with Laurent Mekies in the team principal role, Red Bull’s tone is noticeably different: calmer, less combative, but also more defensive against the idea that it starts 2026 as any kind of benchmark.
Mekies has pushed back on the notion that Red Bull’s got the best package, and he’s framed the early claims around Mercedes strength as part of the “good game” rivals play in pre-season — the classic act of loudly pointing at someone else so nobody looks too closely at you. He’s not wrong, and it’s a dance we’ve all seen before. But it also tells you Red Bull doesn’t want the weight of expectation right now. For a team debuting its own power unit project, expectation is an unnecessary tax.
The wider paddock, meanwhile, is trying to work out how messy — or not — the first few races might be under these new cars. Bahrain testing threw up some eye-catching moments on practice starts, with different launch behaviours prompting the usual rush to declare impending “chaos” once the lights go out for real.
Alex Albon, typically, has offered the more grounded take. His view is that once everyone’s doing proper formation laps on fresh tyres, the starts should converge and look more normal — perhaps not as smooth as before, but not the carnage some have been predicting. It’s a sensible point: testing is a strange environment, and practice start behaviour can be exaggerated by variables you simply don’t get on Sunday afternoons.
And if that all sounds like a lot happening at once — a major team still processing the aftershocks of a leadership firing, a brand-new power unit pecking order being quietly hinted at, and a grid collectively learning how the 2026 machinery behaves in the most high-pressure moments — that’s because it is.
Off track, there’s one more thread that underlines how relentlessly motorsport moves forward. Williams junior Oleksandr Bondarev has been talking about his next steps after winning the UAE4 title — his first single-seater championship — and the messages he’s received from people back home in Ukraine. It’s also a reminder of how quickly the sport’s conveyor belt resets: while F1 obsesses over who’s gained two tenths and who’s playing games, the next wave is already pushing up from below, with stories built on resilience as much as results.
For Red Bull, though, the early weeks of 2026 are going to be judged through two lenses at once. One is straightforward: does the car — and that first homegrown power unit — put Verstappen in position to fight at the front? The other is harder to quantify but just as real: can the team project the same authority without the figure who defined its public posture for so long?
The answers won’t all come in Melbourne. But the questions are already louder than usual.
