Red Bull’s Rookie Engine Beats Mercedes Where It Matters
Red Bull has never built an F1 engine. In 20 years, they've always bought their power units, first from Renault, then Honda, and later rebranded Honda engines. Now, for 2026, they're building their first in-house engine with Ford, a company absent from F1 since the 1980s. By all accounts, they should be struggling. Instead, Red Bull's engine dominance has every major team calling them the benchmark.
The 2026 rules changed everything. Equal power from combustion and electricity, a 50-50 split that turns energy management into the ultimate differentiator. It's the most sophisticated power unit formula F1 has ever mandated, designed to favor manufacturers who've spent billions learning hybrid systems. So, against competitors with more money to burn than the engineering team could count, how was it possible for Red Bull’s engine dominance?
Red Bull started by poaching key engineers from Mercedes and Honda, including Ben Hodgkinson, who led Mercedes' hybrid program. All the while teaming up with Ford, which brought advanced simulation software and 3D printing, cutting prototype development from 16 days to five. Red Bull even went as far as to use Oracle's cloud computing to simulate thousands of scenarios and perfect energy deployment strategies before building hardware. To achieve Red Bull’s engine dominance, they compressed years of traditional development into months by treating the power unit as a software problem first, hardware second, vaulting themselves ahead while their rivals were still calibrating.
Barcelona testing revealed why rivals are worried. Red Bull completed 622 laps with minimal issues while Mercedes struggled with reliability problems. The biggest irony? Racers, including Red Bull's own Max Verstappen, hate these cars. Going as far as to call them boring, Verstappen even compared them to Formula E, and suggested he might leave F1 early because the new regulations aren't fun. Yet Redbull built the best package anyway. Mercedes might grab faster qualifying laps, but Red Bull’s engine dominance advantage means they'll dominate race pace. When the Australian Grand Prix starts in March, the team that's never built an engine will likely be untouchable. Red Bull just rewrote the rulebook… Again.
