Red Bull engine, Mekies: “Patience is needed, I would be naive if I thought I could beat my rivals straight away”

Red Bull and the many challenges of 2026 Once the curtain has fallen on the first major formal event of the season, Red Bull is now warming up its engines for the highly anticipated baptism of the 2026 single-seater and above all of the Red Bull Ford Powertrains power unit making its debut on the track. Having sobered up from the presentation in Detroit, we now await the first shakedown tests in Barcelona, ​​taking place behind closed doors from 26th to 30th January on the Montmeló track: and even if the teams will be more concerned with testing the reliability of the new engines in the meantime, it will be a fundamental step in setting up the work in view of the real pre-season tests, those scheduled in Bahrain from 11th to 13th and from 18th to 20th February. The first Red Bull engine “We are entering – explains team principal Laurent Mekies during the Detroit event – ​​a crucial moment for Formula 1. It will be the biggest regulatory change in history, but for us it wasn’t enough. It’s also the moment in which we decided to make our own engine, with the incredible support of our partner Ford, at our side from the beginning. It’s a crazy challenge that perhaps only a company like Red Bull could decide to face, but that’s exactly why we’re here.” Laurent Mekies does not hide Beyond the proclamations and catchphrases, Mekies himself admits that it will not be possible to immediately reduce the gap in knowledge from the other major manufacturers who have been producing engines for decades and hybrid power units since 2014: “It will be a year full of challenges, but it is fundamentally what unites us. After everything we have said about the scale of the challenge, about starting from scratch and building everything from scratch, I think that facing the first year and the first race thinking of immediately being at the level of the competitors, who have been doing it for years, it would be naive. And we are certainly not naive, on the contrary we know that there will be many difficulties, many headaches and many sleepless nights, we are confident that we have put together an extraordinary group of people and partners, and that with these we will be able to overcome the difficulties, but you will have to be patient in the first months”. “I believe that the initial difficulties – concludes Laurent Mekies – will be a good reminder of what we had to face to get to the top. But this choice to also become builders of power units is the vision of Dietrich Mateschitz (the founder of the company and the team, who died in 2022, ed.), his courage, his spirit. He is the reason why we are all here today. At the time he made that incredible decision to put us on the path to complete independence as regards the chassis and the engine He wasn’t scared off by the scale of the challenge and today Red Bull has the opportunity to pay tribute to him and, we hope, make him proud.”