Red Bull ‘will go through struggle but come out on top’

Red Bull say it would be “naive” to expect them to be able to compete at the very front in Formula 1 from the beginning of their new engine partnership with Ford this year.

Team principal Laurent Mekies said building their own engine with input from the US car giant was a “crazy challenge”.

Four-time world champion Max Verstappen continues as Red Bull’s lead driver and is joined by Frenchman Isack Hadjar, who has been promoted from second team Racing Bulls.

Verstappen finished two points behind winner Lando Norris in the 2024 drivers’ championship, with Red Bull third in the team standings.

“Starting from scratch, going into the first year, going to the first race soon, and thinking to be straight away at the level of the competition, who have been doing it for 90 years some of them, would be naive,” Mekies said.

“We know it’s going to be with a fair amount of struggles, headaches, sleepless nights. We will go through the struggle. We will eventually come out on top. Bear with us in the first few months.”

However, Ford executive chairman Bill Ford said that “together, we’re going to be unstoppable”.

Over the past five years, Red Bull have set up a new engine factory at their Milton Keynes base and recruited 700 staff.

Ford came on board shortly after the decision was made and is supplying staff and technology to Red Bull as they take on established F1 engine builders Mercedes, Ferrari and Honda. Germany’s Audi and Ford’s US rival General Motors are also entering F1 for the first time in 2026.

The partnership was officially launched at an event in Ford’s home city Detroit on Thursday evening.

The new livery for the cars that will be raced by Red Bull and Racing Bulls was also revealed. Red Bull have switched to a gloss livery after using a matte finish on their cars for the past 10 years. The company says it is “inspired by Red Bull’s original look in F1”.

Racing Bulls have signed 18-year-old British rookie Arvid Lindblad to replace Hadjar with Liam Lawson continuing with the team.

The car shown is not the definitive 2026 Red Bull, which will not be revealed until next month. It is a show car giving an approximation of what a car designed to this year’s new rules could look like.

The move comes as F1 introduces new rules for 2026 for both engines and chassis. The engines will rely more on electrical power than for the past decade, with an approximate 50-50 split between internal combustion engine and electrical components. The use of fully sustainable fuels has also been mandated.

There have also been changes to the power-units’ architecture, and to the rules governing the 1.6-litre V6 turbo engine.

Red Bull Powertrains (RBPT) technical director Ben Hodgkinson, who worked for Mercedes’ F1 engine company for 20 years before switching, said that starting from scratch came with pros and cons.

“I’m confident that the team I’ve built is incredible,” he said. “I’m confident the facilities we put together are going to be benchmark. But we’re a newcomer.

“We had to build factories while people started developing engines. So I think we started behind. But I think the people and the facilities we’ve got are better than everybody else. Will I have overtaken them by race one? I don’t know.”

Ford came on board as a partner a year or so after RBPT was established but Hodgkinson said the relationship was “very much a partnership”.

He said Ford had managed to “patch a few holes” Red Bull had not been able to fill in terms of recruitment, that their “state-of-the-art manufacturing capability” had allowed Red Bull to “make very complex 3D parts, but parts that are so complicated you can’t machine them because of their geometry, and we’re able to do those really, really fast because Ford’s expertise in the area is really quite world-class”.

And he said Ford’s buying power in terms of supply for the electrical part of the engine had been “very, very useful indeed”.

He added: “As an F1 engine manufacturer, even though it’s massive business really, it’s tiny compared to some of the big OEMs (car manufacturers), and if you’re to try and get an electric vehicle component supply company to be interested in supplying your 50 bits, they’re just not interested, there’s not enough margin for them. But then if Ford go knocking on the door, people answer.”

Hodgkinson shrugged off a recent controversy over the engine rules. Rival manufacturers are concerned Mercedes and Red Bull may have found a way around a rule restricting the engine’s compression ratio.

This is limited to 16:1 and it is measured at ambient temperature when the engine is at rest. There is concern that Mercedes and Red Bull have exploited the way materials expand at higher temperatures to raise the compression ratio when the engine is running on track. This could give a lap-time gain of as much as 0.3 seconds per lap.

The compression ratio is the difference between the maximum and minimum cylinder volume at the extremes of the piston’s stroke.

Hodgkinson said: “Any engineer that doesn’t understand about thermal expansion doesn’t belong in this sport, doesn’t deserves to be an engineer, really.

“Understanding how materials behave in different temperatures, pressures, stresses, loads, that’s literally our job.

“The regulations are super, super clear about compression ratio. You’ve got a 16:1 limit, the regulations say that 16:1 is measured in a very specific way, there’s a document that describes exactly how you measure it, and it has to be measured at ambient temperature.”

A meeting has been scheduled by motorsport governing body the FIA with the engine manufactures on 22 January to discuss the topic.