Max Verstappen may hate the 2026 Formula 1 regulations, but at least the feeling within the Red Bull camp about its own performance is upbeat following the season-opening Australian Grand Prix. “I do feel really proud of the team,” said the four-time world champion. “They’ve done an incredible job to be where we are, to be fighting with McLaren, with the Mercedes engine.”
That’s possibly the happiest Verstappen has ever felt after finishing sixth, but it cannot be underestimated just how much of a challenge Red Bull faces this year with the debut of its power unit. From the start, the Austrian outfit suggested that it’d be “silly” – per team boss Laurent Mekies – to expect the engine to produce a performance which is similar to the likes of Mercedes and Ferrari, but that is exactly what’s happened across pre-season testing and the Melbourne opener, catching many by surprise.
Perhaps the biggest surprise came through Isack Hadjar, who qualified third on his team debut amid all the historical woes of that second Red Bull seat. He may have retired on lap 11 of the race, saying “the engine sounded terrible”, thus showing all is still not perfect, but Verstappen did his bit by recovering from 20th to take sixth place to give the team some kind of return.
It was a commendable comeback from his Q1 crash, the Dutchman revealing it was down to a “combination of things” but refusing to elaborate on what exactly, having even staged a late challenge on McLaren’s Lando Norris – with Red Bull and the Milton Keynes squad set to start the year in a tight battle for third behind Mercedes and Ferrari.
“The dominant feeling is that we have confirmed we are in the fight,” said Mekies, who refused to give a number for its deficit to Mercedes but his McLaren counterpart Andrea Stella, revealed it’s between 0.5-1s. “We are very proud of everyone in Milton Keynes for the work done in the last three years, for the work done coming to this season, to be able to be in the fight straight away from race one.
“I think it’s a huge achievement. Do we have the ambition and the obligations to do better? Yes. But yes, the starting point is that we were fighting here. P3 yesterday, P20 to P6 today. We think we’ll be fighting in China and then we’ll start the development race.”
Isack Hadjar, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Mark Horsburgh / LAT Images via Getty Images
Conducting an efficient development programme is the key to 2026 success given it’s the start of new regulations. McLaren, during the ground-effect era, is the perfect example of that; the Woking outfit was a backmarker for the 2022 Bahrain season opener, but eventually won the 2024 and ’25 titles.
So this is a solid base for Red Bull to work from, but there is much to do if it is to close down the top two teams, as it struggled with battery management at Albert Park. Both Hadjar and Verstappen had no power for the race start, which was particularly damning for the Frenchman who at one stage looked set to take the lead, until he realised he needed to back off.
“It’s our responsibility to avoid that situation,” added Mekies. “We have been caught by some limitations of the way you can charge and discharge the battery in the formation lap.
“If we are the only ones who have been caught by that, it means that we have not done a very good job. So, it’s what it is. With the unusual behaviours that drivers need to have on a formation lap, with acceleration, braking, acceleration, braking to warm your brakes, to warm your tyres, etc, we ended up in a point where we were unable anymore to get to the right state of charge for the race start.
“We had to build up that battery level through the first lap, which obviously was not enjoyable.”
However, it appears Red Bull wasn’t alone in discovering the issue during the Australian GP formation lap, as both factory Mercedes drivers admitted they lined up on the grid with no battery power to utilise, which explained their tardy starts and aided Charles Leclerc’s bolt into the lead for Ferrari.
George Russell, Mercedes, Isack Hadjar, Red Bull Racing
Photo by: Quinn Rooney / Getty Images
The lack of battery power also delayed Verstappen’s charge to the front and so it’s clear where it needs to improve, with Hadjar claiming “we need to do better to avoid this from happening”. “We didn’t manage to simulate it in the whole six days of testing, in free practice as well,” he added. “Honestly, it’s just new scenarios, a race scenario is different.”
But that is the challenge of these new regulations, with their increased reliance on electrical power, and it is not where a team is in Melbourne that counts, but where it is by the Abu Dhabi finale in December.
“Being top four is the right starting point compared to where the project is at,” concluded Mekies. “We have the ambition and obligations to target higher. We need to develop faster than competitors…”
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– The Autosport.com Team
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