Red Bull 2026 Preview: The hunted become the hunters once more
- Peter Johnson
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Written by Peter Johnson, Edited by Marit Everett
As we count down to Formula One's 2026 season opener, our F1 writers preview each team's potential, expectations and goals ahead of the start of a new regulatory era for the sport. Having dominated the first three years of the previous regulation cycle, for the first time since 2021, Red Bull enters a season without a title to defend. With a brand new power unit, will the team be able to power its way back to the top?
2025 was a turbulent year for Red Bull, as the team failed to win either the Constructors’ or Drivers’ Championship for the first time since 2021.
Former Team Principal Christian Horner, who had led the team since its inception in 2005, departed under a cloud last July, while Liam Lawson’s demotion just two races into the season and Helmut Marko’s departure at the end of the campaign meant that the Milton Keynes-based team’s 2025 was bookended by key personnel shifts.
2026 marks a fresh new era for the team, with new leadership and a new engine leading its quest to return to the top.
The driver line-up
In terms of combined numbers, Red Bull has one of the strongest driver pairings on the grid in 2026.
Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar between them have 128 podiums, second only to Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, and 71 wins, second again to the Ferrari pair’s combined total of 113.
However, individually, Verstappen is responsible for all of those victories and 127 of his and Hadjar’s combined 128 podiums. It is this fact that ultimately underlines the challenge that Red Bull and, more specifically, the problem Red Bull’s second driver has faced for the better part of a decade — stepping out of Verstappen’s shadow.
Since Daniel Ricciardo walked away from the team of his own volition at the end of 2018, Pierre Gasly, Alex Albon, Sergio Pérez, Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda have all tried and failed to match the Dutch superstar. Each eventually ended up being sacked, invariably sooner rather than later.
Isack Hadjar becomes the seventh man to partner Verstappen at Red Bull, but unlike his six predecessors, does so under the leadership of Laurent Mekies.
Pérez, now of Cadillac, spoke to the Oso Trava podcast in January about the struggles he faced entering a team led by Christian Horner and Helmut Marko, now both departed, who preferred to build the team around the Dutchman.
Pérez stated: “At Red Bull, everything was a problem. If I was faster, it was a problem and it created a very tense environment. If I was slower than Max [Verstappen], that was also a problem.
“During my first discussion with Christian [Horner], he told me: “We’re going to race with two cars because we have to have two cars, but this project was created for Max, he’s our talent.’”
The advantage Hadjar now has compared to his predecessors is that Mekies may take a more diplomatic approach. With Red Bull not expected to be the class of the field this season, the Team Principal might be more inclined to take an approach less weighted towards Verstappen as the team battles to return to the front.
Hadjar, for his part, forced his way into the conversation for the second Red Bull seat with a remarkably assured rookie campaign in 2025, which seemed almost unthinkable in the moments following his formation-lap crash in Melbourne on debut a year ago.
In the 22 races in which he competed against Racing Bulls teammate Lawson, in what was essentially a shootout for the Red Bull drive in 2026, the Frenchman claimed the better race result on 13 occasions, highlighted by a podium at the Dutch grand Prix in Zandvoort in August.
With a huge regulation change, a fresh engine partnership with Ford, a new leader at the helm and the dethroning of Verstappen as champion last year, the team enters the new season with something of a clean slate. Something which surely can only help Hadjar’s assimilation.
What we learned from testing
One of the main question marks over Red Bull, and indeed Racing Bulls, prior to the Barcelona shakedown and Bahrain tests, was the performance of the new Red Bull-Ford power unit.
Pre-season speculation hinted that Red Bull had exploited a similar engine loophole to that found by Mercedes, the subject of much discussion in recent weeks.
Recent chatter to that end has died away, although Verstappen described his early experience of the new engine as “very positive.” The engine proved itself both reliable and competitive on pace, neither of which can be said of the Honda engine that the team has stepped away from.
The team completed 329 laps at the final test in Bahrain, with the Dutchman and Hadjar among the fastest runners on all three days.
Overall, it seems that Red Bull still sits somewhere in the conversation with McLaren, Mercedes and Ferrari, although probably slightly lower down the pecking order compared to past seasons.
Team expectations for 2026
For the first time since 2022, when Max Verstappen entered the new ground-effect era as the newly-crowned drivers’ champion, he and Red Bull have consistently had a target on their backs.
Three drivers’ and two constructors’ titles later, 2025 was the first year in five that the Milton Keynes-based team did not claim either title.
While 2026 marks a new era for the sport as a whole, Red Bull is perhaps the one team that faces the most changes this season.
A new driver, the first full season not led by Christian Horner, the departure of the influential Helmut Marko and a brand-new self-sourced power unit are all ways in which 2026 marks a clean slate for the team which, for the first time since 2021, is among the chasing pack.
In the bigger picture, Verstappen has won a race every season since he joined the team in 2016, giving the team the longest active streak of consecutive seasons with a victory. Therefore, anything less than challenging for victories this year would be underwhelming for the Dutchman, although internally the team most likely does not expect to be in contention for either title this season.
The target for Hadjar is slightly lower; he must demonstrate that he can prove a reasonable foil to his teammate when the situation calls, and supply a steady stream of points in the second car.
The future of Verstappen, a key talking point of last year, is less prevalent this time around as he now has a contract towards the end of 2028, although if Red Bull proves to be wholly uncompetitive in this new era, his future both at the team and in the sport as a whole may become a talking point in the short-term.
From the outside, the team looks to be in a healthy and competitive position heading into 2026, although the Dutch national anthem on Sunday evenings may be more of an occasional treat than a weekly ritual.
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