George Russell is adamant that Red Bull holds an early advantage in Formula 1 2026, claiming its engine advantage is \u201cscary\u201d and that nobody \u201cshould be looking\u201d at Mercedes as the team to beat.<\/p>\n
Continuing the back-and-forth between the two teams at the start of the season, however, Red Bull technical director Pierre Wach\u00e9 believes the team are \u201cnot the benchmark\u201d and lie fourth behind Mercedes, McLaren and Ferrari.<\/p>\n
Both Toto Wolff and Max Verstappen have had contrasting views about Mercedes and Red Bull\u2019s pace at preseason testing in Bahrain, where neither team have yet showed their full hand, but both look competitive on track despite McLaren and Ferrari topping the opening two days.<\/p>\n
Red Bull\u2019s engine — produced by Red Bull for the first time in 2026 after the split with Honda — has been drawing praise in particular, with Russell claiming it has the most competitive package.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think anybody should really be looking at us, you should be looking at the most competitive car on the grid which right now is the Red Bull,\u201d Russell said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re not just a small step ahead, you\u2019re talking in the order of half a second to a second in deployment over the course of a lap, so it\u2019s pretty scary to see that difference.<\/p>\n
\u201cRed Bull have always delivered a very good car over the past 15 years even when they didn\u2019t have a great engine, so this test has been really eye opening for a lot of us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Verstappen set the pace early on Wednesday in Bahrain, and Russell added: \u201cThe truth is Red Bull in Barcelona Day 1 hit the ground running and were well ahead of all of their competitors, so ourselves, Ferrari and the others.<\/p>\n
\u201cDay 1 here in Bahrain again, they sort of knocked it out of the park, so they are, at the moment they\u2019re very much a team to beat and it\u2019s quite straightforward when you have three days of testing in the same location to make those improvements.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut when you get to Melbourne and you\u2019ve got three hours of practice before qualifying, based on what we\u2019ve seen in Barcelona and Bahrain, Red Bull are going to be ahead. So yeah, we\u2019ve got work to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Speaking shortly before Russell, it\u2019s fair to say Wach\u00e9 — on media duties for Red Bull with team boss Laurent Mekies absent — didn\u2019t quite agree with the Briton\u2019s sentiments.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are not the benchmark, for sure,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see clearly the top three teams, Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren are in front of us, outside, from our analysis, and we are behind. But there is a work where we think we are. I find it difficult to say about those because the run plan of everybody, the level of fuel they run, the level of power they run is difficult to say, but it\u2019s currently our analysis that it could be wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t spend too much time on that. We try to focus on how to improve our work.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"George Russell is adamant that Red Bull holds an early advantage in Formula 1 2026, claiming its engine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[441],"tags":[49,48,578,576,577,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-472745","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-formula-1","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-f1","11":"tag-formula-1","12":"tag-formula1","13":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}