The disappointing start to the 2026 Formula 1 season has raised several questions about Red Bull’s current form. According to Team Principal Laurent Mekies, the team is now paying the price for having pushed so hard for the 2025 championship, but it was a decision made without regrets, as no one wanted to give up without fully developing the RB21.
Red Bull currently sits sixth in the standings, with just two points ahead of Racing Bulls, despite having the same Power Unit. The 2026 season did not start as the team hoped, with a car that struggles more on the chassis side than on engine performance – historically the strong suit of the Milton Keynes squad. According to team management, this gap is also a consequence of the intense push in 2025 to chase the championship.
Midway through last season, Max Verstappen was over 100 points behind Oscar Piastri, who at that time led the championship. Given concerns over the 2026 Power Unit project, Red Bull decided to focus heavily on developing the RB21 to fight until the very end for the title. This decision was also influenced by McLaren’s choice to halt development of the MCL39 early to concentrate on the 2026 car.
However, it is clear that dedicating more time to one project inevitably takes resources away from another. When correlation issues arise – as they currently are with the RB22 showing unexpected behaviors even for the team itself – the accumulated delay in development weighs even more heavily.
According to Laurent Mekies, Red Bull is now paying the price for that 2025 championship push, which was lost in the final race, almost as a cruel twist in what could have been one of the greatest comebacks in Formula 1 history. With budget cap limits and restrictions on aerodynamic testing, the RB22, in the eyes of the Team Principal, reflects past choices – choices he has no regrets about.
Speaking about the decision to continue developing the 2025 car on the Beyond The Grid podcast, Laurent Mekies explained that the choice had been “easy,” because no one wanted to give up. Turning the page without fully exploiting the RB21’s potential would likely have been the wrong path. Everyone was more than convinced that the car still had much to give; the challenge was understanding how to extract it.
“We thought, and still think today, that it was the right choice, because we felt that turning the page and looking to 2026 would have been too easy a way to escape – an act of blind faith that the next year would be better, without having fully understood the limits of 2025. It didn’t seem like the right path,” Laurent Mekies said.
The cost of that choice, however, is now evident, because the energy invested at the end of last season inevitably affected the starting point of 2026. Laurent Mekies added that the team does not use this situation as an excuse and, while unsatisfied with the start of the season, he is confident Red Bull will identify the problems and turn the situation around, as it did the previous year.
“Clearly, the time and energy invested in last year’s late-season push impact the starting point of 2026. Of course they do. And so today we pay a little of the price. Do we use it as an excuse? No. We are not satisfied with the starting point, but we believe we can overcome these difficulties.”
“As we did last year, we will reach a complete understanding of the limits. This team has been very capable of turning situations around, and we have another opportunity to do it this year as well,” added the Frenchman.
Laurent Mekies also highlighted how the 2025 comeback had a huge impact on team morale: Max Verstappen won six of the last nine races after a difficult start to the season, which served as fuel for the team to keep pushing, despite a season that also saw major internal reshuffles, not only with the departure of Christian Horner.
“When everyone put in extra effort to understand what was limiting us, to try to bring updates and solutions to correct the problems we had, taking an enormous amount of risk in doing so, the second half of the season was anything but straightforward. We won many races, but we also had extremely painful ones, like the Netherlands, Hungary, and that Saturday in Brazil,” Laurent Mekies concluded.
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