The start of the new regulatory era could have told a very different story for Red Bull. Ahead of the season, attention was largely focused on the new in-house power unit developed in collaboration with Ford, an ambitious project representing one of the most complex challenges ever undertaken by the Milton Keynes-based team.
Instead, paradoxically, the very area that raised the most doubts has become one of the strengths of the 2026 RB22 project.
The real difficulties have emerged elsewhere. What has surprised many is the behaviour of the chassis, traditionally one of the technical pillars of the team during the Adrian Newey era. This unexpected situation has affected the opening races of the season and prevented Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar from consistently fighting at the front.
The clearest signs came in the early rounds of the year, culminating in a particularly difficult weekend in Japan, where the Dutch driver failed to progress beyond Q2 and finished the race behind an Alpine. A result that clearly highlighted the struggles of a car still built around several unresolved technical compromises.
Weight remains the main enemy of the RB22
Among the issues identified by the Anglo-Austrian engineers, the one with the greatest impact on performance continues to be the overall weight of the car. The machine designed under Pierre Waché’s leadership entered the season significantly above the regulatory minimum, a handicap that inevitably affected acceleration, tyre management and race pace.
The first major upgrade arrived with the package introduced in Miami. Those changes allowed a noticeable reduction in weight and brought the car closer to the competitive standards Red Bull has set in recent years. Max Verstappen even managed to secure a front-row start in qualifying, proving that the RB22’s underlying potential is far from insignificant when conditions are right.
However, the improvement has not been enough to fully eliminate the deficit. According to reports from The-Race, the current overweight issue is costing around two-tenths of a second per lap, suggesting that the RB22 is still between six and seven kilograms above the minimum weight limit set by the current regulations.
Reducing mass is therefore the absolute priority of the development programme. After the first weight-saving step introduced in the United States, another update is expected at the Austrian Grand Prix, a particularly important race for the team. The stated target is to finally reach the minimum weight limit and fully exploit ballast distribution to optimise performance balance.
This is a less visible aspect compared to aerodynamic upgrades, but often decisive in Formula 1. Having freedom in ballast placement allows teams to fine-tune car balance for each circuit, improving both outright performance and consistency over a race stint.
Extreme setups and kerbs: limitations still to be solved
However, weight does not tell the full story. The RB22 continues to show structural weaknesses that force the team into technical compromises that are often far from ideal.
One side effect of the excess weight is the need to run more aggressive setup configurations in order to recover lost performance. This approach can deliver positive results in certain conditions, as seen in Miami, but it also makes the car more difficult to drive and less predictable at the limit.
The struggles experienced by Max Verstappen in qualifying in Canada are a clear example of this phenomenon. When the operating window becomes too narrow, even small changes in track conditions or setup can compromise an entire weekend.
To this is added an issue already seen in the previous generation of cars: a limited ability to absorb aggressive kerbs and bumps. This weakness is particularly damaging on street or semi-permanent circuits, where riding the kerbs is often essential to extract lap time.
The issue becomes even more critical ahead of events like Monaco, where qualifying performance defines most of the final result. A car that is less effective over bumps risks leaving valuable tenths on the table.
Inside the team, however, the feeling is that there are no fundamentally unsolvable problems. The flashes of competitiveness shown by the RB22 suggest that the technical base still has significant room for improvement.
If the planned weight reduction programme over the coming weeks delivers as expected, the Austrian outfit could quickly move closer to the reference teams, turning what began as a difficult season into a far more competitive recovery than current results suggest.
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