At the start of the 2026 Formula 1 season, very few believed Red Bull would be among the teams capable of fighting for pole positions, podiums, and race victories. Excluding the Melbourne Grand Prix—an event that rarely offers a completely accurate picture of the competitive order due to both its season-opening nature and semi-street circuit characteristics—the RB22 struggled significantly in both Japan and China to keep pace with Mercedes, Ferrari, and McLaren.
Inside Milton Keynes, the team knew extraordinary efforts would be required during April to put Max Verstappen and Isack Hadjar back in a position to fight near the front. But judging by the words of team principal Laurent Mekies, not only have those improvements arrived, they may even have exceeded Red Bull’s own expectations.
Mekies: “We haven’t solved all our problems yet” — but there is clear room for more progress
“We have taken a decisive step forward,” Laurent Mekies said at the conclusion of the Miami Grand Prix.
“In Japan, we were 1.2 seconds off pole position, and in China we were 1.0 second behind. We knew our rivals would not stand still, so we had to react. Beyond the upgrades, we also knew there were issues with our car that needed to be addressed, but we also knew there was room for improvement.”
The progress seen in Miami has clearly lifted morale within the Red Bull camp. A recovery is no longer seen as a distant possibility, but something genuinely achievable—especially after the team’s encouraging performance against the frontrunners: “Qualifying six tenths off pole in Sprint Qualifying and then just two tenths away on Saturday was surprising. It is a very clear sign of the work carried out at the factory,” Mekies was quoted as saying by Crash.net.
“It was a major step forward for us. The biggest step taken by any team.”
That is a bold statement in a season where the development race is already moving at full speed, but Miami undeniably marked Red Bull’s most convincing weekend of the year so far. The upgrades introduced there appear to have addressed several weaknesses, while also unlocking more performance from a car that previously looked difficult to fully exploit. Still, Mekies was careful not to suggest Red Bull’s problems have completely disappeared.
“We have not yet solved everything we wanted to solve. For the rest of the championship, we also need to continue working on ourselves. We want to extract more from our package, but we know our competitors will already bring further upgrades at the next race.”
And that warning is well founded. In Canada, Mercedes is expected to introduce its first major upgrade package of the 2026 season, effectively catching up with the development push that Ferrari, McLaren, and Red Bull launched earlier in the year. McLaren, meanwhile, has no intention of standing still either.
The Woking-based team had already planned to split its development programme into two phases—Step A and Step B—with those upgrades scheduled to arrive between Miami and Montreal.
That means Red Bull’s encouraging resurgence may only be the beginning of an even more intense technical arms race as the 2026 Formula 1 season enters its next critical phase.
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