Max Verstappen’s victory in the Bahrain Grand Prix at Sepang ended a 301-day Formula 1 win drought and delivered his first victory of the 2026 season. Yet Red Bull’s return to the top was not simply an isolated breakthrough. It underlined one of the defining characteristics of the Milton Keynes team: its remarkable ability to recover from technical problems, management turmoil and difficulties within its driver programme.
The Max Verstappen-Red Bull combination has now achieved at least one Grand Prix victory in each of the last ten seasons. That statistic points towards something deeper than sustained competitiveness. Even during difficult periods, Red Bull has repeatedly found a way to put itself back in a position to win, even if only for a particular weekend.
The latest success can be placed alongside the wider career of Max Verstappen, whose relationship with Red Bull has remained central to the team’s competitive identity through several different technical eras.
Red Bull resilience goes beyond one Max Verstappen victory
Resilience is not an accidental characteristic of Red Bull. It is the product of a structure built on strong foundations, allowing the team to recover from a series of technical, political and driver-management crises over recent years.
The 2026 Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia offered the latest demonstration. Max Verstappen finally returned to the top step of the podium after a difficult season, giving Red Bull an important result after months of searching for improvements.
That ability to rediscover competitiveness has become a recurring feature of the team, even during periods when its technical direction or internal organisation has come under pressure.
The art of correcting technical problems quickly
Red Bull undoubtedly inherited much of its design philosophy from former Chief Technical Officer Adrian Newey, who built his reputation around approaching even the most complicated engineering challenges without fear.
“The biggest technical challenges are the ones that force you to rethink everything from scratch. The real strength of a group isn’t having the perfect initial design, but how quickly it can change direction when something isn’t working,” Adrian Newey said during an appearance on the James Allen on F1 podcast.
That philosophy helps explain why Red Bull has so often managed to improve the performance of its cars during a season instead of simply accepting the weaknesses of its original concept.
The current campaign and the previous season both illustrate that ability. Last year, Max Verstappen was even able to remain in contention for the world championship thanks to an impressive Red Bull recovery during the second half of the season.
The Dutchman’s long-term future with the team has also remained an important part of Red Bull’s wider planning, even with exit clauses remaining in Max Verstappen’s latest Red Bull contract.
Sepang delivers another milestone for Red Bull
Under team principal Laurent Mekies, Red Bull provided another demonstration of its ability to recover at Sepang. Max Verstappen’s victory was not only the team’s first win of the season but also its first victory using a power unit produced by Red Bull itself following the end of its partnership with Honda.
That achievement gives the Malaysian result significance beyond championship points. It represented an important milestone for a project that required Red Bull to take on one of Formula 1’s most demanding technical challenges while simultaneously navigating major changes elsewhere in the organisation.
Red Bull learned to isolate itself from political turmoil
Red Bull’s resilience has also been tested away from the circuit. From 2022 onwards, and increasingly during the Christian Horner controversy that began in 2024, divisions emerged within the team’s management structure.
On one side stood the Yoovidhya family, which holds 51% of Red Bull GmbH and had supported maintaining Christian Horner’s prominent position within the team’s governance. On the other were executives in Salzburg who were closer to Helmut Marko’s position and wanted Christian Horner’s influence to be reduced.
The internal crisis ultimately had consequences across the organisation. By the summer of 2025, Christian Horner’s position had become increasingly precarious amid the accusations against him and continuing pressure from the Austrian side of the organisation, eventually leading even the majority owners to withdraw their support.
Red Bull also faced the departure of some of the most recognisable figures associated with its modern Formula 1 era, including Adrian Newey and Helmut Marko.
Despite losing such influential personalities, Red Bull decided to trust the technical structure it had built internally rather than abandon its existing foundations. That choice proved significant: the team demonstrated that its organisation was strong enough to continue competing even after losing individuals who had once appeared indispensable.
Red Bull also had to rebuild its driver programme
Another difficult area has been driver management. Since Daniel Ricciardo’s departure after 2018, Red Bull has repeatedly struggled to find a driver capable of performing consistently alongside Max Verstappen.
With the car’s technical development increasingly centred around the Dutchman’s requirements, finding another driver capable of extracting comparable performance from machinery tailored so specifically to Max Verstappen became extremely difficult.
A rapid sequence of driver changes followed. Pierre Gasly and Alex Albon shared the second Red Bull seat across one period, while Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda experienced another rapid rotation during 2025.
Those repeated changes cost Red Bull valuable points and exposed weaknesses in the way the organisation was managing its drivers.
Gwen Lagrue brings a new approach to Red Bull juniors
Following the end of the traditional Helmut Marko approach, Gwen Lagrue became an increasingly important figure within the Red Bull Junior Team structure.
Red Bull recruited Gwen Lagrue directly from Mercedes, where he had spent 11 years successfully leading its young-driver programme and helping develop talents including George Russell and Kimi Antonelli.
Gwen Lagrue subsequently took global responsibility for the Red Bull Junior Programme. Although he was not directly responsible for discovering the current Red Bull academy drivers who are making an impact, including Isack Hadjar and Arvid Lindblad, his arrival has contributed to moving the organisation away from the relentless driver turnover that had previously characterised its approach.
Red Bull is becoming less dependent on individual personalities
Red Bull can therefore be described as more than simply a winning Formula 1 team. It has developed into an organisation capable of absorbing major shocks without allowing individual crises to destroy its competitiveness.
The era in which the team appeared heavily dependent on a handful of dominant personalities has clearly begun to give way to a more modern and structured management transition.
That change has not resulted in collapse. Instead, it has increasingly appeared to be the strategic response required to protect Red Bull’s long-term competitiveness.
Max Verstappen’s Sepang victory after 301 days without a win is the latest evidence. Red Bull has lost key figures, faced technical setbacks, experienced internal political conflict and repeatedly struggled with its second-driver structure, yet it has continued to find ways back to the front.
That ability to correct course may ultimately be one of the most important reasons why Red Bull remains such a formidable Formula 1 organisation.
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