(Motorsport-Total.com) – Max Verstappen may hate the new regulations for 2026, but at least the mood in the Red Bull camp regarding their own performance is optimistic after the Australian Grand Prix. “I’m really proud of the team,” says the four-time world champion. “They have done an incredible job to be where we are now – in the fight against McLaren and the Mercedes engine.”
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It is probably the first time that Verstappen seemed so satisfied after a sixth-place finish. But one should not underestimate the massive challenge Red Bull faces with the debut of its own power unit.
From the beginning, the team said – according to team principal Laurent Mekies, it would have been “silly” – to expect performance on the level of Mercedes or Ferrari. But that is exactly what happened during testing and at the season opener in Melbourne, surprising many.
The biggest surprise was probably Isack Hadjar, who qualified third on his team debut despite all the historical concerns about the second Red Bull seat. Although he retired on lap 11 (“The engine sounded terrible”), which shows that not everything is running perfectly yet, but Verstappen performed damage control: after a Q1 crash, he fought his way from 20th to sixth place, securing the team’s first points.
The foundation is there
Verstappen spoke of a “combination of things” that led to his qualifying crash but did not want to elaborate further. In the race, he even put pressure on Lando Norris in the McLaren at the end. It is becoming clear that Red Bull and the Milton Keynes squad will start the year in a close battle for third place behind Mercedes and Ferrari.
“The prevailing feeling is that we have confirmed we are in the fight,” says Mekies. He refuses to give a specific figure for the gap to Mercedes, but his McLaren counterpart Andrea Stella revealed that it lies between 0,5 and 1,0 seconds.
Max Verstappen’s crash in Formula 1 qualifying for Australia 2026
“We are proud of everyone in Milton Keynes for the work over the last three years. Being competitive from the first race is a huge achievement. Do we have the ambition to get better? Yes. But we have a foundation: P3 yesterday, from P20 to P6 today. We will fight in China, and then the development race begins.”
An efficient development program is the key to success in 2026. McLaren is the best example of this from the ground-effect era: backmarkers in Bahrain in 2022, they won the title in 2024 and 2025.
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Problems at the start
So for Red Bull, this is a solid foundation, but there is much to do to close the gap to the top teams – especially with battery management, which faltered at Albert Park. Both Hadjar and Verstappen had no electrical power at the start. This was particularly bitter for the Frenchman, who briefly looked like he could take the lead until he realized he had to lift off the throttle.
“It is our responsibility to avoid such situations,” Mekies adds. “We were caught off guard by the limitations of how to charge and discharge the battery on the formation lap. If we are the only ones who were caught out by it, we haven’t done a good job.”
“Due to the unusual driving behavior on the formation lap – accelerating, braking, accelerating to warm up brakes and tires – we reached a point where the state of charge was no longer sufficient for the start. We had to rebuild the battery level during the first lap, which of course wasn’t exactly fun.”
However, Red Bull was apparently not alone: both Mercedes factory drivers also admitted they had no battery support at the start, which explained their poor starts and allowed Charles Leclerc in the Ferrari to take the lead.
The lack of electrical power also delayed Verstappen’s charge through the field. Hadjar emphasizes: “We need to get a better handle on this. In six days of testing and practice, we couldn’t simulate this. A race scenario is simply something else.”
But that is exactly the challenge of the 2026 regulations with their heavy dependence on electrical energy. It doesn’t matter where a team stands in Melbourne, but where it ends up at the finale in Abu Dhabi in December.
“Being in the top 4 is the right starting point for this project,” Mekies emphasizes. “But we have the ambition to aim higher. We need to develop faster than the competition.”
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