(Motorsport-Total.com) – Purely on paper, it was not a good first half of the 2026 season for Red Bull. The Bulls are only in fourth place in the World Championship at the summer break, which, according to the current status, would be the worst result in the Formula 1 World Championship in more than ten years.
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Red Bull last missed the top 3 in the Constructors’ Championship in 2015, when the drivers were still Daniel Ricciardo and Daniil Kvyat. In the era of Max Verstappen, who joined the team in 2016, this has never happened to the Milton Keynes team so far.
Verstappen himself explains that although there were some good moments in the first half of the 2026 season, the first eleven races were overall “very tough.” Because Red Bull has not yet secured a win this year.
The four-time world champion emphasizes: “I think we need to try to be more solid and a bit more balanced to have somewhat less complicated race weekends. Also, we need to find more performance. It’s ultimately that simple.”
“Apart from needing to find more performance, it’s also about eliminating the problems with the current package we have,” he explains and reports: “We lose performance over the weekend or even from the start to the end of the race.”
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“We had [in the first half of the season] difficulties providing the drivers with a car that had a good balance,” confirms team principal Laurent Mekies and explains that the drivers “very often managed to get the performance out anyway.”
Nevertheless, after the summer break, they must manage to make the RB22 more consistent. “That has been an issue for us this season, and this is probably part of the improvement potential for the second half of the season,” says Mekies, and Verstappen also calls this a “high priority.”
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Can Red Bull continue the upward trend?
On the other hand, it would be too easy to call Red Bull’s 2026 season a complete failure at this point. Although they have not yet won a race, a clear upward trend has been visible since the season opener in Melbourne.
“We are satisfied with nothing other than wins,” Mekies makes clear. “But I want to take this opportunity once again to give our people a big compliment,” says the team principal, explaining that they have reduced the gap to the front from 1.2 seconds at the start of the season to 0.3 seconds recently.
“Since the Austria update, we have been fighting for podiums at almost every race,” he emphasizes on Sky and explains that Red Bull has been “sometimes a bit closer to the front and sometimes a bit further away from the front.”
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In fact, Verstappen has been on the podium three times in the four races since Spielberg, even securing two second places. Although they partly benefited from competitors’ retirements, at the start of the season they were often not even in a position to capitalize on such mistakes.
So, in the end, it is difficult to draw a really clear conclusion about the mid-season. “Don’t expect me to say we are satisfied, because we are not,” Mekies makes clear and emphasizes: “We will only be satisfied when we have a car again that has the pace to win on its own.”
The Bulls have not had such a car so far. However, the development of recent weeks and months at least gives hope that the RB22 will not be the first winless Red Bull car since the RB11 from the 2015 season.
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