Max Verstappen in the Red Bull Ford-powered RB22 at Spa-Francorchamps, 2026. Photo: Der Alf / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Sprint pole. Sprint win. Grand Prix pole. Grand Prix win. Max Verstappen left Marina Bay with every piece of silverware a sprint weekend hands out, and he did it in a car whose engine did not exist as a race-proven product ten months ago.
That is the detail worth sitting with. One win, at Sepang on October 4, could be filed under weather, timing and a rival having an off day. Two in a row, the second a clean sweep at a street circuit where Verstappen had never won in nine previous attempts, starts to look like a pattern. And the Red Bull Ford DM01 is still a first-year power unit from a first-time engine builder.
So the question for the rest of the grid is not whether Red Bull’s engine is good. The FIA answered that months ago. The question is how much of this package is still unfinished, and what happens when Milton Keynes finishes it.
What Singapore actually showed
The numbers from the official classification are not subtle. Verstappen won the Sprint by 2.591 seconds over Lewis Hamilton, then took his first Singapore pole and converted it into a 7.335-second win over Charles Leclerc across 62 laps. Kimi Antonelli was another 17 seconds back in third. It was Verstappen’s 73rd Grand Prix win, landing on his 250th start.
The race itself was a one-stop affair with two Virtual Safety Cars and no full Safety Car. Verstappen started on softs, switched to mediums on lap 33, and managed the gap. Nothing about it relied on luck or a strategy gamble. Ferrari’s best car still finished more than seven seconds adrift. That is a car-and-engine result, not a pit wall one.
The Red Bull Ford customer side backed it up. Liam Lawson took fifth in the Sprint and seventh in the Grand Prix for Racing Bulls, finishing ahead of George Russell’s Mercedes after Russell started from the back with power unit penalties. Three of the four DM01-powered cars scored on Sunday.
The engine was never the bottleneck
Here is the strange shape of Red Bull’s 2026. The FIA’s catch-up system, ADUO, measures each manufacturer’s internal combustion engine against the best one on the grid. When the FIA published its first two verdicts, Mercedes landed in the 2–4% deficit band, while Audi, Ferrari and Honda were 4% or more behind. With five engine suppliers in the field, that leaves only one manufacturer as the reference: Red Bull Ford.
Yet Mercedes won 12 of the first 15 rounds. That gap between “best engine” and “best results” is the most useful thing to understand about this season, and it comes straight from how ADUO works. The FIA’s own explainer spells it out: the performance index uses input shaft torque, engine speed and MGU-K power, but the wider energy recovery system is excluded. There is no correction for fluid temperatures or external aerodynamics either.
Under the 2026 rules, roughly half the car’s power comes from the combustion engine and the rest from the MGU-K. So the FIA’s ranking is a combustion-engine league table, not a full power unit one. How well a team harvests and deploys electrical energy, how its software manages that split, and how the chassis turns all of it into lap time sit outside the measurement entirely.
Verstappen pointed at exactly that after Sepang. “These engines are so complicated and a lot of software is implemented,” he said in the FIA post-race press conference, adding that the team had been “working very hard to understand our issues.” Read that alongside the season results and the picture is clear: Red Bull had the strongest combustion engine for months, and the rest of the system took until October to catch up with it.
Why “year one” should worry the grid
Every other manufacturer on the grid arrived in 2026 with existing engine departments, existing dynos and, in most cases, a decade of turbo-hybrid data. Red Bull Powertrains was only set up in 2021, after Honda’s exit forced the question, and started its work with Ford on the new-generation unit in 2023. Its technical director, Ben Hodgkinson, joined from Mercedes’ engine operation.
That history matters because engine programs mature on a different clock than chassis programs. A chassis department can iterate a floor or a front wing in weeks. Combustion engine changes run through long design, manufacture and dyno cycles, and under the 2026 rules they also have to be homologated. Red Bull is learning to run both clocks under one roof for the first time, after two decades of designing a car around someone else’s finished engine.
Team principal Laurent Mekies set expectations back in February, calling the season “a huge development race both on the chassis and PU side,” in comments published by Red Bull. Ford, for its part, described Sepang as “a key milestone of the partnership, not the final goal” in its own write-up of the first win. Corporate optimism is cheap, but the results now give it some weight. A team that tops the FIA’s combustion-engine ranking in its debut season and only starts winning once the rest of the package settles has obvious headroom left.
The other Red Bull had a very different weekend
If you want proof that the package is not finished, look across the garage. Isack Hadjar retired from the Sprint after two laps, went out in Q1, started the Grand Prix from the pit lane and recovered to tenth for a single point. Same chassis, same power unit, same weekend Verstappen won everything.
That spread is not new. We have argued before that Red Bull’s real 2026 problem is repeatability, not pace, and Singapore was a neat illustration of both halves of that. The ceiling is now race-winning. The floor still includes a car that can tumble out in Q1. A team that closes that gap does not just win more races; it scores the constructors’ points that pay the bills and decide where the money goes in 2027.
The rulebook angle: rivals have help, but it has strings attached
Being the benchmark has a cost. As the reference engine, Red Bull Ford received no extra homologations or cost cap relief from ADUO, and it cannot qualify for any in the rest of 2026. Audi, Ferrari and Honda each banked two extra homologations for this year and two for 2027. Mercedes got one of each, plus cost cap allowances that the FIA sets at up to $3 million per period in the 2–4% band and more for bigger deficits.
The detail that gets less attention is the condition on those 2027 upgrades. Under the FIA’s rules, upgrades granted for the following season can only be used if the manufacturer falls within the deficit thresholds again. Any upgrade not used by the final round of its season is forfeited. In plain terms, the rivals’ 2027 help depends on them still being measurably behind Red Bull Ford’s combustion engine. Close the gap and the extra development slots fall away.
That is a fair design. It does, however, mean that every gain Milton Keynes finds over the winter makes it harder for rivals to catch up on the combustion side, while it can keep refining the parts of the package ADUO never measures: energy recovery and deployment, software and integration with the RB22’s successor.
What to watch in Austin
The title fight is close to done. Antonelli leads Russell by 102 points heading to the United States Grand Prix and can mathematically clinch the championship there, while Verstappen sits fourth. So the final rounds are about something other than the crown for Red Bull. Three things are worth tracking:
- Whether the form survives a different circuit type. Sepang rewards high-speed efficiency, Marina Bay rewards traction and braking stability. Winning both suggests the package is broadly competitive, not tuned to a single venue. A third straight win would confirm it.
- Hadjar’s weekend. The second car is the clearest measure of how usable the RB22 is outside Verstappen’s hands. A tidy top-six run would say more about Red Bull’s progress than another Verstappen win.
- The final ADUO window. The third review period runs from the Netherlands to Mexico City. The FIA’s verdict after Mexico will be the last 2026 snapshot of where every combustion engine stands before winter development begins.
“We have a lot of motivation in the team to try and deliver even more results,” Verstappen said after Singapore, in comments carried by Formula 1. Standard post-race fare, usually. Coming from a team that has just won back-to-back races with an engine program still in its first season, it reads a little more like a forecast.
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