Photo: Lukas Raich, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Red Bull Racing goes into Formula 1’s summer break fourth in the constructors’ championship on 177 points, 202 behind runaway leaders Mercedes and 43 adrift of third-placed McLaren. Max Verstappen sits sixth in the drivers’ standings on 109 points, 110 behind Mercedes’ Kimi Antonelli, with twelve rounds left to close it. Those numbers are bad. The number underneath them is worse: zero. That’s how many races Red Bull has won through the first eleven rounds of a season it entered with genuine hope that a new engine partner and a clean-sheet rulebook might reset the pecking order in its favor.
The Math Behind the Slump
Four podiums is the entire haul for both Red Bull cars combined this year, and every one belongs to Verstappen: third in Canada, second in Austria, third in Belgium, second in Hungary. Isack Hadjar, in his first season alongside a four-time world champion, has been a credible teammate rather than a passenger, but the head-to-head score sits at 8-3 in both qualifying and races in Verstappen’s favor. Neither result is padded by a pole position — Verstappen has gone the entire first half of 2026 without starting a Grand Prix from P1, settling for front-row slots in Miami, Monaco, and Belgium instead.
The Car’s Actual Problem
It’s tempting to look at a fourth-place team with zero wins and blame the engine. That would be the wrong diagnosis. As we detailed when the FIA’s development catch-up mechanism handed extra budget and upgrade tokens to four rival manufacturers this year, Red Bull Ford Powertrains’ internal combustion engine already ranks among the strongest on the grid — which is precisely why the team didn’t qualify for a single dollar of relief under a rule designed to help whoever’s furthest behind. Red Bull’s problem lives in the chassis. A rotating rear wing failed during Austrian Grand Prix qualifying and put Verstappen into the barriers, then failed again in Britain and spun him out of what looked like a likely podium. The team reverted to the previous wing design for Belgium while it reworks the mechanism, with a plan to reintroduce an updated version later this season.
Beyond the wing itself, Red Bull’s own account of its season points to a broader balance problem: inconsistency from one circuit to the next, and recurring complaints — Verstappen’s especially — about how the car behaves on downshifts. Under a rulebook built around smaller, lighter cars, active aerodynamics in place of DRS, and a roughly even split between combustion and electric power, small mechanical issues show up directly in lap time, and Red Bull has spent the first half of 2026 fighting them race by race instead of solving them at the source.
A Rebuild, Not a Slump
This is what separates Red Bull’s year from an ordinary rough patch. Design chief Adrian Newey, motorsport advisor Helmut Marko, and race engineer Gianpiero Lambiase have all left or are in the process of leaving the organization — three people who were central to Red Bull’s run of four consecutive drivers’ and constructors’ championships earlier this decade. Team principal Laurent Mekies has been direct about the team being in a genuine rebuilding phase, not simply working through a bad aero concept, and rebuilds take time that a title fight doesn’t offer. Red Bull isn’t the only team gambling on a leadership change mid-reset, either. Cadillac swapped out founding team principal Graeme Lowdon for Marcin Budkowski before its debut season had produced a single point, a reminder that 2026’s technical upheaval has made major personnel moves part of the standard playbook up and down the grid, not just at the back.
The Ghost of 2025
Red Bull has reason to believe a big second-half swing is possible, because it just watched Verstappen produce one. A year ago, he won six of the final nine grands prix, from Italy through Abu Dhabi, and finished the championship two points behind champion Lando Norris, 423 to 421, after trailing for most of the season. That comeback happened in a mature car within a stable rulebook. This year is a different problem entirely: new regulations, a new engine partner, and a chassis that still can’t explain why it gets slower as a race weekend goes on. The man currently leading the standings, meanwhile, is chasing a title in barely his second full season in the sport — part of a generational shakeup at the front of the field that’s reshaping who gets talked about as F1’s next great one.
What Actually Matters From Here
Twelve races remain. The relevant question for Red Bull isn’t whether Verstappen can still produce a special single lap — Austria and Hungary already answered that. It’s whether the team can turn Friday pace into Sunday results without a new problem showing up in between, and whether a reworked rear wing can survive a full race weekend without ending one early. Verstappen’s contract runs through the end of 2028, so any talk about his long-term future at the team is speculation, not fact, until either side says otherwise. What isn’t speculation is the arithmetic: Red Bull needs to prove it can be boring and fast at the same time, and it has twelve weekends left this year to show it.
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