2026 Oracle Red Bull Racing F1 Team

[TNTHead]

My guess would be the the following 5:

- Starts & other engine gremlins (not fully solved yet, although progress made, maybe counted as solved?)
- (cooling) efficiency (solved - less louvres / smaller rear exit,new macarena rear wing, sidepod, Japan floor?)
- balance in yaw (probably due to insufficient out-wash to ingress of rear wheel wake into diffuser) (solved via new sidepod, but also front wing?)
- weight (not yet solved)
- low speed mechanical grip (partly solved, maybe new suspension will follow if that is the rumour)

Sounds plausable. Hypothesis: we are already observing performance convergence chassis wise. Since the floor is much less sensitive than in the GE era trade offs are far less knife edge so great gains can be obtained by adopting the best aero and chassis solutions.

Still an unkown is which development path has the most potential with highest performance ceiling for chassis and aero. If this is the case we are effectively back in an engine formula.

With the last update package and the rearwing Red Bull has shown they are still a force to reckon with regarding aero/chassis.

[Gillian]

That first lap was the worst performance I have seen from Verstappen in many years. The spin can happen (and saved it, well done), but he went a bit overboard after that.

??? What do you mean with "overbaord". His tires were surely cooking after the spin, so he had to deal with the swimming car on a aggressive first lap.

I would rather criticize, that both errors, the spin and the crossing of the line, are errors that usually do not and should not happen to him. Also the start was not good....getting to a point where you need to question why always the same drivers have bad starts (e.g. Russel had again a better start than Ant).
I am starting to think that these errors are not normal but have something to do with concentration.

Besides that it was a fantastic weekend. I dare say Verstappen is a title contender. Just hope this upgrade was not an one-off, but they can keep progressing.

Come on...

Come on, what? The car is fast, the difference is night and day, there is a lot more potential (weight for starters), there's more than 1 team/driver in it, and Verstappen is still the best driver so being thereabouts is enough performancewise. Honestly, disregarding final result, this was a mega positive weekend.