Author Archives: PressBox

Red Bull’s 2026 F1 resurgence has put it back in the podium fight, and Laurent Mekies said the team has been making steady gains through the season and expects that form to continue in the remaining races. He said recent upgrades at Monza, Madrid and Baku have brought incremental performance improvements and that the breakthrough result after the summer break confirmed the positive trend.

Mekies said the new rules era has made development gains larger for all teams, but also harder to find relative performance, especially with Red Bull running its own power unit for the first time. He pointed to the final upgrade package introduced in Azerbaijan, which helped Max Verstappen close the gap from more than a second behind to within three-tenths of the leaders and finish 0.196 seconds from victory there.

Mercedes remains the benchmark, Mekies said, and is likely to stay the favorite for race wins because of its power unit and chassis combination. Even so, he expects Red Bull to remain in the podium fight for the rest of the season, with Singapore potentially suiting the team’s slow-speed corner performance. Verstappen took pole at Sepang and then won, giving Red Bull its first 2026 victory, while Isack Hadjar qualified third there before a grid penalty dropped him to eighth.

Mercedes confirmed that George Russell will take a new power unit in Singapore, which will send him to the back of the grid for Sunday’s Singapore Grand Prix. Because it is a sprint weekend, the penalty applies only to Sunday’s race and not Saturday’s Sprint. The move follows his latest engine failure, and Mercedes has already used up its supply of low-mileage components, so Russell has now reached the limit of his season’s power-unit allocation and another engine change brings a penalty under F1 rules.

Russell said the failure was sudden and another setback in a difficult season, while Toto Wolff said it was terrible for his championship hopes. Russell goes into the weekend 84 points behind teammate Andrea Kimi Antonelli, and Mercedes still leads Ferrari by 151 points in the constructors’ standings. Bradley Lord warned that the damaged unit could create a double whammy if Mercedes needs another engine change at the United States Grand Prix before the upgraded unit is ready.

Questions swirled over race control’s handling of the Bahrain Grand Prix after a wet formation lap software glitch triggered an aborted start and forced the field back to the pits. Former Aston Martin strategist Bernie Collins said the decision to restore the original grid order after Lewis Hamilton briefly dropped to the back of the field appeared to clash with Article B5.15.1, which says cars entering the pit lane behind the safety car after a suspended start should line up in the order they entered.

The trouble began when several drivers, including Max Verstappen, Hamilton, Charles Leclerc, Lando Norris and Gabriel Bortoleto, reported losing power on the formation lap. Race control aborted the start, sent teams back for an FIA software update and delayed the race by about an hour. The FIA later said reduced electrical power had been depleted and the internal combustion engine could not spool up the turbo, while FIA single-seater director Nikolas Tombazis later described the problem as a software bug. The safety car had completed two formation laps before the start procedure was suspended.

The grid reset spared Hamilton from starting at the back and put him on the front row on slick tires, and he finished third in the 55-lap race behind Verstappen and Andrea Kimi Antonelli. Fernando Alonso called the red-flag decision “a bit weird” and said the FIA should explain why the race was stopped, while Sergio Perez called the confusion “totally unacceptable.” Carlos Sainz said the episode showed Formula 1 relied too much on software and race-control intervention, and Ralf Schumacher said the new engine regulations were overly complex and contributed to the chaos.