Racing
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Ford Performance director Mark Rushbrook says Red Bull-Ford’s new DM01 has started the 2026 Formula 1 season more competitively than expected, but he does not buy the idea that it is already the class-leading engine and still sees Mercedes as the benchmark.
Rushbrook told Motorsport-Total.com that simply getting a brand-new power unit to the grid was a major target for the program, which makes Red Bull’s early position more significant. “We knew what an incredible challenge it would be, simply to get on the grid with the new power unit, to be honest,” he said. “But to be in the mix like we are, it certainly feels good.”
That cautious assessment cuts through the noise that has surrounded Red Bull’s engine project. Last year at Zandvoort, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said Red Bull had “Mount Everest to climb,” a view the article says Laurent Mekies also shared. Then, after winter testing in Bahrain ahead of 2026, Wolff and George Russell described the Red Bull-Ford power unit as “the absolute benchmark.” Max Verstappen pushed back on that at the time, saying: “Just wait and see how fast Mercedes will be on all the straights in Melbourne.”
Rushbrook made clear he sees more than pure performance analysis behind those swings in tone. “There’s racing, there’s technical, and there’s politics, for sure,” he said, describing Red Bull as “in the mix” rather than comfortably ahead. He also agreed with Verstappen’s view of the current standard, adding of the Mercedes engine: “Well, yeah, it’s pretty good.”
Part of the difficulty in judging the true order, Rushbrook said, is that the new generation of power units is highly sensitive to conditions. He said they are “certainly sensitive to temperatures and to the environmental conditions” and that “we are seeing differences in those different conditions, and that’s part of what we need to sort out as well.” That matters as the FIA evaluates internal combustion engine performance through its ADUO system after the Canadian Grand Prix.
Rushbrook argued that any regulatory view of engine performance has to account for those variables instead of treating the raw numbers in isolation. He said FIA decisions need “context,” meaning “the temperatures, the humidity, the environment that you’re racing in, because every power unit has different sensitivity to those conditions.”
Red Bull’s stronger-than-expected start has been built on choices made early in the project. The article says Red Bull focused more heavily on the combustion engine in the first phase of development, aiming to maximize what it could learn on a single-cylinder test bench before applying that to the full V6. Ford’s role also expanded beyond the electrification side of the program as its own road-car plans changed.
Rushbrook said Ford originally expected its contribution to center on “the battery cell, the motor, the inverter, the software, and the calibration board,” but that changed as the program developed. He said one of the biggest gains came from “additive manufacturing or advanced manufacturing,” adding that the ability “to print parts, to make them so quickly with the turnaround, and with the quality control and the precision that’s needed” pushed the project much further than expected.
Combined with Red Bull’s rapid build-up in Milton Keynes and expertise brought in from around Mercedes High Performance Powertrains, that has given Red Bull-Ford a power unit capable of fighting near the front immediately. But Rushbrook’s message is that being competitive from the start is not the same as settling the argument over who has built the best engine, especially when Mercedes still sets the standard Red Bull believes it must catch.