Racing
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Laurent Mekies said Red Bull expects to qualify for Formula 1’s ADUO engine concessions because its power unit is “absolutely not” at the level of the best and is internally estimated to be about three-tenths of a second per lap behind Mercedes, directly challenging Toto Wolff’s position that only Honda should receive help.
The disagreement has turned the FIA’s looming ADUO ruling into one of the first major political fights of the new engine era. Under the Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities system, manufacturers whose internal-combustion engine is between 2% and 4% behind the benchmark receive one extra upgrade opportunity, while those more than 4% back receive two. The assessment is made at six-race intervals and, crucially, covers only combustion-engine performance rather than the electric side of the power unit.
Mekies, Red Bull team principal, told Sky that Red Bull hopes to fall into the eligible group. “Is it at the level of the very best? Absolutely not,” he said of the Red Bull engine. He added that the team does expect “to be in that group” given the chance to catch up, while stressing that ADUO should be used to recover ground rather than jump ahead.
On that principle, Mekies and Wolff are aligned. Wolff, Mercedes team principal, has said ADUO was created to help manufacturers “catch up” and not “to overtake others.” Where they split is over who actually needs that support. Wolff said he does not see Red Bull or Ferrari carrying a major engine deficit and argued that Honda is the only manufacturer that should benefit. He also said he would be “very surprised and disappointed” if ADUO decisions changed the current competitive order.
Mekies rejected that reading and pushed back against paddock talk that Red Bull might already have the strongest engine. He described that kind of ranking exercise as a lobbying game and said Red Bull’s own data points in the opposite direction. According to Mekies, Mercedes is “a long way ahead of most of us,” with Honda particularly behind, while Ferrari and Audi are probably close to Red Bull. He said Red Bull internally estimates Mercedes’ advantage at “at least three-tenths per lap,” with a large part of that gap coming from the internal-combustion engine.
That gap matters because the FIA’s ADUO call will be based on a deliberately narrow measure. Teams and manufacturers have debated whether the ranking should account for broader technical choices that affect real-world performance, such as turbo size, turbo pressure, plenum temperature and installation trade-offs. Ferrari has been cited as one example because of its smaller turbo concept, which can bring benefits in responsiveness but may compromise outright combustion-engine power.
Nikolas Tombazis, FIA Director of Single-Seaters, said the governing body is sticking with a simple combustion-power metric because the manufacturers themselves asked for it. He said the FIA held long discussions with power-unit makers in spring 2025 and offered a more sophisticated model that would have considered factors such as “turbo pressures,” “turbo diameters,” and “the operating of the plenum temperature.” But, as Tombazis explained, the “universal position” of the manufacturers was to keep the system simple, so the current internal-combustion horsepower measurement was accepted from the start.
Tombazis also cautioned against treating ADUO as a balancing mechanism that can reorder the field on its own. He said it is not a Balance of Performance tool and does not hand struggling manufacturers an immediate on-track gain, only extra scope to develop. That has done little to cool the argument, because the first FIA ranking will shape who gets those extra chances for 2026 and 2027.
With Mercedes insisting the field behind it is largely level and Red Bull insisting it is still significantly down on the benchmark, the fight has moved beyond raw performance and into the question that matters most for the next phase of the season: who the FIA decides is genuinely far enough behind to deserve engine help.