Racing
© Morio
Red Bull heads to its home Austrian Grand Prix fourth in the 2026 constructors’ championship on 89 points with a major RB22 upgrade package, but team boss Laurent Mekies has already warned that Spielberg will not deliver a complete turnaround on its own.
The team is introducing its second major development package of the season at the Red Bull Ring, with the focus understood to be aerodynamic refinements and shedding the RB22’s remaining excess weight after the car started the year overweight. Multiple reports indicate Red Bull has now at least moved toward the 768kg minimum, a key target as it tries to recover performance under Formula 1’s new regulations.
Mekies, Red Bull Racing team principal, made clear before the weekend that the update matters, but only as part of a longer push. “Our next package of news will arrive in Austria. It's going to be important and the team at Milton Keynes is working really hard to make it happen,” he said. “But we have no doubt that even when we introduce these new features, they will not be enough. So we will need other news to improve further.”
That candor reflects the scale of Red Bull’s problem. The team has yet to win in 2026 and has slipped behind Mercedes, Ferrari and McLaren. Max Verstappen’s best result so far is third in Canada, and the previous round in Barcelona underlined the current deficit: he finished fourth, 16.778 seconds behind Lando Norris in third.
Mekies said Barcelona was effectively a reality check after stronger weekends on tracks where Verstappen could stay closer to the front. On a layout that exposed the RB22 more fully, he put the remaining gap at roughly three to four tenths and said Red Bull is no longer chasing one breakthrough fix.
Instead, the team believes it needs performance from several areas at once. Mekies said Red Bull still has to find gains in mid-speed corners, high-speed corners and on the straights, while keeping the steady progress it has made since Japan. The goal, he said, is to stop talking about a deficit of four tenths and bring that margin down further.
That makes Spielberg more than just another update weekend. This is the first time Red Bull will contest its home race as a power-unit supplier through Red Bull Powertrains-Ford, turning the Austrian Grand Prix into both a symbolic milestone and a high-pressure test of whether its development path can start changing the shape of a season that has fallen well short of expectations.