RacingRed Bull’s feared first in-house engine has not been the main thing dragging it down at the start of Formula 1’s 2026 season. Three rounds in, the sharper concern around Max Verstappen, Isack Hadjar and the RB22 is the chassis, with both drivers pointing to a car that is slow in corners, hard to read and changing balance so quickly that they are still finding it out mid-lap.
That is the clearest theme in Red Bull’s ugly early numbers. After three rounds, including one sprint, Red Bull sits sixth in the Constructors’ Championship with 16 points, just two more than Racing Bulls. Mercedes leads on 135, Ferrari has 90 and McLaren has 46. For a team that came into the new rules cycle with as many questions around its Red Bull-Ford power unit as anything else, the surprise is that the engine does not look like the main failure.
Hadjar has said it most plainly. In comments cited by the original article, Isack Hadjar, Red Bull driver, said of the team’s package: “We have a good power unit, the engine is good. But the chassis side is terrible, very slow in the corners. The only positive point is that I can be fast driving the car, but we have no idea how to develop now.”
He gave an even clearer picture at Suzuka. “We’ve got no load and that’s it. It goes into one direction or the other very, very quickly,” Hadjar said, Red Bull driver, in comments reported after the Japanese Grand Prix weekend. “FP3 was the opposite balance, we go into quali, it’s the other way around.” When asked by The Race if that meant discovering the balance on the lap itself, Hadjar replied: “Exactly. And then you can f**king crash. Because you have no idea! So you have to reset your expectations all the time. It’s not nice.”
Verstappen has pointed the same way. “Our energy deployment is good, that is not our biggest problem,” Verstappen said, Red Bull driver, to media including RacingNews365. He added: “I think, actually, from the engine side, yes, correlation and calibration can be better, but actually in terms of pure power, it is not our worst thing for sure.” In the same media session, Verstappen said Mercedes remains the benchmark because “they’re super strong, so we have a lot more work to do.”
That does not mean the power-unit picture is clean. Hadjar retired with an engine failure in Australia, and Verstappen had an ERS cooling leak in China. But Verstappen’s read on the broader situation has stayed measured. “We need to understand the engine deployment a little bit better, and just be a bit more solid, but we’re doing okay,” Verstappen said, Red Bull driver, to media including RacingNews365.
So the recovery now looks tied far more to the car concept than the engine architecture. According to the source material, a young chassis concept should be easier to move forward than a fundamentally bad power unit design. That puts the focus on Red Bull’s technical group under Pierre Waché and whether it can make the RB22 usable quickly.
Verstappen is at least still talking about untapped performance. “I think there’s a lot of potential in the car,” Verstappen said, Red Bull driver, to media including RacingNews365 before the Japanese Grand Prix. He added: “We just need to keep working, keep trying to put more performance on the car, race after race.” With Formula 1 returning in Miami on 1 to 3 May after the post-Bahrain and Saudi Arabia hiatus described in the source material, Red Bull has a window to analyse what it has and decide whether this slump starts to lift with updates to the RB22.