What's Racing Bulls doing that Red Bull isn't?

There's only one team which has scored points with both drivers in the last five Formula 1 race weekends: Racing Bulls. The Italian squad has tapped into a rich vein of form of late, putting it neck and neck with Alpine in contention for the notional best-of-the-rest ranking in this year's constructors' championship. Pace-wise, it's been well clear of the Enstone operation of late.

Consistency has been in abundant supply at The Team Formerly Known As Minardi, Toro Rosso, and AlphaTauri (or TTFKAMTRAAT for short) across 2026, and with good reason. Across the past few seasons, Racing Bulls has been excellent at developing well-behaved, benign cars that give the drivers a stable platform to work from - to the point where Yuki Tsunoda admitted that his regret on joining Red Bull was having to give up a VCARB 02 chassis that he was clearly comfortable with.

The contrarian view might be that this is what stops the VCARBs from regularly cracking the top five, but this is very much not in the team's purview. As much as Racing Bulls is operationally independent, it leans on its sister Red Bull team for a handful of transferrable components, like suspension; in the previous regulations, the team often stuck to year-old suspension layouts to maintain some level of consistency.

Even though Racing Bulls has also moved to a new space in Milton Keynes, just across the road from the 'main' Red Bull team, it's still functionally smaller than its championship-winning counterpart. That's not stopped it from upsetting the applecart on occasion, prompting Red Bull to snaffle some of the engineers from its feeder outfit - and irritate Zak Brown in the process, given the short gardening-leave timelines involved. Andrea Landi only had to wait three months to move from Racing Bulls to Red Bull as head of performance - while McLaren is set to wait until 2028 until Gianpiero Lambiase can move to Woking from Milton Keynes' world of roundabouts. 

Sure, there's 69 points between Red Bull and Racing Bulls, and the RB22 is the superior car over the VCARB 03 at their peaks, but there's a lot that the latter is getting right over its 'parent' team.

The key difference between the two cars is minimum speed performance in low-speed corners; the RB22 can carry more, and this was evident at Silverstone as Isack Hadjar made up a combined four tenths on Liam Lawson and Arvid Lindblad through both Luffield and Club alone. Until those points, the two cars had been evenly matched through the first sector. We can see this on the GPS data below, in comparing Hadjar's best lap from Q3 with that of Lindblad.

It's difficult to tell given the spread of deployment strategies, but the two cars are practically identical in terms of straightline speed. Speed-trap data from this season shows that all four Red Bull-Ford-powered cars tend to be within the same 2km/h bracket through most qualifying sessions, and it's just a lack of downforce where Racing Bulls current misses the mark. In terms of powertrain deployment and energy management, however, it's evident that Racing Bulls is getting the most out of what it has at its disposal. 

That being said, Racing Bulls has been chipping away with its updates through the season, something that has imbued its 2026 car with the ability to break into Q3 regularly and has bought the team plenty of momentum.

The new floor introduced in Montreal, followed up by a few small steps to the diffuser and edge geometry at Barcelona, Austria, and Silverstone, has kept the team moving forward. And the gains seem to be a lot more permanent, while Red Bull's Austria update pushed the team forward at its home race, but did not necessarily deliver much more at Silverstone.

"It's been working very well recently," Lawson mused after the British Grand Prix. "Everything we've brought to the car has been positive and working well. Each weekend we've been managing to find little bits of lap time.

"It was pretty small, this one, but again, it's just all heading in the right direction. We already had a quick car in Austria, so it's just helping us build that even more.

"I think the main thing as well is we've been starting really strong from FP1. We haven't really had to change much, so it's always been little bits of fine-tuning. Overall, that's made it a much faster race car."

That final point from Lawson underlines perhaps the biggest perceived difference between the two Red Bull operations. It has been common to see Red Bull suffer through a difficult Friday, and require Sebastien Buemi or Jake Dennis to work their magic in the simulator overnight to uncover a smoking gun; the example that springs to mind is Max Verstappen's distinct turnaround at 2024's Imola weekend, in which he looked out for the count in practice, only to turn his weekend around with continual tweaks to the car. 

The Racing Bulls pair have found incredible consistency in 2026

Photo by: James Sutton / LAT Images via Getty Images

Racing Bulls, meanwhile, seems to have the knack for getting its car into a solid window from the get-go, which has been a useful trait in the midfield battle as Alpine has struggled to get its A526 to perform out of the box. Again, the extra complexity of a car designed to challenge at the top end of the field might hurt the likes of Red Bull slightly, but the excuse doesn't necessarily wash when the likes of Mercedes and Ferrari are kicking off the weekends in boisterous fashion.

The Racing Bulls pair also seems to have the starts to races pretty nailed down; Lindblad's monster first lap in Australia demonstrated that the VCARB 03 can get off the line pretty swiftly (even if Lawson's car had bogged down) but, since then, Lawson has made up positions at the start in all but one grand prix - the only outlier being his preservation of eighth at the Barcelona race. It's a bit more of a lottery with the RB22.

Again, this falls under the remit of powertrain operations and process. Racing Bulls has clearly put the work in here to overcome the issues it had on Lawson's car in Australia, as well as ensuring its drivers are well-prepared.. As team principal Alan Permane explained in Austria, much of it has been ensuring that Lawson and Lindblad have been kept calm if the formation lap getaway had been less auspicious than expected.

"We use the same power unit, and we have the same gearbox. And most of the time, we're starting the race on the same tyre. So the three main components in that start chain are the same," Permane told Sky. 

"Starts are tricky with these engines. They are really tough, and the drivers have to work hard at them. And we have to work hard to keep them calm as well, because sometimes we'll do a formation lap start, and there's no power. And then, of course, they're going around thinking the worst just keeps on - 'no, no, don't worry!'.

"'Temperatures weren't in the right window, but it's all going to be OK'. So far, and I hope we haven't jinxed it here, everything's been reasonably good for us."

There is a few operational points that Red Bull is currently missing the mark on, and perhaps taking a look at how its sister team operates could shed a little light on how to get the best out of its own resources. That said, Racing Bulls might appreciate not losing any more staff to any internal transfers of personnel...