Why "crazy" power unit success is so meaningful for Red Bull - and for F1

Verstappen arrived at the Singapore Grand Prix with "unfinished business". The Marina Bay circuit is the only long-running circuit in F1 he has yet to conquer, a hole in his CV largely down to inherent Red Bull weaknesses on its many kerbs and bumps over the years.

But another significant hole the four-time world champion has already managed to plug. By winning last week's Bahrain GP in Malaysia, the Dutchman avoided a winless campaign, which would have been his first since his 2015 debut season with Toro Rosso.

That prospect long looked bleak given the team's huge deficit at the outset of the 2026 campaign, battling its sister team Racing Bulls to remain the fourth-fastest team on the grid. Red Bull has improved leaps and bounds since then, taking its latest step forward with a comprehensive upgrade in Baku. But a key aspect of its recovery that has been snowed under by its recent form is just how remarkable the V6 hybrid in the back of Verstappen's and Isack Hadjar's car has been performing. Produced by a company that was a hole in the ground just five years ago.

When Mercedes chief Toto Wolff was asked about Red Bull taking on the challenge of building its own power units for 2026's complicated rules era, his thoughts echoed those of most observers in the paddock. "My first answer would be that's Mount Everest to climb, because our engine departments have grown over tens of years," he said.

Embarking on the Everest expedition was Christian Horner, gearing up after losing Honda and walking away from a deal with Porsche, instead preferring to take the bold move to take the power unit in-house at Milton Keynes. Horner didn't do so alone, armed with full support and a hefty chequebook from late founder Dietrich Mateschitz, which he put to good use to build a brand-new facility on campus and populate it with over 700 staff experts lured from across the paddock.

Horner's successor Laurent Mekies, who inherited the project in July 2025, had been able to watch the project blossom from the periphery as its future customer at Racing Bulls and he too thought the decision was "as crazy as it gets".

"It's an unbelievable challenge to be associated with. It's the sort of crazy stuff that Red Bull does, so it's a good feeling. We don't underestimate that these guys have been doing it for 90 years or something like that, so it would be silly from our side to think we are going to come here and right from the start be at Ferrari's level or at Mercedes level."

Mekies wasn't at the helm when the RBPT project was born, but even he knows the incredible challenge that faced the company

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Things certainly could have gone very wrong for Red Bull Ford Powertrains in year one, and few would have been completely surprised if they did.

"Honestly, I remember the first lap I did with the engine in Barcelona [winter testing], I was like: 'Wow, this is going to be a long season,'" Hadjar recalls. "It quickly recovered after that, so even I don't really realise how impressive that is. I remember when I was going to Red Bull there was like, literally just Red Bull Racing, and then within like six months there were like two massive buildings built, and it started from there."

Verstappen added: "I would say very neutral in that, I was not trying to be super optimistic, but also not negative, because you don't know, I mean how would you know? You trust of course that the people that have been hired, you know that they're doing a good job.

"They have the facilities to deliver a very good engine, because Red Bull invested a lot of money in that. I was not too stressed about it"

Max Verstappen

"They have the facilities to deliver a very good engine, because Red Bull invested a lot of money in that. I was not too stressed about it, but of course we are now very happy with how we started. It could be much worse as we can see in other places in the paddock, so we're just very proud."

While RBPT was frozen out of in-season power upgrades by the FIA's ADUO system, which deemed it to be the most powerful V6 engine, that doesn't mean engineers in Milton Keynes were twiddling their thumbs.

Red Bull fiercely contested the FIA's V6 assessment, with Mekies' boss Oliver Mintzlaff even getting personally involved in the various discussions. Meanwhile, the power unit department was still able to improve a lot of ancillary systems and software to further streamline the DM01 - named in honour of the late Mateschitz - and turn it into a more refined and integrated power unit.

"There are a huge number of other performance factors that can be developed and improved, especially in the first year for us as a power unit manufacturer." Mekies said after winning in Malaysia. "So, of course, there is a huge development work in the background, even though you cannot change the hardware."

Verstappen picked up RBPT's first F1 victory in Malaysia

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The bigger picture is that alongside Ferrari and Mercedes, Red Bull Ford Powertrains is the third winning PUM of the 2026 era. That's good news for the series as it aims to have close competition, and also for the other OEMs that have had a less successful baptism of fire.

Like Red Bull, Audi has also entered as a first-time entrant and while it hasn't been as competitive as its peers, the German marque's first-ever F1 engine has been more than respectable, even if it's lacking power. The relatively successful debut campaign made the team's Gabriel Bortoleto bullish about where Audi could go next.

"If I trust them? Absolutely. I think they can fix it," Bortoleto said. "These people in Neuburg have built the best engines in other series that they have taken part in in the past, and I have no doubts they're going to do the same in Formula 1. We just need to give them time. I believe they're going to make something great."

It should also provide some food for thought for the beleaguered power unit team at Honda, which clearly wasn't ready for 2026 after a late U-turn by Honda chiefs on the brand's F1 exit. That meant it had to hastily reassemble a technical team without many of the people who made the company successful with Red Bull, and who had been redeployed elsewhere.

If the cursed start of that stint with McLaren in 2015 tells us one thing, then it's that one shouldn't underestimate the proud Japanese company to rectify its wrongs and bounce back over time.

With a likely move to much simpler V8 engines on the horizon as early as 2030, could Red Bull's success story inspire other teams to be in charge of their own destiny? That is not as easy to envisage. Building a power unit department from scratch is still a hugely expensive and complex undertaking, which a company the size of Red Bull was able to pull off. But it is still out of reach for a team like McLaren, which may have to find a different engine solution in 2030 if Mercedes follows through with its plan to scale back the number of customer teams from three to two.

That prohibitive cost and specific know-how is also why some paddock observers are sceptical about the FIA's plan to commission an off-the-shelf third-party power unit for teams without manufacturer backing.

How could the FIA's future F1 engine plans affect the current manufacturer landscape?

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But that's tomorrow's story. The story of the day is that the huge gamble by Mateschitz and Horner, executed by RBPT chief and long-time Mercedes HPP engineer Ben Hodgkinson, has paid off sooner than expected.

As Wolff put it: "It's certainly a huge, huge challenge that they've given themselves by doing their own engine. But remember when they took the chassis team over, everybody joked that an energy drink company is trying to compete with Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren in Formula 1. And they won in the end."

Now that drinks company has built a winning hybrid power unit.

How many more wins will RBPT pick up?

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