At Red Bull, there’s no clear conclusion after the first half of the 2026 season—while the team isn’t satisfied with its performance, it also emphasizes the progress made
On paper, it wasn’t a good first half of the 2026 season for Red Bull. The Bulls are currently sitting in fourth place in the World Championship standings heading into the summer break, which, as things stand, would be their worst result in the Formula 1 World Championship in more than ten years.
The last time Red Bull missed the top 3 in the Constructors’ Championship was in 2015, when the drivers were still Daniel Ricciardo and Daniil Kvyat. In the era of Max Verstappen, who joined the team in 2016, this has never happened to the Milton Keynes-based team.
Verstappen himself explains that while there were some good moments in the first half of the 2026 season, the first eleven races were, overall, “very tough.” After all, Red Bull has yet to secure a victory this year.
The four-time world champion emphasizes: “I think we need to try to be more consistent and a bit more balanced so we can have race weekends that are a little less complicated. We also need to find more performance. It’s as simple as that, ultimately.”
“Aside from needing to find more performance, it’s also about resolving the issues with the current package we have,” he explains, adding: “We lose performance over the course of the weekend—or even from the start to the end of the race.”
“We had difficulty [in the first half of the season] providing the drivers with a car that had good balance,” confirms Team Principal Laurent Mekies, explaining that the drivers “very often managed to get the performance out of it anyway.”
Nevertheless, after the summer break, the team must make the RB22 more consistent. “That’s been an issue for us this season, and that’s probably where some of the potential for improvement lies for the second half of the season,” says Mekies, and Verstappen also calls this a “top priority.”
Can Red Bull continue its upward trend?
On the other hand, it’s also a fact that it would be too easy to label Red Bull’s 2026 season a complete failure at this point. While the team hasn’t secured a victory yet, a clear upward trend has been evident since the season opener in Melbourne.
“We won’t settle for anything less than victories,” Mekies makes clear. “But I’d like to take this opportunity once again to give our people a big round of applause,” says the team principal, explaining that they’ve reduced the gap to the front-runners from 1.2 seconds at the start of the season to 0.3 seconds most recently.
“Since the Austrian update, we’ve been fighting for podium finishes in pretty much every race,” he also emphasizes on Sky, explaining that Red Bull has been “sometimes a bit closer to the front and sometimes a bit further from the front.”
In fact, Verstappen has stood on the podium three times in the four races since Spielberg, even securing two second-place finishes. While the team did benefit in part from competitors’ retirements, at the start of the season they were often not even in a position to capitalize on such mistakes.
And so, all things considered, it’s difficult to draw a truly clear conclusion at the halfway point of the season. “Don’t expect me to say we’re satisfied, because we’re not,” Mekies makes clear, emphasizing: “We’ll only be satisfied when we have a car again that has the pace to win on its own merits.”
The Bulls don’t have such a car yet. However, developments over the past weeks and months at least offer hope that the RB22 won’t become the first winless Red Bull car since the RB11 from the 2015 season.
