Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls Team
Photo by: Andy Hone/ LAT Images via Getty Images
The 2026 Formula 1 car launch season is set to commence in Detroit tonight with Red Bull and sister squad Racing Bulls revealing their liveries for the upcoming campaign.
This will kickstart a three-week window in which all 11 teams will showcase their look for this year, which will also witness the introduction of widespread technical regulation changes.
A car chassis will become lighter and smaller with more emphasis on electrical power, meaning it is currently unknown what the pecking order will be due to the vast changes.
Regardless, what is the state at Racing Bulls ahead of this season?
The biggest changes at Racing Bulls concern its driver line-up and power unit supplier. To start with the former, the Faenza outfit will give an F1 debut to 18-year-old Arvid Lindblad, who is graduating from F2 having finished sixth in his only season in that championship.
This comes after the promotion of Isack Hadjar, who impressed during his rookie campaign at Racing Bulls last year by finishing 12th in the standings, with a podium at Zandvoort being the highlight.
Podium: second place Arvid Lindblad, Campos Racing
Photo by: Formula Motorsport Ltd
It was obvious pretty early on, around the Dutch Grand Prix at the end of August, that Hadjar was set to move to Red Bull for 2026 - especially considering the struggles of Yuki Tsunoda - and Lindblad faced little competition for one of those Racing Bulls seats.
Quite frankly, Red Bull had nobody else to promote from its junior ranks, of which Lindblad has been a member since 2021, and given he was fast-tracked through the single-seater pyramid then the Briton was the standout choice.
Lindblad will partner Liam Lawson, who started the 2025 season at Red Bull but was dropped after just two grands prix having performed very poorly. The 23-year-old then spent the rest of the season at the sister outfit, finishing 14th in the championship.
This is a crucial year for Lawson because he made his debut for Racing Bulls back in 2023 in a stand-in role, but 2025 was his first full season in F1, meaning he has a decent bank of experience in F1 even if it has been on and off. So, given Red Bull doesn’t like to keep drivers at its second team for very long if a promotion isn’t on the cards, then Lawson could come under pressure for his place.
What is coming into the family is a new engine programme, with 2026 being the debut of Red Bull Powertrains. The junior team has been powered by Honda since 2018, but the Japanese marque announced in 2020 that it would withdraw from the championship after 2021, before making a U-turn on that decision after being impressed by the direction of the 2026 regulations.
By that point, however, it was already too late as Red Bull had committed to building its own engines for 2026 with Ford as a partner.
Red Bull Ford Powertrains
Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool
There is a reason that the Mercedes-powered cars are on everybody’s lips as the ones which could be strongest this year, considering how the Silver Arrows dominated the last engine change in 2014.
Ferrari and its customers could also be strong considering the Italian marque’s history of a strong engine, while Red Bull and Racing Bulls are much more unknown quantities considering they are entering new ground by building in-house power units.
Red Bull boss, formerly of Racing Bulls, Laurent Mekies even said “it would be naive” to assume that both teams will have the strongest engine straight away because the move in-house is “the craziest decision one can take”.
So the biggest challenge will be for Racing Bulls to be competitive from the Melbourne opener and ensure it has an engine capable of holding its own straight away.
The strongest asset for Racing Bulls would have to be its close collaboration with one of F1’s biggest teams in Red Bull. Considering both squads come under the same umbrella then they are often sharing components such as the suspension, gearbox and hydraulics, allowing Racing Bulls to fit car parts at a reduced cost.
There is also its “location free” approach, which entails having a base in both Faenza and at a facility in Milton Keynes next to Red Bull, allowing staff to be spread across two bases. This gives staff the freedom of deciding where they would like to work, as well as presenting the company the chance to realistically employ people from both countries, plus making sure that certain departments are not pigeonholed into place.
Liam Lawson, Racing Bulls Team
Photo by: Zak Mauger / LAT Images via Getty Images
Racing Bulls will just be hoping for more of the same in the 2026 campaign: solid midfield. It comes after finishing sixth in the 2025 standings, which was the Faenza squad’s best result since its AlphaTauri days in 2021 where it also secured sixth, highlighted by a podium in Baku.
So last year was effectively as good as it could get for Racing Bulls, who would no doubt be happy with that result again in 2026 considering the challenges of running a new power unit and how it has lost its star driver for Lindblad.
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- The Autosport.com Team
Source: Autosport