Red Bull advantage ‘pretty scary’, says Russell

Red Bull’s advantage at the front of the Formula 1 field is “pretty scary,” says Mercedes driver George Russell.

The Briton said that the performance shown by Red Bull this week in the first of two pre-season tests at Bahrain had been a “reality check” for their rivals.

“They’re not just a small step ahead,” the Briton said. “You’re talking in the order of half a second to a second in deployment over the course of a lap.

F1 is introducing its biggest rule change in history this season, with the engines, chassis, tyres and fuel all to a new specification.

Energy management has become a much more central part of the sport as a consequence of engines that have about half their total power output produced by the electrical part of the engine, and a limited battery size.

Rivals say GPS traces of the Red Bull power-unit in Bahrain this week have shown that it can keep deploying its electrical energy for longer than any rival.

Russell said he and his team had noticed Red Bull’s strength from the time they started running at the ‘shakedown’ test in Spain last month.

He said: “The truth is, Red Bull in Barcelona day one hit the ground running and were well ahead of all of their competitors – ourselves, Ferrari and the others.

“Day one here in Bahrain again, they sort of knocked it out of the park. At the moment, they’re very much the team to beat.

“When you get to Melbourne and you’ve got three hours of practice before qualifying, based on what we’ve seen in Barcelona and Bahrain, Red Bull are going to be ahead.”

Red Bull technical director Pierre Wache rejected Mercedes’ claims, which were first voiced by team principal Toto Wolff on Wednesday.

“We are not the benchmark, for sure,” Wache said. “We see clearly the top three teams. Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren are in front of us, outside, from our analysis, and we are behind.”

The second day of testing on Thursday was marked by two of last year’s title contenders, Lando Norris and Max Verstappen, disagreeing over whether the new cars were enjoyable to drive.

Russell said the 2026 cars were “way nicer to drive” in terms of their handling and ride compared with last year’s, but added that the “engines are very complicated”.

He said: “These two tracks, Barcelona and Bahrain, are arguably two of the easiest circuits for the engines. I don’t want to say anything too early before we get to the likes of Melbourne or Jeddah, but it will be much more challenging for the engines and the energy once we get there.”

But he did expand on a point Verstappen made about the new engines demanding unusual driving styles.

These include using much lower gears in corners than would be normal, just to ensure the engine is revving highly so the systems can recover as much energy as possible.

Russell said: “To give an example, here in Bahrain, usually the first corner is a third-gear corner in the previous generation (of car). Now, we’re having to use first gear to keep the engine, the revs very high to keep the turbo spinning.

“This is probably the one thing that is quite annoying and isn’t that intuitive.

“Imagine when you drive to the supermarket in your car and you get to the roundabout and you put it in third gear to drive around the roundabout, but suddenly the person next to you says, ‘put it in first gear’.

“Everything is like, ‘Wwaahh,’ revving. You don’t go in the roundabout to the supermarket in first gear if you’re driving at a sensible speed. This is the same thing.

“The car and the engine is designed to go around this corner in third gear, but because of the turbo and the boost and all of this, you’ve got to keep the engine revs very high, which means you have to take first gear.

“So, the car just isn’t really designed to do that, but we’re working around it.”

He added that because of the critical nature of energy levels for lap time, it was not always the case that driving around a corner in the fastest possible way – which is usually the fundamental part of a racing driver’s job – would lead to the best lap time.

Russell said: “In the past, if you went around the corner quicker or you tried something different and it worked, you know that’s positive and you just carry that forward.